Dark Entries Page 14

  He knelt upon the floor to look in his bag for his field-glasses; and, as he did so, came into that conscious relationship with the pattern and texture of the carpet which begins only with close physical proximity. The carpet, though pleasantly deep-piled, had not, during the brief time he had been in the room, seemed to him otherwise remarkable. But now he noticed that the not unusual pattern appeared, like the snake on the stairs, nowhere to repeat itself. He groped in his mind for the explanation, and before long it came to him that both carpets were possibly pieces of very much larger carpets – of very large carpets indeed, he quickly realised. Reassured by this hypothesis, which related the carpets to the sum total of his life’s experience, he briefly examined the view with his strong field-glasses. There was not a house, not a figure, not a road, not a pylon, not even a hedged field: only the ancient sea, the wine-like air. Wagner’s words to Baron von Keudell returned to him. This clear, sunny emptiness was what his mind most needed. Deeply content, he put away the field-glasses and descended to tea.

  The grey-clad maid was waiting in the hall and took him to a small square drawing-room, where Ariel lay extended on a sofa, a tea-tray by her side. The room appeared to be in an angle of the house, for there were windows in the centres of two adjoining walls; through which, Carfax noticed, the prospect consisted entirely of the near enveloping hills.

  ‘What a beautiful house!’ Carfax exclaimed warmly over his bread and butter. ‘But you must find it difficult to keep up in these days?’

  ‘We do not have to pay British taxes on the Island,’ she replied. ‘And everything is much cheaper and better and more abundant.’

  ‘Even domestic servants? Forgive my curiosity. It is only that I am deeply impressed with the beauty of your house. There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices.’

  ‘My servants have always been with me,’ she answered. ‘I do not think they are dissatisfied.’

  ‘I am quite certain they have no reason to be. This place is paradise. Absolute paradise. But people tell me that servants want the pictures nowadays, and there’s always the question of what used to be called followers. You seem very isolated here. But I suppose you have lots of visitors, and they bring servants of their own?’

  ‘The people here are not like the English, you know.’ She poured him a second cup of tea. ‘I have few visitors, but people here have interests of their own and never feel bored.’

  ‘Few visitors in this huge house? I visualised the whole place crowded with them. It all seems in such perfect order, as if every room were awaiting an occupant in the next hour or so. Besides, you yourself—’

  ‘Yes?’ Her tone had no flavour of mockery.

  ‘You hardly strike one as living in sequestered solitude on a remote island.’

  ‘I have never said solitude. After all, you yourself are here.’

  ‘I am being foolish. It is because I am so very unused to such dreams coming true as you and your house and my being here.’

  ‘That, I think, is because you fail to draw the essential distinction. I do draw it. You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labour when they call it peace, your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous. Does not some modern Frenchman, exhausted by it all and very naturally, say, “Hell is other people”? But here there are no other people: therefore no war, no marriage, no Government orders, and only such work as you choose and like and Nature herself requires you to do. Here a distinction is drawn. I am surrounded only by my friends – who are not like other people.’

  ‘Am I, then, so unlike other people?’ Carfax asked in the schoolboy naivety, new come upon him, which seemed so pleasant to him.

  ‘You are in flight from them!’ she exclaimed smiling.

  Shortly afterwards she referred briefly to the delights of the house: a carefully selected library, a well-stocked music room with two pianos, a small studio on the roof, a formal garden with a pool. ‘And, of course,’ she added, ‘there’s always the Island itself. You can spend a long time exploring that. All your life, in fact. Because the Island’s always changing. When Nature’s advertising agents say that in books about beauty spots, they are of course trying to conceal what they regard as her frightful sameness and dullness. But here things are different. The Island is never the same and never repeats itself.’

  ‘Or if it does, the pattern is too large for one mortal to comprehend?’ interrupted Carfax, thinking of something else. ‘Or one lifetime, perhaps?’

