Mr. Fortune

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Arrived at Lisbon he sought out a boat which would take him across the Atlantic again, scarcely aware that he was in Europe, so anxiously did his thoughts lean westward. There was no longer time enough, his indifference, that safe cold cloak, was gone, and he was once more capable of fear and vulnerably conscious of beauty. But no beauty could stay him; the sights that might have pleased his eyes only warned him onward, waving to him their admonition of fleetingness.

  Coming to Rio de Janeiro when the newly risen sun glittered on the bay that is dotted with little islands—islets so exquisite and fastidious that they appear to have been composed by some romantic milliner, selecting for each a tree, a couple of flowering bushes, and a score of butterflies—more than beauty assailed him; for here, as in some unreal and childish paradise, the existence of his lost island seemed commemorated, and every frond waving in the land breeze beckoned him to stay and rest for ever. But the impulse to lean over and drown in the reflection of one of these bright effigies lasted for barely a minute, blown away by the strength of his purpose.

  There was not time, so it seemed, for self-murder. Death among these radiant islets was a whimsical excursion that he, bound upon another journey, must forgo. And, still admiring, he fell to wondering what the pampas would be like. A wide place; a green expanse, impassive and solitary; a place where there would be elbow-room for sorrow.

  Make haste, make haste! There was so little time, and he might die before he came there, and be defrauded of his grief. Happiness was on the island, where he had left it; but there, awaiting him on those green plains, if only he could get so far, was sorrow, an experience as deep and assuaging as the other. In all these years of dingy exile he had never once had time to put on his sorrow. It had lain folded and hidden within him like a garment folded in a travelling-trunk. And unless he made haste he might never wear it, for with every day it grew more crumpled, more sullied with disuse, its embroideries perishing, its texture rotting and creased. This heavenly treasure laid up in an earthly carcass, he had lugged it about from port to port. It’s a wonder, he thought, that I didn’t present it to a museum with all the other things I brought from the island. Example of a sorrow, full-length. Made by an Englishman in the Southern Hemisphere. Presented by, etc. The lettering would be calm and neat, a lettering equally applicable to gold-bearing nuggets and marsupials. Yes, if it had occurred to me, no doubt I should have jettisoned it in the museum, with the rest. I told myself that I relinquished them from an aesthetic compassion, saying that I could not endure to see them getting so battered and dimmed with being carried about; but it was pique, really, an angry self-mutilation. That was at Sydney, nearly two years ago. Meanwhile I have carried my sorrow about with me, never lifting the lid, never daring to put it on, only knowing it as a weight to be carried about. I had no chance to wear it, I told myself, for sorrow is not a garment to wear in a cook’s galley, or among the greedy bugs and whoremongers of a seaport. But that was the excuse my cowardice made, choosing to wander in such a life, skulking in that busy ignominy, nor daring, indeed, to put on sorrow.

  Now, perhaps, it was forfeit. Arriving at Buenos Ayres he found that it was thronged with such as he, but younger and better qualified; it seemed that he would never finish his journey. And he would have despaired, if it had not been for the recollection of how he had seen the mountains from a tram, and his conviction that something, called for convenience’ sake a soul, was already arrived at the journey’s end, and awaited him there, making ready a place for him. Then he had seen an advertisement, and answering it he was hired to give English lessons to an ageing harlot who proposed to found a brothel. Starving himself, except for the sweetmeats she gave him, and sleeping out of doors, he had saved his wages until he had put by enough money to travel to San Diego by train.

