“You used to talk an awful lot of cock.”
Nathaniel nodded.
“I still do. But we are still interwoven and the same things hold good. Then when you introduce me to Mary—you remember? You see how we three act and re-act. There came that sudden flash, that—stab of knowledge and certainty that said, ‘I have known you before.’”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“She felt it too. She said so. She’s so—wise, you know! And now we are both quite certain. These things are written in the stars, of course, but under them, Chris, we have to thank you for bringing us together.”
“You and Mary Lovell?”
“Of course these things are never simple and we’ve meditated apart from each other and together——”
An enchantment was filling the room. Nat’s head seemed to grow large and small with it.
“And I should be awfully pleased, Chris, if you’d be best man for me.”
“You’re going to marry! You and——”
“That was the joyous news.”
“You can’t!”
He heard how anguished his voice was, found he was standing up.
Nat looked past him into the fire.
“I know it’s sudden but we’ve meditated. And you see, I shall be going into the Navy. She’s so good and brave. And you, Chris—I knew you would bring your whole being to such a decision.”
He stood still, looking down at the tousled black hair, the length of limb. He felt the bleak recognition rising in him of the ineffable strength of these circumstances and this decision. Not where he eats but where he is eaten. Blood rose with the recognition, burning in the face, power to break. Pictures of her fell through his mind like a dropped sheaf of snapshots—Mary in the boat, carefully arranging her skirt; Mary walking to church, reeking of it, the very placing of her feet and carriage of her little bum an insolence; Mary struggling, knees clapped together over the hoarded virginity, trying with one hand to pull down her skirt, with the other to ward off, the voice finding the only protection for her half-naked breast——
“I shall scream!”
Nat looked up, his mouth open.
“I’m not being a fool this time you know. You needn’t worry.”
The snapshots vanished.
“I was—I don’t know what I was saying, Nat—quoting from some play or other.”
Nat spread his hands and smiled diffidently.
“The stars can’t be thwarted.”
“Especially if they happen to agree with what you want.”
Nat considered this. He reddened a little and nodded gravely.
“There is that danger.”
“Be careful, Nat, for God’s sake.”
But not known, not understood—what is he to be careful of? Of staying near me? Of standing with her in the lighted centre of my darkness?
“You’ll be here to look after her, Chris, when I’ve gone.”
There is something in the stars. Or what is this obscure impulse that sets my words at variance with my heart?
“Only be careful. Of me.”
“Chris!”
Because I like you, you fool and hate you. And now I hate you.
“All right, Nat, forget it.”
“There’s something the matter.”
An impulse gone, trodden down, kicked aside.
“I shall be in the Navy, too.”
“But the theatre!”
Gone down under calculation and hate.
“One has one’s better feelings.”
“My dear man!” Nat was standing and beaming. “Perhaps we can be in the same ship.”
Drearily and with the foreknowledge of a chosen road.
“I’m sure we shall be. That’s in our stars.”
Nat nodded.
“We are connected in the elements. We are men for water.”
*
“Water. Water.”
The clothes bound him like a soggy bundle. He hauled himself out into the sun. He lay there feeling that he spread like seaweed. He got his hands up and plucked at the toggles of his duffle while the snapshots whirled and flew like a pack of cards. He got the toggles free and plucked at the rest of his clothing. When he had only vest and pants on he crawled away, yards over the rock to the water-hole. He crawled up the High Street and lay down by the Dwarf.
“If I am not delirious this is steam rising from my clothes. Sweat.”
He propped his back against the Dwarf.
“Be intelligent.”
His legs before him were covered with white blotches. There were more on his stomach when he lifted his vest, on his arms and legs. They were deformations at the edge of the eye-sockets.
“Stay alive!”
Something fierce pushed out of his mind.
“I’ll live if I have to eat everything else on this bloody box!”
He looked down at his legs.
“I know the name for you bloody blotches. Urticaria. Food poisoning.”
He lay quiet for a time. The steam rose and wavered. The blotches were well-defined and of a dead whiteness. They were raised so that even swollen fingers could feel their outline.
“I said I should be ill and I am.”
He peered hazily round the horizon but it had nothing to give. He looked back at his legs and decided that they were very thin for all the blotches. Under his vest he could feel the trickle of water that found its way down from blotch to blotch.
The pressure of the sky and air was right inside his head.
11
A thought was forming like a piece of sculpture behind the eyes but in front of the unexamined centre. He watched the thought for a timeless interim while the drops of sweat trickled down from blotch to blotch. But he knew that the thought was an enemy and so although he saw it he did not consent or allow it to become attached to him in realization. If the slow centre had any activity now it brooded on its identity while the thought stayed there like an ignored monument in a park. Christopher and Hadley and Martin were separate fragments and the centre was smouldering with a dull resentment that they should have broken away and not be sealed on the centre. The window was filled with a pattern of colour but in this curious state the centre did not think of the pattern as exterior. It was the only visible thing in a dark room, like a lighted picture on the wall. Below it was the sensation of water trickling and discomfort of a hard surface. The centre for a time was sufficient. The centre knew self existed, though Christopher and Hadley and Martin were fragments far off.