  ‘No, I do not think it ever repeats itself,’ she answered musing. ‘Always there are variations. But, of course,’ she added, ‘the man in us looks rather for the pattern such as it is, the woman for the variations.’ She smiled again. ‘But the immediate point is that you won’t be seeing much of me during the day, so I do hope you’ll find things to do. We are quiet here, but I hope not dull.’

  Eagerly he reassured her about both these hopes.

  Carfax, who found in her movements a grace he had vainly sought elsewhere, watched her as she rose from the sofa and crossed to the door. She entranced him; so that only a corner of his eye and a fragment of his attention engaged themselves with the figure of what appeared to be a huge and burly man passing first one window and then the other as presumably he walked round the corner of the house. Ariel said nothing: and Carfax, as stated, was entranced by her.

  He spent the evening drawing in the garden. The spring sun shone and the surrounding hills protected him from the wind. Immediately he entered the garden his attention had been seized by a certain aspect of these hills: a large landscape of a force and significance utterly unprecedented in his experience clamoured through his brain to be released on to paper or canvas. Without going further he started work, his swiftly moving pencil leaving behind it a line of astonishing power and certainty. It would be a sombre work. In a few hours Carfax had been so far emancipated as to be producing once more and at long last a sombre work . . . Even Ariel passed almost from his consciousness as drawing followed drawing and he detached the pages of his block. His pencil travelled as if held by planchette. Tomorrow he would start the final version, the masterpiece. He worked until the gathering cold and damp reminded him that the year was yet young and the Island not a thousand miles from England.

  To his astonishment she appeared for dinner in the costume, though simplified, of an Elizabethan man. Dressed in black, and with her white shirt left open at the neck to show her whiter skin, she might have been an actress about to play Hamlet, a Bernhardt or La Verne; were it not that her smooth golden hair hanging on her shoulders made not only her sex but in some way also her authenticity apparent at a first glance. The long black stockings showed off her lovely legs and ensured that every small delightful grace of movement appeared to the greatest advantage.

  Carfax asked one question.

  ‘Why do not all women dress like you?’ he exclaimed softly. ‘To awaken wonder and love?’

  ‘My friends do,’ she answered simply, offering him an exquisite little glass.

  The small dining-room was oval with a ceiling which, though probably flat, was painted, after the manner of Biagio Rebecca, to appear steeply concave. As they sat at each end of a small oval table in fine satinwood, the grey-clad maid, now changed into evening black, perfectly served the perfect courses.

  After dinner they went up to the music room and for hour upon hour played to each other or played duets or played simultaneously upon the two pianos. The maid at intervals brought them coffee and cubes of Rahat Lacoum, placing the trays on the coloured table between them. A fire which had been lighted so illumined the room as to make lamp and candles almost superfluous, especially as both players seemed so well to know the music.

  ‘Who is that bust over the mantelpiece?’ asked Carfax.

  ‘I have no idea, absolutely no idea,�
� she replied. ‘He just goes with the house. He is part of the house.’

  There were long pauses in their playing as they talked eagerly and softly of the wonders and beauties of music: the hardships and frustrations and irreparable disappointments of the musician. Outside all was still except for an occasional wind which rattled and echoed in flue and window frame. There was no clock and the hours passed, faded, and were lost.

  Carfax at last stopped playing and crossed to where she sat at the other piano. She had started to play what she said was an air of the Island: ‘arranged by myself’. It curled and dripped through the thickly curtained silence. It seemed without meaning.

  Carfax’s hands fell upon her black-covered shoulders.

  ‘Oh Ariel,’ he said. ‘Ariel . . . I love you with all my heart and soul.’

  She continued playing the rather thin, even silly, little air. The melody accompanied her reply, spoken slowly and with pauses while she went on playing. She spoke while she softly played, some lines of verse:

  ‘Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,

  Atop on the topmost twig – which the pluckers forgot somehow,

  Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it . . .’

  A few more bars and she stopped. Rising a little wearily, she crossed to the small table and, going through the motion of pouring from the coffee pot, demonstrated its exhaustion. She made an indescribable little motion: indicative, it might be, of the bankruptcy also of poesy.

