It was not happiness.
Four thousand miles away, across a continent, across an ocean, was an island. And there, secure in the timelessness of all things irretrievably lost, was happiness—local, like a bird singing or a flower growing. He had possessed it, he had misused it—for to do anything with happiness but to receive it as the ear receives the song of a bird or the nostril the scent of a flower is to misuse it; he had left it. But because he had left it of his own will it had given him—a parting gift—this touchstone to carry for ever in his heart, wherewith to try and infallibly dismiss any solace, whether of chance or plotted by the treachery of his desires, that might come to him and say, I too am happiness. Turn in with me.
Self-exiled, he still carried with him this divine right of not being taken in by imitations. And often he had known a strange mental pleasure in the exercise of this faculty, a faculty so sharp and unerring that the pinchbeck pretences of pleasure had become harmless, tolerable, indeed almost endeared, just because it was so easy to see through them. If from the first we could look into the hearts of those we meet, we should look on all men mildly. It is not our enemies that we seek to destroy, but our own illusions which mistook them for friends. It is our silly selves, lodged in them, fastened there with rusted loves, which we must pursue with unappeasable malice, till nothing remains to remind us how we were deluded. It is that we must away with, abjure, exterminate.
It was not happiness that he had found at the House of the Salutation, and what it was he could not well name; but whatever it might be that greeted him there, an instinct bade him respect it and submit himself to it. Naturally, being an honourable man, he had resisted that instinct to the uttermost. It was comfort, he told himself—the satisfaction, so long untasted, of smooth linen, regular meals, order, and decency. It was the unbalanced sensibility of convalescence, the reaction of the refreshed body upon the mind, or it might even be the effect of his sun-stroke—they often left one a little queer in the head. It was indolence, it was childishness, it was the shock of being so kindly treated. Who would not lend himself to such kindness, and fancy for a day or two that a new life had begun?
Once I leave (he told himself), and I really must leave tomorrow, it will all fall into place, and I shall see that it was just a pretty picnic, a fancy—something in the place, not in me.
Meanwhile he stayed, agreeing that it was at her bidding, and knowing that it was of his own will. Socially, staying was an easy matter. For many years now it had been one to him whither he went or where he stayed; and he was so indifferent to himself that he did not think he was likely to be a noticeable nuisance. Habit, not pride, made him feel that he should do something to earn his keep; but he had no ambition about this, and would have been as perfectly willing to work, had she asked it, twelve hours a day as a labourer, as he was willing to shake the apricot brandy and paint the dog-kennel.
After such activities his hostess would suggest that he should take a siesta, enforcing the suggestion with persuasive yawns. It was not for the first time in his life that he found himself among people who slept extravagantly. On the island, where happiness was, there had also been a vast amount of sleeping. But there his friends had been in the habit of casting themselves down in any place and at any moment, like dogs, whereas Angustias slept with formalities, and would no more wake through an afternoon than she would go to bed before midnight. For himself, he found this regimen difficult; but there was no doubt but that it agreed with her. She seemed to regard life through a perpetual haze of well-being and detachment, twice a day exchanging the innocent drowsiness of the newly-awakened for the sensual composure of one preparing for bedtime. In the first of these states she resembled a child, in the second, a very old lady; consequently it was not possible to have any exact idea of her age, though she must be older than he.
It was an elderly household. Discounting the puppies, Pepe and Rosa were its only examples of youth. They, with their smooth skins and eyes of violent brilliancy, were like creatures from another world, a fairy-tale prince and princess, only tethered to real life by their several passions—hers, for her shepherd; his, for the Ford.