A curtain of hair and flesh fell over the picture on the wall and there was nothing to be examined but the thought. It became known. The terror that swept in with the thought shocked him into the use of his body. There was a flashing of nerves, tensing of muscles, heaves, blows, vibration; and the thought became words that tumbled out of his mouth.
“I shall never get away from this rock.”
The terror did more. It straightened the hinged bones and stood him up, sent him reeling round the Look-out in the pressure of the sky till he was clinging to the Dwarf and the stone head was rocking gently, rocking gently, and the sun was swinging to and fro, up and down in the silver face.
“Get me off this rock!”
The Dwarf nodded its silver head, gently, kindly.
He crouched down by a whitish trench and the pattern of colour was sight again.
Christopher and Hadley and Martin came part way back. He forced the pattern to fit everywhere over the rock and the sea and the sky.
“Know your enemy.”
There was illness of the body, effect of exposure. There was food-poisoning that made the world a mad place. There was solitude and hope deferred. There was the thought; there were the other thoughts, unspoken and unadmitted.
“Get them out. Look at them.”
Water, the only supply, hung by a hair, held back by the slimy tamping; food that grew daily less; pressure, indescribable pressure on the body and the mind; battle with the film-
trailers for sleep. There was——
“There was and is——”
He crouched on the rock.
“Take it out and look at it.
“There is a pattern emerging. I do not know what the pattern is but even my dim guess at it makes my reason falter.”
The lower half of his face moved round the mouth till the teeth were bare.
“Weapons. I have things that I can use.”
Intelligence. Will like a last ditch. Will like a monolith. Survival. Education, a key to all patterns, itself able to impose them, to create. Consciousness in a world asleep. The dark, invulnerable centre that was certain of its own sufficiency.
He began to speak against the flat air, the blotting-paper.
“Sanity is the ability to appreciate reality. What is the reality of my position? I am alone on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. There are vast distances of swinging water round me. But the rock is solid. It goes down and joins the floor of the sea and that is joined to the floors I have known, to the coasts and cities. I must remember that the rock is solid and immovable. If the rock were to move then I should be mad.”
A flying lizard flapped overhead, and dropped down out of sight.
“I must hang on. First to my life and then to my sanity. I must take steps.”
He dropped the curtains over the window again.
“I am poisoned. I am in servitude to a coiled tube the length of a cricket pitch. All the terrors of hell can come down to nothing more than a stoppage. Why drag in good and evil when the serpent lies coiled in my own body?”
And he pictured his bowels deliberately, the slow, choked peristaltic movement, change of the soft food to a plug of poison.
“I am Atlas. I am Prometheus.”
He felt himself loom, gigantic on the rock. His jaws clenched, his chin sank. He became a hero for whom the impossible was an achievement. He knelt and crawled remorselessly down the rock. He found the lifebelt in the crevice, took his knife and sawed the metal tit away from the tube. He crawled on down towards the Red Lion and now there was background music, snatches of Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Holst. It was not really necessary to crawl but the background music underlined the heroism of a slow, undefeated advance against odds. The empty mussel shells cracked under his bones like potsherds. The music swelled and was torn apart by brass.
He came to the pool on the rock with the one weedy limpet and three prudish anemones. The tiny fish still lay in the water but on a different part of the rock. He pushed the lifebelt under the surface of the water so that the fish flicked desperately from side to side. A string of bubbles came out of the tube. He collapsed the long bladder and then began to pull it open again. Little spits of water entered the tit and worked down between more bubbles. Strings only, now, deep. He lifted the whole lifebelt out and hefted the bag. There was a washing sound from the bladder. He sank it in the pool again and went on working. The strings were working too, and woodwind was added and a note or two of brass. Presently, and soon there would come the suspended chord that would stand the whole orchestra aside for the cadenza. The weedy top of the limpet was above the surface. The tiny fish, tricked by this unnatural ebb was lying on wet rock in the sun and trying to wriggle against the surface tension. The anemones had shut their mouths even tighter. The bladder of the lifebelt was two-thirds full.
He hutched himself back against a rock with his legs sprawled apart. The music rose, the sea played and the sun. The universe held its breath. Grunting and groaning he began to work the rubber tube into his backside. He folded the two halves of the long bladder together and sat on it. He began to work at the bladder with both hands, squeezing and massaging. He felt the cold trickle of the sea water in his bowels. He pumped and squeezed until the bladder was squashily flat. He extracted the tube and crept carefully to the edge of the rock while the orchestra thundered to a pause.
And the cadenza was coming—did come. It performed with explosive and triumphant completeness of technique into the sea. It was like the bursting of a dam, the smashing of all hindrance. Spasm after spasm with massive chords and sparkling arpeggios, the cadenza took of his strength till he lay straining and empty on the rock and the orchestra had gone.
