Mr. Fortune

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  It was rolled up in a minute or two, the familiar ground, shrivelled like the parched scroll of the judgment day hymn. He had never surmised that a car could go so fast; but with the flicker of attention that acknowledged this he put it by also, feeling neither wonder nor apprehension. The headlights were on, smashing the faint remnants of day. Beyond the path they scythed so scornfully nothing had any validity, a continent was no more than the file of grasses and weeds that fringed the unrolling track.

  At first the car had flinched and swayed on the rough surface; now they were on a metalled road, a smooth rod that rushed towards them, bearing its tribute of obscurity, delivering it up to their light, vanishing under them, a momentary show of reality was blown out like a bubble at that impact. It was as though the car and the road together made up some infallible machine. Sometimes a geometrical arm of light reared up from the darkness before them, to be snuffed out and to reappear as the headlights of an approaching car; and that too would rush upon them, and be blown out by the wind of their passing.

  It would be best, it seemed, to go on like this for ever, existing henceforth as some small determined part of a machine, a bolt or screw that gliding back and forth on the life of a piston is carried across the Atlantic. He stared ahead until his sight seemed only the closely fitting tube through which rushed the rod of the inexhaustible road. His body, in comfort, warm and well-sprung, complied with the oscillation of the car. The noise of the engine wound his hearing upon it, as though silk were being wound upon a reel. It was not until Alfredo spoke that his mind awakened, connecting the speeding car with the flesh and blood that guided it, sitting scornfully languid and detached beside him. But he had no time to wonder, for he must listen to the words.

  “McGregor the gardener has a story, Señor, that might interest you. He told it to me when I was a child. I forgot it, as a childish thing. But finding you in our house has recalled it to me. This is the story. It appears that in Scotland there was a farmer, a thriving and prosperous man. But one day, by some ill chance, a creature, not moral, a goblin, as one would say, arrived at the farm and could not be driven out. I think McGregor called it a Brown. An English name, is it not? This Brown brought evil and mischance with it. From the day it came, nothing prospered. The cattle died, the crops failed, the people of the house sickened, everything went to ruin. Except the Brown. The Brown thrived, and grew fat, and lived idle. It had no care, the interloper! Things at the farm went from bad to worse. Still nothing ailed the Brown, and nothing, not prayers, nor threats, nor incantations, could drive it away. At last...”

  There was a cry from the back of the car.

  “Look, look! The fireworks. Ah!”

  At some unknown distance a rocket had soared up, and exploded in a bouquet of stars, that now on a languorous curve turned to earth again, and floated down the sky. Another sprang out, as though to embrace it, blossoming where the first blossoms had been, diving its shaken petals down to sift and mingle among the other’s withering fires.

  The road vanished before them.

  “I have switched the headlights off that you may see better,” said Alfredo, over his shoulder, as though speaking indulgently to a child. Lowering his voice again, he continued,

  “At last, as I was telling you, the farmer decided that since the Brown would not budge, he must. His few poor cattle were driven to the new farm, the furniture was carted, the last loaded wagon stood at the gate, ready to drive off. Then he heard a voice. ‘We’re all going,’ it said. ‘And I’m going too.’ And there, on the last wagon, sat the Brown, smiling and rubbing its hands. This is the story that comes into my mind, Señor, as I drive you in my car to see the fireworks.”

  Now that its glaring eyes were shut, the car had become an animal, swift and low to the ground, a nocturnal beast of prey. Or like some furious fish it darted through the semi-darkness. So many rockets had gone up that the colour of the sky was changed, livid and thick like turbid water. Already they could see the distant town, its domes and factory chimneys silhouetted against the puffs of Bengal lights.

  “You have no comment to make on my little story? It does not interest you?”

  “Why do you hate me like this?”

  “Why do I hate you?”

  The car leaped forward as though it had sighted its quarry, so swiftly and infallibly stalked, and an ascending rocket let loose a hive of writhing golden serpents.

  “So you have perceived that I hate you? You have been a little dense, Englishman. But you come of a stupid race. However, you admit that I hate you. Good. We will now go further. We will discuss my reasons. I hate you because you are an interloper, an abuser of hospitality, a leech. You arrive from nowhere. You fall sick, a convenient sickness. A household of women runs to and fro, attending on you. They wash your feet, they pick the lice out of your beard, they weep over their Jesus. Presently, all in good time, you deign to recover. You grow strong, strong enough to walk about the property, counting the cattle, measuring the acres. But you are not strong enough to walk off. Then you attend to the house a little. You pry through the cupboards, you acquaint yourself with everything, and you advise that this should be mended, and that altered. Then, since you are prudent, you look into the accounts. But there you overreach yourself, my friend. For there are others not so blind as an infatuated old woman.”

  The car was wholly an animal now. Soft, warm, and regular, he could feel its breath patting the back of his neck. His hand tried the catch of the door, but its mechanism baffled him. The voice went on, low and slighting, a film on the noise of the engine.

  “Yes, you were too clever there, or too complacent. You should not have advertised so soon your ownership of the Salutation. Those accounts were prettily drawn up, one could see the practised hand. For I suppose this is not the first time that you have played this game. How nice, my mother said, that Mamaçita should have found so good a bailiff. And unpaid, too. But, Englishman, you have not only women to deal with. You have to deal with me.”

  “To deal with a child. That sometimes requires patience.”

  She spoke the few words easily, so easily that they might have seemed casually spoken had it not been for the skill of utterance that poised them, as the violinist poises the first notes of his entry into the concerto.

  “I am not a child.”