  ‘It must be late,’ she said, smiling her steady smile. ‘We had better go to bed. We had better go to bed.’

  When Carfax returned to his own room in the morning, he found it flooded with sunshine, and swept, to the point of discomfort, by the breeze through the open window. The previous evening upon his return from the garden he had found the shutters and blinds drawn against the oncoming night; so that it was not until now that the contrast once more struck him between the view from his window and the view from outside the house. Now, again seeing the open moorland spread before him, he began to feel an uneasy wonder at the absence, in the view, of those compelling hills which were to be the main feature of his picture. He wondered also at the unwonted lack of method which had accompanied his inattention to the problem while he had been in the garden the day before. But the problem was at once so enormous and, when compared with the other happenings of the previous twenty hours, so small and unimportant, that the mind tended somewhat to reel, at once baffled and bored. Carfax continued, none the less, to stand staring out of the window, half-naked and shivering slightly in the draughts which forced their way round the edges of the now closed sashes.

  He resolved at breakfast lightly to besiege the beloved Ariel with some very reasonable questions.

  One enquiry answered itself, however, at least in part; for not only did she appear dressed for riding, in breeches and boots, but soon remarked that he would not be seeing her again until the evening. Her attitude, affectionate rather than amorous, seemed in no way influenced by the occurrences of the night; but Carfax’s initial disappointment was soon modified by an uprush of feeling, already increasing steadily and rapidly, that whatever she did was the best possible thing to be done, at least from his point of view, the thing most in his own interest. Her doings were mainly mysterious, but seemed to provide him, as well no doubt as her, with odd but complete gratification . . . Now he would have time to get on with his picture . . . He would be able to paint knowing she would return . . . Wonderful foreknowledge . . . Her daytime activity taking her from him, about which he had been intermittently speculating, appeared to be riding. It sufficed.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘why the very nice room you have given me is so different in style and furnishing from all the other rooms I have seen in the house – from your own, for instance?’

  ‘The house has been built and rebuilt several times,’ she answered politely but without displaying much interest in the matter. ‘Even on several different sites. And occupied, of course, by many different people. I expect these are the reasons.’

  ‘I thought perhaps my room is in the style of decoration you reserve for your male guests,’ he continued, the presence all the time of this thought in his mind and his consequent eagerness to express it impeding his full immediate awareness of her answer.

  ‘No. I draw no decorative distinction between the sexes, my darling,’ she replied in the same even tone of slightly patient commonplace. By now, however, something strange in the terms of her earlier answer had passed the resistance necessarily strong in any human mind to such strangeness, and had in part entered Carfax’s consciousness.

  ‘You talk the most sweet nonsense, dearest Ariel,’ he said. ‘And nonsense with a lovely strangeness about it. Lovely nonsense.’

  ‘A very ancient said that all beauty must have something of strangeness,’ she replied, again with her serene smile.

  ‘Like your carpets!’ he interjected quickly. ‘How did you get a stair carpet which is different on every step from every other step? Is it part of a very huge carpet or was it specially made to a design of your own?’

  ‘Esprit d’escalier,’ she replied, gently smiling. ‘Esprit d’escalier. The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete – till afterwards it suddenly comes to you – when it is too late.’

  ‘Will it be too late when I know the real answers to my questions?’ he asked.

  ‘You must have noticed it is always too late when questions are answered and hopes fulfilled and sacrifices made and murder done. Because it is always later than you think.’

  The grey-clad maid brought in a large porcelain bowl heaped with fruit. They ate for a while in the silence of lovers.

  Later she rang for the dishes to be removed.

  ‘Don’t get painter’s cramp or lead poisoning, my darling,’ she said as they stood alone in the hall. ‘I look forward so much to seeing you alive and well tonight.’