A very old man, whose face, tanned to the colour of a winter sun, was surrounded by a frill of black and white striped whisker, giving him a mystical resemblance to a badger, worked in the garden, and in the intervals of his labour sat in the arbour smoking cigars. He was silent, unless Quita came into the garden for vegetables. Then, as abruptly as if he had been turned on, he would break into a torrent of injurious recriminations, smartly taken up by her. For a few minutes the two voices, gusty bass and strident alto, would clash together; then, when she had snatched the prey from his hands and rushed back into the house, he would turn himself off again. It seemed as though a stranger in the garden was less than a pebble to him. But one day, during the painting of the dog-kennel, he approached the new-comer, and asked,
“Were you ever in Greenock?”
The answer not meeting with his approval, he turned away.
It was his birthplace, Angustias explained, though he had left it so long ago that now he spoke only Spanish if he spoke at all. Harry had found him, penniless and drunk, prodding a quayside with a spud, and had brought him to be a gardener. With wry deliberation he had settled down, his only acknowledgment of the animal kingdom to strew the neighbourhood with bastards. Gregorio was one of these, an easy transition from McGregor.
He lived, solitary, in a thatched hovel, some two miles away. The herdsmen and other farm servants lived in similar hovels, linked by leisurely paths that curled over the waste with no appreciable scheme, a map as baffling and traditional as though it had been traced out by hares. There seemed to be little or no cover in this flattened landscape, yet a few minutes of following one of these paths would dandle one on the edge of a prospect apparently unknown. A clump of gaunt thistles reared against the sky. Was it newly seen, or was it but a new aspect of the thistles skirted already? Somewhere hereabouts, surely, the path dipped into a little hollow where three willows sheltered a drinking-hole? The path dipped duly, and here was the hollow; but instead of the willow-trees and the muddy brook stemmed up there was a tarred shed protected by a tangle wreath of barbed wire. Lifting one a few feet higher, the path disclosed itself running towards a distant roof, a feather of smoke. But negotiating another group of thistles it shook itself free of that intention and brought one out into a vast grassy place where a herd of cattle were feeding. The different aspects of the unvarying landscape melted into each other like thoughts merging, colliding, returning, sliding off for ever, conditioned and unforeseen. And then, breaking in upon it like the tones of speech, one of those hovels would rise up, and perhaps a troop of children would run acclaiming from the doorway, or McGregor’s shirt hang airing upon the line.
Her guest had explained to Angustias, a little firmly, that at his age it would be more dangerous to learn to sit a horse than to go afoot, even among cattle; and that, as he always kept to the paths, it was a logical impossibility for him to be considered as losing his way. As regarded going on foot, she was too deeply embarrassed by his ignorance of horsemanship to make any demur; by the second thesis she had seemed imperfectly convinced, had expostulated a little, putting on that peculiarly rational tone, that air of making everything quite clear, proper only to people roused from sleep to cope with a situation. But, never having been acquainted with women, he found her solicitude no obstacle to continuing to do as he wished.
He wished very much to continue these rambles, and that not only because they removed him from the household of women. This was a natural desire and he felt it; but it was not his prime motive. He went out for corroboration. This landscape, so flat and blank, matched the flatness and blankness of his mind, and thus to be released into indirection was like the comfort of sleep without its cheating. For sleep is a danger to the unhappy; dreams, lovely and ruthless as wild beasts, lurk in its thickets, ready to pounce out and tear the mind. But here he might wander as h
e willed, yet never be betrayed into forgetting that he walked an exile from joy. Often he would stop and look about him, thinking that perhaps nowhere else in the world would he find a landscape so perfectly fitted to his requirements; and he felt a satisfaction so deep that it was almost as though he rejoiced in his surroundings, rejoiced with much the same durable joy as with which one rejoices in a good coat. For he was a quite ordinary man, a desert would have been no use to him, he would have felt abashed had he been called upon to walk out his sorrow amid the declamation of rocks and torrents. But here there was nothing grand, nothing poignant. The texture of the scenery bore everywhere faint signs of use, it was, however sparingly and casually, subdued to the ordinary fate of being useful; the landmarks meeting his eye were all reassuringly insignificant—a tarred hut, a zinc water-trough, a rubbish-heap; and even the vastness extending round him seemed only the extension of a very large field. Perhaps there was a hint of melodrama about the vultures; but they soon took upon themselves the colour of being just birds, even useful birds, like hens, with a function of being convenient about carcasses. The sky was moderately supplied with clouds, the grass was a rather fatigued green, when it rained it rained in a matter-of-fact way without thunderstorms. There was a familiar badge, too, upon the flocks and herds inhabiting this great field. They were owned and doomed, the sheep for shearing, the cattle for slaughter. Only by its extent did the great field differ from any other field.