  It was strange to be in a train once more, like a gentleman; like a gentleman to be going where he willed with no obligation to do anything about it except pay some money and preserve his ticket, able to look out of the window and observe with condescension the contours of the landscape as though it were laid out for sale—but he would not buy this bit or even examine it, it was nothing to him, only so much more earth over which gangs of sweating men had, under the direction of skilled engineers, laid down iron rails. Further down the car four men were playing cards. They played game after game, and at the end of each game they quarrelled and abused each other. He knew enough Spanish now to understand most of what they were saying, but there was no need to listen or to take any interest in them, for as long as he had his ticket he was free of his fellow-men, humanity existed only to procure his journey, to be borne along with him, or to be left behind, small figures rooted in earth or impaled on platforms, cast away from him by this transit which he could wrap about him like a cloak. He had caught a chill, sleeping out, and now it was heavy on him, so that his head ached, and his back, and thrills of fever ran across his limbs like some esoteric species of pleasure. And thus he came to San Diego, and gave up his ticket, shivering at the contact with fresh air; and suddenly, as though he had left it behind in the rack, he knew that he had mislaid his purpose, that there was no more reason why he should be here than anywhere else, that it was not his journey’s end that he confronted, but another stage in a purposeless journey.

  Thereafter, muffled in fever, his recollection preserved only disconnected fragments: a horrible meal, costly and greasy, after which he had vomited; looking at a full moon; the shade under an avenue of cork-trees; hearing from a solitary farmhouse—for he had left San Diego and all this while walked on, directionless—the strains of “The Belle of New York” played on a mechanical piano; a rhea, with the feathers slipping from its wing like overbalancing panniers; the silence of late summer suddenly trampling him with terror as he stood among the endless ranks of tall grasses, so that he began to talk to himself, and then as desperately desisted, knowing this to be the behaviour of a madman; and a long argument he had held with himself, later in the day, as to why he should not wish to run mad, since sanity had done so little for him. These, with thirst, headache, cold at dawn, the grasp of the midday sun, and countless cattle, and endless herbage, and occasional unreal meetings with herdsmen and once with a postman, made up the sum of he knew not how many days.

  But to mind, sourly rankling inside his sick and insatiably enduring body, there had been no release, no moment when he could put on that rich garment of sorrow. He had walked in a dull and angry dream, feeling himself made a fool of. Here he was, amid the landscape and solitude he had promised himself, on the right side of those mountains at last. Here was the place, his world’s ending in this unending plain. Here, if he chose, he could sit down and fully possess himself of sorrow before he died; for it takes many hours to die: if those who drown can find time to review a whole life, one dying more slowly of starvation should have leisure for the longer exploit of one minute’s absorbed accepted grief. There was nothing to say him nay, no policeman to move him on, no public opinion to clap him into a workhouse or an infirmary. A rhea, wearing its feathers in that fatalistic manner, would not put out the slightest objection to his death on its territory. Yet he walked on, never finding the place, the unforetold aspect of grass and sky which would say to him, Here! Sit down, Sorrow. With a melancholy exasperation he continued his frantic stroll, and took pains still to preserve his life, even his comfort, seeking signs of man so that he might buy food, and being careful not to sit on a thistle. So, perceiving the House of the Salutation, he had turned his steps that way, and stopping by a brook had washed himself, and scraped away a two days’ beard, being anxious to make a good impression.

  Presumably he had done so, since the owner of the house had taken him in and nursed him. Waking from a vexed and unsatisfactory stupor to her kindness, he had felt grateful; but it irked him to find that she spoke English, and during his convalescence he had felt an increasing desire to get away as soon as the conventions of this odd situation would allow. Not that there was anything to go away
for. Every hope of possessing his sorrow had fallen off him now. During the time he lay a-bed he had been haunted by the recollection of a swarm of butterflies which had settled upon the boat as it left Rio de Janeiro. At the moment of departure they had come after it, thickly, impetuously, as bees follow the queen in the nuptial flight. Like a shower of blossoms they had settled upon deck and spar and rigging, their colours palpitating on the ship’s unlovely surface like a scatter of jewels. For two days they had remained with the boat; on the third day they were gone, drowned in sea or air, all but a dying, discolouring few, fluttering their faint wings in corners, trailing underfoot in alley-ways, stamped out in a few hours to powder and a film of death. So, on him, at his setting out, had his hopes clustered; and now were gone.

