As she turned over Miss Dombey’s effects, which, apart from the bundles of tracts, were few, the stewardess remembered another incident which had surprised her. She had recounted it later in the voyage to the purser who seemed to find it very droll. The bell rang and there was Miss Dombey standing outside the cabin door, her red freckled face contorted with anger. Without a word she turned and led the way to the private bathroom which was attached to her saloon. Pointing a quivering finger, she said, in tones of outrage, “And what might this be?” She was pointing at the bidet—for the Europa was one of those French liners which had changed hands after the war. “That ma’am?” she had said, with a dreadful feeling of being personally responsible for the outrage. “That’s a biddy.” It was enough for Miss Dombey. She turned on her heel and bowled out into the corridor. “I am going to see the Captain,” she said. “It must be removed at once.” She actually fought her way on to the bridge to see the Captain. What she said to him was not known, but when they came down off the bridge they were both red in the face. The bidet stayed where it was, but an arctic coldness sprang up in Miss Dombey’s manner whenever she passed the Captain on deck. The Captain was not one to be put upon by such behaviour.
Mr. Campion had taken all his things. He had, however, trodden a certain amount of paint into the floor, and had forgotten a small folding camp-stool. There was a paper bag full of walnuts under his pillow and a small dirty comb. A dozen roped-up canvases stood in the corner tied together with a rubber band and label. The label bore an address in Marseilles. Mr. Campion was rather too familiar with her. “A penny for your thoughts,” he had said on one occasion; and when she did not reply: “No? Well then, a pound for your body.” It was hardly the way to speak to a decent girl—even if she wasn’t a lady. Mr. Campion had also left a beret on the wardrobe. He always wore a beret and an open-necked shirt. Perhaps he had more than one beret. She tried it on and thought she would keep it; it would look quite nice after a dry-clean. The walnuts seemed to be mostly bad.
Who else was there? It always gave her a pleasant feeling of superstitious fear to go to Fearmax’s cabin. It was rather a gloomy one on A deck. It was in a fearful mess. There were a number of books lying about, clothes hanging out of suitcases, and several bundles of envelopes done up with string and sealing-wax. She touched them softly, as if she were afraid that some of the medium’s magnetism might remain in these belongings of his. There was the short cloak he wore for the ball—it suited him over his evening clothes. A box of cigars and a rosary lay beside his bed. She turned over some of the envelopes in her hands. On one was written in a spidery hand “Press Cuttings, 1941-48”, on another “Articles to The Medium,” and a third, “My last Will and Testament, O. Fearmax”.
The steward came in to help her sort the belongings which littered the cabin. She commented on the quantity of things Fearmax had left behind. “He was going on to Egypt,” said the boy. “All the others were going to stay for a while in Crete and took their things.” Was that true, she wondered? Miss Dale had left an evening-frock behind. “That poor Miss Dale,” she said. “So quiet and gentle.” She oiled her spitcurl in the mirror and twisted it round her finger. The boy gathered up the books into a bundle and dumped them in a suitcase. “He’s not left any money about?” he asked suspiciously. She folded the suits and placed them one on top of the other. “Didn’t have much to leave, I expect,” she said.
In Baird’s cabin they found a pair of khaki shorts, and, in Graecen’s, a shaving-mirror which was propped at an operational angle by a half-crown. “You could tell he was every inch a Lord,” said the stewardess pocketing the coin. Who else would use money to prop up a shaving-mirror?
Miss Dale’s cabin was not as empty as they had at first glance imagined it to be. “There—you see? Careless,” said the steward reprovingly. He had been particularly fond of Miss Dale with her sad blonde appearance, and her being too timid to ring for servants because, as she said, “she wasn’t used to them.” She had spent all day in a deck-chair, wrapped in rugs, convalescing from a serious illness. Latterly, Lord Graecen had been seen reading to her. “Ah well,” said the steward with a sigh to himself, “Romance, that’s what it was.” The stewardess noticed his sigh and shrugged her shoulders.
The miscellaneous periodicals they gathered up found their way at last into the purser’s hands as he stood on C deck, talking amiably to a friend and spitting into the oily waters of Alexandria harbour. “Thanks,” he said. “I could do with some light reading.” He talked as if he had been wrestling with heavy books of reference all day. The bookshelf above his bunk was crammed with yellow-backs. He took the bundle of papers, put them under his arm, and continued his conversation. He was describing to a friend the tragedy that had overtaken the party in the labyrinth. After having extracted the fullest possible pleasure from this he went and sat in a deck-chair aft, lit a fresh pipe and glanced through the papers. He wondered for a moment which papers had belonged to which passengers—one could hardly imagine these Bystanders belonging to Fearmax. Fearmax had rather awed him. He looked like a minor prophet—a gaunt and vehement character. He had refused to give a séance in the first-class saloon, pleading that he was in poor health. And yet he talked like a volcano in short and crisply-articulated sentences. He wore soft black bow ties with drooping ends—such as were fashionable in Belgravia towards the end of the last century. His face had the charred finely-lined character of the later Rudolf Steiner portraits; under his eyes there were deep smudges of black which seemed violet in the harsh lights of the first-class deck. He walked about the decks for hours with his hands in his pockets, like a monomaniac.