  Emotion swept through him and he embraced her passionately. She opened the front door. Outside stood a black horse, beautifully accoutred, the bridle held by the efficient young woman who had driven the car on the previous day. Ariel mounted, smiled at him, and rode swiftly away, the horse’s hooves clattering excitingly down the spotless gravel of the drive. Carfax’s gaze followed her out of sight. Then, noticing that the efficient young woman seemed to have gone about her business, he proceeded to go about his.

  Progress with the wonderful painting proved disappointing. Carfax found himself intermittently re-troubled by the problem of the view. Several times he left his easel and, returning to the house, climbed the serpent staircase to his room for further cogitation and research. Though his knowledge of the technique of orientation was hazy, it seemed clear enough that his room faced south, also that the south front of the house was at his back as he painted; but looking up from the little terrace where his easel stood, he was quite unable either to determine which was the window he had just looked out of or to perceive how any window could possibly offer that wonderful airy panorama. Nor when he looked out from his bedroom could he, owing to the configuration of the house and ground, see his easel; and he had noticed when below that the three parts of the garden, corresponding to the three fronts of the house which did not contain the front door, seemed oddly alike in plan and planting, perhaps identical. In the end he resorted to the familiar device of hanging his towel from his bedroom window (first saturating it with water from his ewer to warrant the absurd procedure in the eyes of any inquisitive cleaner or bed-maker: also tumbling his bed anew, as he thought matters over, in his eagerness for the aspects of the wholly normal); but when he had descended to the garden he found the soaking object a small heavy heap on the ground and the appropriate window as impossible as ever to detect by any index of open or closed sashes. Irritably he ascended the staircase again (his fifth transit since Ariel’s departure), passing once more he noticed, as he had done on each previous occasion, the grey-clad maid, who seem
ed always so much more in evidence than any other member of the domestic staff.

  Back in his room fear rose for the first time to his consciousness as, at the casual glance he had resolved upon, he at once fancied that the view had changed. Sick shivering gripped him as his eyes stared without blinking or moving at a small building, a white-washed cottage of the type a fisherman might be supposed to occupy, which stood at the edge of the distant cliff where Carfax was so certain no building had stood before – no building had stood, in fact, less than ten minutes ago. His whole body was shaking as he sank into a chair and picked up a sheet of some newspaper he had used as packing for a pair of shoes. In the attempt to steady himself he read through the first item his eye lighted upon, though the paper shook so much that reading itself was slow and laboured. It was the report of Our Racing Correspondent upon happenings at Plumpton the day before, now more than a week ago. To Carfax it was all warmth and reassurance; like the aftermath of a bilious attack in school days twenty years before.

  He recovered; looked again; felt no fear at all; and decided he had been mistaken. The cottage was still there; but he must have failed to notice it through concentration on the wider view.

  He descended once more; once more passing the grey-clad maid, now industriously polishing a suit of armour mounted on the first-floor landing. Something, necessarily something very slight, in the proportions of the armour seemed to him in some way familiar. A flood of feeling swept through him for Ariel who, he at once realised, owing to a lover’s inexactitude in such matters, momentarily seemed to him of just that size and (absurdly enough), in some sense, shape and build. Several times already since meeting her he had caught delightful shades and echoes of her loved form and presence where no such things could be except for the infatuate.

  He returned to the garden and resolutely began to paint. The notion of further experiments, even of the smallest enquiry, was swept clean from his mind. His tired nerves automatically threw off the slightest trace of conscious anxiety about the view, the only disturbing element in the period of blissful happiness he was now entering upon. Or perhaps very nearly the only disturbing element. For another minor mischief began almost at once to suggest itself: the nearly miraculous concept for his picture had completely disintegrated. Before and after the excellent luncheon the grey-clad maid had provided for him in a little square study well suited to meals taken alone, he struggled and searched to recover what was lost, to produce even a passably good painting. Only daubs and smears and lightning zigzags resulted. A corner of his mind seemed at once to offer the suggestion that in some incomprehensible way, by forcing his thoughts so thoroughly from the mystery of the view he had injured his capacity to paint. Did his imagination in some way have to embrace everything or nothing?