  While his body recovered slowly round the wreck of his mind he lingered, exasperated and grateful, saying to himself, Once I am up, once I can trust my legs to carry me out of eyeshot, I will go. Conveyed in the car with the calico lilies he had winced under the taunt of that wasted speed and mileage, asking himself why in heaven’s name he had volunteered for the excursion. Then, sitting alone in the car outside the church, he had known that at last, if he sat very still, still as a biddable child that sits with mouth open and eyes shut to see what somebody will send it, his sorrow would be vouchsafed to him.

  The rain fell, churning the soft road to mud, sliding over the willow-trees and trickling through the roof of the car. Its gentle insistence seemed to subdue everything to the level of earth, weighing down the houses, the trees, the ramshackle warehouses and sheds. Only the church resisted it and stood up, enlarged to a greater stature by the low horizon-line. A baroque building, festooned with stone, solemnly ornate, it looked like a ship. A windjammer with all her canvas spread, it seemed to sail upon the plain, slowly advancing upon him, bearing down on him, growing momently taller and more imposing, its enormous weight yielding smoothly to the light pressure of the following airs. It had been a shock when Angustias emerged from it, recalling it again to rooted stone. But he was not angry with her. For, sitting very quietly, his will at last unclenched, his thoughts extinguished by the falling rain, he had found himself invested in his sorrow, and had known in that absolving moment, the space of time wherein a drop of rain might hang on a willow twig, round itself into perfection and fall, how well it fitted and became him.

  It was not happiness, he repeated to himself. Nor was it peace; since peace must flower like the rainbow out of a storm, and never, since leaving the island, had his unhappiness broken its weight of immobility. If this which he now felt had been peace, the rainbow, it must have revoked the old grief, have said, as a rainbow does, Never again shall the waters cover the earth. But his grief had not receded an inch, he was not one blade of grass comforted. Whatever part of his mind was capable of happiness or comforting worked no longer. A spring had snapped. No, he told himself, walking about day after day, what I feel now is perhaps some emotion I could never have felt while I was still capable of any hope. For by the law of a man’s mind he cannot feel an emotion that is not balanced against an opposite, whose white or black is not paired with a black or white. But this is a single thing, irrelevant and complete; and being complete, as complete as death, it is sterile. Nothing will come of it, good or bad. It will not better my days, or shorten them. But it enlightens me as the light in the kingdom of Limbo enlightens the souls there—a light that knows neither rising nor setting, timeless, dim, and equable, casting no shadow.

  For more and more the sense of time left him, and the real sun, bestriding the faintly undulating, even-coloured landscape, scarcely indented his consciousness with the scalloped pattern of days. Time stretched unmeasured, monotonously embroidered with the wax and wane of daylight. Very slowly it was becoming colder, very slowly the pampas changed colour as the days shrank. The great thistles were empty of seed now and clanked together hollowly in a more determined wind. The birds had a different, scantier note, the sheep moved under a heavier fleece. He had been at the Salutation for two months and more, so much an accepted part of the household that Angustias troubled herself no longer to find employments for him that he might feel at home.

  “Ah,” she had said on an admiring sigh, one evening as they sat together. “I see you are business-like. I suppose all the English are so.”

  He looked about him, at a loss to discover what act of his had prompted this conclusion.

  “You even roll up string,” she added. And following the direction of her gaze he saw, lying beside him, neatly twisted into a wreath, a length of string that he had been playing with unknowing.

  “I have a great quantity of string, all in tangles,” she continued, her voice warm with hospitality. “Would you like some more?” And without awaiting his answer she rose and made off with her slow easy gait, limberly unrolling, a heavy woman and idle, but light on her feet as a girl, and returning with a boxful of twine, set it down before him as though, from the recesses of her experience, her intuition, her deep female resources of cupboard, she had fetched exactly the right toy to please a child.