For a short while the purser played drowsily with these fugitive recollections, before dropping off to sleep. He noticed that some of the portraits in the society papers had been decorated with moustaches in pencil and wondered whether Graecen had been guilty of the impropriety. The sun was sinking behind the jumble of masts and hulls and a light wind had sprung up.
At Toulon they had all been ashore, and the Truman couple had arrived back rather drunk in the pinnace. He had seen Miss Dombey sitting opposite them with that suffused and swollen look—that redness of the wattles—which always came over her when she was outraged. Mr. Truman’s hat was over his ear and his arm was round his wife. They were singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling”, with a care that seemed a little over-scrupulous to the more sober members of the crew who watched them from the rail. Graecen had made some remark to Baird and they had both laughed. It was obvious that Miss Dombey was not enjoying their company. She kept her gaze steadily averted and wondered how these disgusting people had managed to travel first-class. As the boat came in to the Europa’s side she had caught Truman’s eye and, to her horror, after a second’s patient, indulgent, and glassy scrutiny, he had winked at her. “That man,” she hissed to Baird as she came up the gangway. “He’s drunk.”
The purser had liked the Truman couple. He was short and thickset, with a good deal of grey hair and a clipped moustache. His manner was extremely good-natured and he appeared to suffer from no sense of social inferiority whatsoever in travelling first-class: “Money,” he said whenever he had to produce any at the bar. “It means nothing to me. I never had any use for it. Here, take the lot.” He was reputed to have won a fortune on the football pools. Miss Dombey found him infuriating because she could not condescend to him; he was alert, civil, and very faintly mocking.
Mrs. Truman was a good-looking woman but a trifle sluttish of dress. Her rouge was nearly always unevenly put on, her deck-shoes rather grubby. Between her husband and herself there existed a sensible bond of ordinary humour; they were accomplices in the criticism of the world around them; a world which threw up people so irresistibly funny as Miss Dombey or as pleasant as Graecen. They were particularly pleased at any speculations as to how they had managed to acquire their wealth; as a matter of fact they had just fifteen pounds of their savings in hand. Truman had won a competition in a weekly paper whic
h had offered him a choice between a pound a week for life or a holiday cruise. The choice was characteristic of them. “Mother,” he said with a calm good-humour, “the pound a week I can make myself, but a holiday cruise we shall never afford if we don’t go now.”
They were obviously very much in love, and Miss Dombey could not forgive them for their private jokes, the way they whispered into each other’s ears, and walked hand in hand about the wet decks like schoolchildren. The stewardess’s, in qualification of her liking of them with the suggestion that they were perhaps a little eccentric was due to a conversation she overheard one night when they were undressing in their cabin. The door had been left ajar while Truman cleaned his teeth—which he always did with a gusto and uproar quite out of proportion to so elementary an operation. You would have thought that a horse was being curried in its stall. He added to the noise by trying to hum snatches of song as he brushed. One night as the stewardess passed the door she heard this customary performance broken off abruptly and the sound of weeping, subdued and rather unearthly in the corridor which was silent now save for the furry noise of the fans. “There, Elsie,” Truman was saying, “I know things would have been different if it hadn’t died.” After some further conversation she heard Mrs. Truman’s melodious voice, recovering its steadiness, say: “I know it’s silly, but I can’t help feeling I killed it, John.”
Later that evening she heard Truman cursing the narrowness of the cabin: “Making love in these bunks is like making love in a matchbox,” he said with his comical north-country accent, with its flattened vowels.
But perhaps the seal was set upon their eccentricity when one day the stewardess found them sitting naked, side by side on the bunk, playing noughts and crosses. “Come in, dear,” Mrs. Truman had said with pleasant unconcern, and then, seeing her consternation, “John, out of sight with you.” She heard Truman laughing immoderately as he struggled into a shirt. She confided this adventure to the steward, asking him very seriously whether old people like that still made love: it seemed faintly indecent. They were old enough to have children. The steward stifled a smile and said he didn’t know—they were probably eccentric. She was thoroughly satisfied with this proposition. Eccentric, that’s what they were. But they were good-humoured and undemanding, and she had a little wave of pity in her heart as she packed the ill-fitting cheap dresses, the old wire-hair-brush, and the copies of Tit-Bits in the trunk which, according to the metal stamp, had been made by a Mr. Stevens in Peckham Rye.