It was not happiness, and he would have turned from the thought that it might be consolation. It was no substitute for what he had lost. But it was something found. It was, indeed, the right place to be unhappy in. And that it should be so was a confirmation of a long-carried hope.
More than a year ago he had landed at Valparaiso, his first coming to South America. The liner had docked soon after dusk, but his work as purser’s clerk had kept him on board all night and most of the following day. It was late in the afternoon when he went on shore, alone and inadequately, teased by a ridiculous sensation that he must have come to the wrong place, since no one else was doing as he did. It was not possible to feel with proper interest that he was now setting foot on a strange continent, and it seemed to him that South America was but another place he would have to get away from—a junction where the trains did not fit, and where the waiting-room needed airing. He could almost smell the stifling fustiness of the coke fire, and the posters on the hoardings seemed to be the usual recommendations to young girls, only they happened to be in Spanish, and, very sensibly, illustrated. Perhaps the train would be late, perhaps he would have to wait some time before he got away; for his job on the liner was at an end, he had been taken on for the voyage only, replacing a clerk who had died of influenza. However, something would turn up, and he would catch it, and shog on.
So temporary did his sojourn appear to him that he forgot his intention of finding a cheap hotel, and went for a walk to kill time, noticing the details of his route only that he might be able to find his way back. Then he struck a line of trams, and followed that. They banged past him, shaking the hot air off their flanks, and the names on their destination boards were so romantically beautiful that they must be lies, for such places could never be attained by trams. Mirar los flores. If a tram could nurse such an ambition it had better relinquish it, the utmost it could hope for would be a municipal cemetery. The tram stopped, and he boarded it, heaven knew why, and climbed to the upper deck. No sooner had he sat down than the conductor came scolding after him to ask why he had not paid on getting in. He realised the short-sightedness of coming to South America, a place where one immediately became involved in a foreign language and a foreign currency. However, he had changed some money, so mutely he held out a coin which seemed to be of a suitable size. The conductor continued to address him, perhaps one had to explain how far one wished to be taken. “Cemeterio,” he said, absently, and felt his heart stumble at the sound of his naked voice, and his limbs dissolving in a sweat. After the man had moved away he recovered himself, and began to look out of the window.
It was one of those rather Edgeware Road districts, common to all famous cities, and for a while everything he saw seemed so familiar that he was scarcely aware of seeing anything. Then, looking up a side-street, he saw the mountains.
Under the strong thick sun they appeared to lack all spatial relationship to the foreground. They might be near or remote, cardboard or cloud. Indeed, in the first unrecognising moment he had an idea that they must be some kind of advertisement, and it was only in losing sight of them with the progress of the tram that he knew that his flesh had already quickened with an authentic excitement and acknowledgment. An icy breath of snow seemed to dart into the sweltering tram, a shattering whiteness to dazzle his eyes; and in a minute, up the next side-street, he was looking at them again, and already their outline was familiar, and they, once more, were slightly unreal and flimsy, as though they were purposely misrepresenting themselves to the eye of man. And then, without in any way changing, they put on their true being, and rose up out of a continent, with time wandering across their slopes like a slight cloud, and ships and cities scattered at their base no weightier than cobwebs.