  The ham soufflé, to be served in the arbour by Rosa wearing a light blue straw hat, had eluded the moment of performance, and now it was too late in the year for such gaieties, it must be postponed till next summer—for she hoped he would stay on till then, perhaps for ever, there seemed no reason why not; meanwhile, the string proving so successful, her ambition was whetted to produce other congenial entertainments. Rummaging at leisure through her imagination she hit upon the clocks. The House of the Salutation was almost as rich in clocks as in string; and by now the clocks were as much in need of attention. Harry, enforcing his punctuality upon a continent of mañana, and with a passion for timepieces, had bought clocks with a double impetus of duty and pleasure—alarm clocks, travelling clocks, chiming clocks, clocks combined with barometers or showing the phases of the moon; he had also bought, when such came his way, clocks with any peculiarity to commend them—clocks with one hand only, clocks with painted dials, and a clock whose weights had been founded out of a church bell possessed by the devil.

  “I have got all their keys,” she said. “For I do not lose things. I put them away.”

  The truth of this was deepeningly revealed to him when, with the ripening of his authority as a power for order, he began to accompany Angustias on her raids through cupboard, box-room, and storehouse for the things she had not lost. All his life he had lived slenderly; the abundance through which he now waded did nothing to quicken in him a desire for possessions. Indeed, at first he felt a slight moral pain that such abundance should be possible. But realising that nothing could be done about it, he fell to accepting it as a matter of course, as though it were one of the gaudier manifestations of nature, like tropical scenery. The remains of two races and two civilisations were mingled here, lying pell-mell. Lacquer fans, stirrup irons, baby-clothes, spice-boxes filled with scentless shreds and dusts, old books of devotion, advertisements from hardware manufacturers, swords, sewing-machines, flintlocks, rosaries, dog-collars, quilted petticoats, charms, and a model steam-engine were packed away with spirit-lamps, mandolines, and mouldy furs. Stuffed into the crannies of the great chests and domed travelling-trunks were packets of old letters, deeds, invoices, crumpled fiddle-music, daguerrotypes, astronomical charts, pedigrees of horses and dogs. Into this humus Angustias would dive in unflustered search, bringing to the surface whatever she felt a whim to unearth. Her memory never failed her. She would pick up a nut and say from what machine it was lacking. The recognition sufficed her, she felt no need to rescue or restore. Everything was there and everything was in her memory; as she had said, she lost nothing, she put things away. “Look,” she exclaimed, extricating a crumpled platter of green chiffon and rusty wires from a wicker bassinet filled with spurs and medicine bottles. “This is the hat I wore on my honeymoon. It looks odd now, doesn’t it?” And balancing it upon her damasked hair she looked at him serenely.

  These things have been liv
ing to her, he thought. That is why she now accepts their decay so naturally. They have fulfilled themselves and are dead. And he understood why this accumulation left his conscience untroubled. It was an accumulation, not a hoard; she raided among it as though she were stirring up dead vegetation heaped for leaf-mould. Angustias too would die. She would be put into a graveyard and labelled, a human distinction which her belongings did not claim. How did she feel about it?—that discarded from the uses of life she would be put away but not lost? The women of her race were said to be pious, and Angustias went to mass, and carried calico lilies to the Virgin. Upon this follows immortality. Yet she did not convey the aroma of religion, and it seemed to him that the immortality she looked for would be the measured earthly immortality of something put away that might be come upon at hazard, and for a moment greeted, and then securely forgotten again.

  On the heels of this reflection it occurred to him to wonder if in this country there was such a thing as valuing for probate. If there were, the House of the Salutation would be a tough nut to crack, one day. Later, seeing Angustias bent, sighing and rather inky, over a number of bills and an account book, the thought brushed his mind again. And this time it led him to think that she might be glad of a little help.

  “Yes. You will do it properly, with red ink and those lines. I will find you everything.”

  Returning with inks, a ruler, and a leather-bound folio, musty with age but blank except for one entry dated 1857, she explained that twice a year her son-in-law liked to oversee the estate accounts—a great nuisance, since he, being a town-dweller, understood nothing of country management, and continually boggled at the pliability which country management demanded.