It was not till some days later, when Graecen’s escape was announced in the Press, that the purser discovered that he was a poet. “England’s Foremost Poet-Peer” said one paper and gave a brief outline of his history, his Scottish title, his M.C. and Mention, and his brilliant batting for the Gentlemen versus Players at Lord’s in 1936. Everyone felt that they wished they had known at the time; he had been so quiet and unobtrusive—so like a middle-aged stockbroker. It is true that he had once been seen sketching in a book, and that he read to Miss Dale once or twice on A deck—but whether it was poetry or not they could not tell. It seemed, however, no less than poetic justice that he should be saved. Later still the purser was to see in The Times the poem of Graecen’s, beginning: “When death like the sundial casts his shadow.” The lines were, he noticed, dated April, 1947, several weeks before the incident of the labyrinth, but they read to him like a premonition—as many, that is to say, as he could understand. He read them over several times, cut them out with a penknife and transferred the cutting from his grubby fingers to his pocket-book for future consideration. And here the circle of speculation closed.
Ariadne’s Thread
It was in the middle of May that Graecen for the last time closed the little makeshift office which had been built around the Cefalû statue while it was being cleaned, and started to walk, with his deliberate soft pace, across the Graeco-Roman section. Twilight had come—that strange marine twilight which only seems to come to Museums—and the long cases reflected his sober figure in subaqueous tones as he passed them. Today was the end of a ten-year term in a life devoted entirely to them, he was reflecting, as he descended the long staircase step by step, and ten years was a long time. He was trying to invest the episode with some sentimental significance, but in truth he felt a little empty and negative. He tasted the damp air from the gloomy corridors of stone and glass around him. It must be seven. The light was fading fast outside; neutral, grey London had seen no signs of spring as yet. He breasted the tide of scholars emerging from the great library, flowing through the central doors and dissolving into the grey hinterland outside, and handed over his key with a sigh of resignation, a little surprised that it did not hurt more. As he was collecting his hat and coat, Swan, the attendant, hurried up to him.
“Is it true that you’re leaving us, sir?” he said. It was true, of course; but the eager self-indulgent emotion in the old man’s voice struck no echoing spark in Graecen’s heart. He stood on one leg, flushed. In his neat black clothes and preternaturally shined shoes he looked very much a gentleman covered by a gentleman’s confusion. “For a time, Swan,” he said, “I hope to be back soon.” The blush lit up first his face and then the little bald spot on his crown which always made him look like a saint in a halo. Blushing was a habit he tried to cure without success. He saw that Swan’s rheumy eye was marking the blush as it travelled steadily upwards and round towards the nape of his neck. He put his hat on, and pressed a ten-shilling note into the old man’s hand. “I shall see you very soon,” he said as he passed down the hall and through the swing-doors.
He halted for a moment on the marble steps, experiencing a sense of aimless emptiness which must, he thought, be such as prisoners feel, who, after a long sentence, hear the prison gate close behind them. It was a leave-taking peculiarly without any positive sentimental bias, and as a sentimental man he regretted it. “I’ve resigned,” he told himself aloud, and, looking round, found that the pock-marked elementary Easter Island carvings were staring at him with their familiar cruelty from the porch.
Museum Street looked drab. So did Great Russell Street. Drabness multiplied by drabness. The last suds of light were running down behind St. Pancras. London was drawing up the darkness like a blotter. Syrinx was out, however. He saw that it was in several bookshops. A few notes on the scrannel for a Spring that was, as usual, late. “Ah well,” he said, and took off his hat to feel the air upon his brow. He bought a Times Literary Supplement and a packet of cigarettes at the corner. It was no good reading the reviews in the left-wing papers—they always upset him with their ill-bred shrillness. As an afterthought he stole into a bookshop and bought himself a copy of Syrinx: as usual he had given all his complimentaries away. It was absurd to feel guilty and panic-stricken, for he was still comparatively unknown as a poet. Syrinx was his seventh book and he did not expect more than the usual mede of literary lip-service for it. He had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his verse was neither very experimental nor very exciting. But at least it got published: and he adored publishing. He had all the author’s vanity in the appearance of a new book, and Syrinx was really very pretty, very pretty indeed. The cover was bright, and yet refined. The pan-pipes, the reeds, the rather mouldy-looking swan—they all, he felt, admirably expressed the nature of the poems. They, too, were a little mannered, a little old-fashioned, perhaps a little threadbare. (“Lord Graecen’s Muse, turned housewife, once more beats out her iambics like some threadbare carpet”: that was the kind of thing he found so unkind.)
Enjoying the feeling of the little book under his arm he turned into a tea-shop to look it over once more. The review in The Times would be, as always, sepulchral but kind. Old Conklin admired his work, genuinely admired it. He avoided the corner where old Sir Fennystone Crutch was devouring buttered toast. His skull-cap and slippers made him a familiar figure in the reading room. He hated being disturbed at his tea—which was the only real meal he had during the day. Graecen had once done so and had been severe
ly reprimanded. “Go away,” the old man had said, “Can’t you see I’m eating?” An all-consuming passion for Sanscrit and buttered toast—did that give one the right to be rude to people, Graecen wondered? Nevertheless he had learned his lesson; he squeezed past the old man in a hurry and fitted himself into one of the dark wooden alcoves, ordering tea, toast and a boiled egg. He opened the paper.
The Dark Labyrinth Page 2