Absently, his mind fingered their names like a string of bright beads. Man, armed with intelligence like a housewife with a feather whisk, runs through the world, hasty and tidy, dabbing at this and that with an exploration, with a name. Whether a summit be called Chimborazo or Mount Brown is but a dab with the whisk; for the existence of being a mountain there is no name and no possible exploration; mysteriously emerging and subsiding, the mountains heave along the land in a secrecy as unassailable as that of the waves wandering along the ocean. It is for fear that man has snatched up the feather whisk. This Tom, Dick, and Harrying of Chimborazo and Mount Brown is the familiarity, rather vulgar, of the parvenu. So, in the war—he had heard—people would call one death or another Minnie or Bertha. Yet these accredited, licensed fears (so, sitting in the tram, he thought) are man’s expedient against a vaster terror. We hire the fear of death to protect us against the fear of life. Man sets the unscalable Himalayas as a guard between himself and a blade of grass.
The tram jolted to a stop, people began to squeeze past him. He shut his eyes and tried to shut his senses, knowing that only with the renewed movement of the tram would his thoughts begin to move again. For their life was not really in him. He had nothing of his own, not even his thoughts. The jolting of an iron vehicle must dispense the possible understanding of a mountain to him, and for every moment that the jolting was withheld his meditations withered like plants without water. There was a touch on his shoulder. He looked up. The conductor was standing beside him, and the tram was empty.
Obediently descending to the pavement, he felt the sun strike on him with brutality. He looked round for somewhere else where he could sit. As, in a city, one may not sit on the ground, there was nowhere. But even in a city one may lean; and propped against a standard he looked at his tram turning its head into its tail, and hoped that it might soon fill up, and move off, and be followed by another; for there would be no social conventions to prevent him climbing on to that, seeing the mountains again, and continuing his thoughts. But before the next tram came all thinking had died under the motionless heat, and there was nothing to be done but to be carried back to where he had started from, and then to set about finding somewhere to lodge. Tomorrow he must find another job: another clerkship, a steward’s place, or a job as a cook’s help—he could wash dishes very carefully.
For the last eighteen months he had lived by the sea, at haphazard, picking up one temporary job after another. During that time he discovered that there were many such as himself: men who had taken to the sea as women take to the streets. It is not much of a life, and leads to nothing, but it is casual, and anonymous, and no mental effort or choice is involved. Another voyage, another man...whither, who, it does not matter. All that matters is that they should be like the second tram, into which one might step unrecogni
sed, free of the personal existence imposed on one by the attention of our fellows. So, shadowy, uncontinuing, negligible to others, one might ease a little the burden of being still real, continuous, and painful to oneself.
But searching from one office and bureau to another he found he was not so dispurposed as formerly. Something in him, call it, for the sake of convenience, a soul, had accomplished the next journey already and, looking at the mountains, had traversed them and descended to the plains beyond. There, in that vast meadow, it waited for him to follow it with the baggage of bodily sense. Time enough, he said. I show no signs of dying. Time enough. That ever-rolling stream has washed me to some queer places, and one day perhaps will carry me there too. If not, it is no great matter. And it was with no thought of a cannon that he signed on as cook’s help in a cargo boat bound for Lisbon.
But one night, waking and knowing by the gait of the vessel that it was now riding the open sea, he felt with vehemence that the first stage of his journey was begun, and his impatience alone seemed to swing the boat on with lengthening stride over the enlarging waves. In his mind’s eye he saw, dimly distinct on the night, the pattern of broken lace incessantly jolted backward from her sides, the trailing and forsaken wake. It was his impatience that ravaged the face of ocean with these fleeting shows, that startled from every sleek mound of water this response of astonished foam. Silenced under the blackness of night was the colour he had noticed so often and never seen till now, when his memory gave it to him: the blue, so intense, so candid as to be in some way piteous, that the passage of the ship leaves in its wake—a colour like a wound, ripped by the iron out of the secretive grey of unbroken water. The colour of the sea’s wound, he thought; its most blue and precious blood streaming.
Mr. Fortune Page 19