He turned his face on the rock and grunted at the antagonist.
“Are you beaten yet? I’m not.”
The hand of the sky fell on him. He got up and knelt among the mussel shells.
“Now I shall be sane and no longer such a slave to my body.”
He looked down at the dead fish. He pushed the body with his finger to the mouth of an anemone. Petals emerged and tried to take hold.
“Stings. Poison. Anemones poisoned me. Perhaps mussels are all right after all.”
He felt a little stronger and no longer so heroic that he need crawl. He went slowly back to the Look-out.
“Everything is predictable. I knew I shouldn’t drown and I didn’t. There was a rock. I knew I could live on it and I have. I have defeated the serpent in my body. I knew I should suffer and I have. But I am winning. There is a certain sense in which life begins anew now, for all the blotting-paper and the pressure.”
He sat down by the Dwarf and drew up his knees. His sight was right on the outside and he lived in the world.
“I believe I’m hungry.”
And why not, when life begins again?
“Food on a plate. Rich food in comfort. Food in shops, butchers’ shops, food, not swimming, shutting like a fist and vanishing into a crevice but dead on a slab, heaped up, all the sea’s harvest——”
He examined the sea. The tide was running and glossy streaks were tailing away from the three rocks.
“Optical illusion.”
For of course the rock was fixed. If it seemed to move slowly forward in the tide that was because the eye had nothing else as a point of reference. But over the horizon was a coast and that remained at a constant distance while the water flowed. He smiled grimly.
“That wasn’t a bad trick. It might have caught most people.”
Like the train that seems to move backwards when the other one steams away from beside it. Like hatched lines with one across.
“For of course the rock is still and the water moves. Let me work it out. The tide is a great wave that sweeps round the world—or rather the world turns inside the tide, so I and the rock are——”
Hastily he looked down at the rock between his feet.
“So the rock is still.”
Food. Heaped on a slab, not swimming free but piled up, all the spoils of the sea, a lobster, not shutting like a fist and shooting back into a crevice but——
He was on his feet. He was glaring down at the place where the weed grew under water by the three rocks. He cried out.
“Whoever saw a lobster like that swimming in the sea? A red lobster?”
Something was taken away. For an instant he felt himself falling; and then there came a gap of darkness in which there was no one.
*
Something was coming up to the surface. It was uncertain of its identity because it had forgotten its name. It was disorganized in pieces. It struggled to get these pieces together because then it would know what it was. There was a rhythmical noise and disconnection. The pieces came shakily together and he was lying sideways on the rock and a snoring noise was coming from his mouth. There was a feeling of deep sickness further down the tunnel. There was a separation between now, whenever now was, and the instant of terror. The separation enabled him to forget what had caused that terror. The darkness of separation was deeper than that of sleep. It was deeper than any living darkness because time had stopped or come to an end. It was a gap of not-being, a well opening out of the world and now the effort of mere being was so exhausting that he could only lie sideways and live.
Presently he thought.
“Then I was dead. That was death. I have been frightened to death. Now the pieces of me have come together and I am just alive.”
The view was different too. The
three rocks were nearer and there were sharp things—mussel shells, he thought, brilliantly—cutting his cheek.
“Who carried me down here?”
There came a little pain with the words which he traced to his tongue. The tip was swollen, and aching, and there was salt in his mouth. He could see a pair of empty trousers lying near him and curious marks on the rock. These marks were white and parallel. There was blood in them and traces of froth.
He attended to the rest of his body. He identified a hard, bar-like object as his right arm, twisted back. That led him to the pain in the joints. He eased over so that his arm was free and gazed at the hand on the end.
Now he saw that he was not wearing his pants because they were out there in his right hand. They were torn and there was blood on them.
“I’ve been in a fight.”
He lay, considering things dully.
“There is someone else on the rock with me. He crept out and slugged me.”
The face twisted.
“Don’t be a fool. You’re all alone. You’ve had a fit.”
He felt for his left hand and found it with a grunt of pain. The fingers were bitten.
“How long was I? Is it today or yesterday?”
He heaved himself up on hands and knees.
“Just when I was myself again and victorious, there came a sort of something. A Terror. There was a pattern emerging from circumstances.”
Then the gap of not-being.
“This side of the gap is different from the other. It’s like when you’ve finished a lights rehearsal and they cut. Then where there was bright, solid scenery is now only painted stuff, grey under the pilot light. It’s like chess. You’ve got an exultant attack moving but overlooked a check and now the game is a fight. And you’re tied down.”
Bright rock and sea, hope, though deferred, heroics. Then in the moment of achievement, the knowledge, the terror like a hand falling.
“It was something I remembered. I’d better not remember it again. Remember to forget. Madness?”
Worse than madness. Sanity.
He heaved himself on his hands and knees and laboured to trace his fit, by the scattered clothing and the marks on the rock, back to where he had begun. He stopped by the Dwarf, looking down at rock with a pattern scratched on it—a pattern now crossed by the gritted mark of teeth.