  “Indeed you are a child. Only a child would deny it so passionately. What is more, you are my grandchild. Were it not for that I should not have borne with you for so long. But since you will not admit that you are a child let me remind you of something else—though sometimes you seem too ready to remember it. You are my heir, my direct heir. When I die the property of the Salutation will come to you, whether your father is living or no.”

  It was as though a fish had leapt in the darkness. But the boy had not stirred, his finger-tips resting on the wheel, his eyes not flickering from their watch of the darkness ahead, where the rockets soared and broke and melted on their languorous curve.

  “Remark, I do not threaten you. I say plainly that the House of the Salutation shall be yours. But while I live it is mine; mine to direct, mine to guard. And I do not choose that it shall come to you sullied with a fault of hospitality.”

  “Hospitality!”

  The voice that had been so cold and certain, as though in its insults repeating something known by heart and negligible, was awakened now; and under the increment of passion it had lost its infallibility, plunged from word to word, rocked, as the car did, shuddering away from the rough ground at the side of the road.

  “And when it comes to me I suppose I shall inherit with it a guest, a pensioner, a lapdog that cannot be kicked out. A family servant, grey-haired, faithful to you for a lifetime, can be turned away, for hospitality does not forbid that. No! Hospitality demands it, or the guest does. And I—I with this place in my blood, loving it all my life long, proud of it—I do not matter! For I am only a child of the house, hospitality is more than me.”

  “True, my child. Hos
pitality is more than a servant, more than you or I. It is a matter of honour.”

  “God, what an honour! To have it told through the countryside that a stranger lives at the House of the Salutation as though it were his own. A tramp, an interloper, a sycophant! But he stays there, while servant and grandson are sent packing, because he pleases its mistress, because he has deluded her, exploited her, bewitched her. That is what they will say. Doña Angustias and her gigolo!”

  “Mrs. Bailey, and the man of her husband’s race.”

  She paused, as though in saying this she had said everything. Neither hearer spoke, and the noise of their journey swept over the place where her words had been. Just so, he remembered, had the dusk swallowed up his vision of that other steadfast one, the wooden, velvet-petticoated doll in the church, who, being so old, sad, and worldly, had seemed to him the representative of profane love. And forgetting alike the comfortable Angustias of every day and the termagant who this very day had so imperiously constrained him, he waited for the doll, come to life and sitting at the back of the car unseen, to speak once more. For it must be she. Long steadfastness, long neglect, the long-husbanded spark of that tragic worldly love that knows how, sooner or later, the body must fail, betraying its spark of love and guarded memory to oblivion—only these could speak so, teaching the voice such proud patience and simplicity.

  “I speak no longer to you, my child. You cannot understand, now, what I say. It is to him I speak. I tell him that for the sake of his race and the sake of my husband the House of the Salutation shall shelter him as long as he chooses to stay and I am mistress of it. I do not know where he came from, and I do not ask. I do not ask even what he was seeking and whether he has found it. If Harry had been alive he could have asked, but it is no business of mine. Once, long ago, an Englishman came to the house while Harry was away, asking for shelter. I took him in, I said to him, Though my husband is away, you are his guest. Be welcome. The next morning, very early, he disappeared, taking with him a horse and money which he had stolen from us. But I had done rightly. Now I say to this one, Though my husband is dead, you are his guest. I tell him too—he will not remember, he could not know when it was—that there was a moment when I thought, I cannot keep him here. It was no fault of his, but he reminded me of what is past. But with us, who are old, it is small blame to feel such impulses, and no merit to overcome them. The heart is like an old dog. It barks, and lies down again....”

  Listening, he had forgotten that his hand still rested upon the catch of the door. Suddenly the spring yielded, and the door opened, wrenched back by the wind of their passage. A thrust of icy air surged into the car, and as though they too came in, the fireworks flashed with a violent reality. The incoming air was cold and heavy as a surge of water. It seemed about to break the flimsy box of glass and fabric. Like the thrust of a wave, impelled by all the weight of the real world outside, it drove in through the wound of the opened door, pinning the car to a standstill, toppling it over.

  Disaster had been implicit in that rigid violence, though what had seemed the moment of death had been indeed the moment of waking—a rupture so annihilating that for some time he lay motionless with closed eyes, not daring to put his senses to the test. Yet what remained most actual of the dream was the last sentence Angustias had spoken; or rather she who, in the guise and with the voice of Angustias, was the doll out of the church, the doll who had once been a tree in Spain, and then, in a first widowhood, a timber darkened with Atlantic salt, and then, widowed even from that existence, hewn into human shape to suit the needs of man’s soul, and by man’s soul finally forsaken. The running sap, the tears of ocean, the tears of man—she was dried of all these. But loyal still to some integral pity that nourishes the universe she had borrowed flesh from his dream, and spoken.

  “The heart is like an old dog. It barks, and lies down again.”

  Strange words, fast shrivelling into something meaningless, discolouring and growing stiff and brittle, like some frond of seaweed pulled from the salt and laid open to the execution of air. Already they were little more to him than the end of a dream, at every reiteration of his mind losing more of what had seemed their deep intent and gracious purpose. Our dreams should warn us of ourselves, he thought, slowly acclimatizing his eyes to the grey light of morning; for they, more obviously than ourselves, are at the mercy of chance. A nothing deflects them. The end of my dream, that seemed so terrible and yet so full of dark consolations, may well have been spun out of a draught from the window, the bark of the old bitch in her kennel. And now, rousing his mind, he looked back with little but curiosity upon the dream, admiring its coherence, its deference to what might have been. As far as the rhea he could trace it back. And he recollected how, a few days before, Gregorio the shepherd had spoken of shooting a rhea. There was the seed from which, wafted hither and thither in its growth by accidents of body and mind untraceable, the dream had sprung. A dream spanning two days—and perhaps it had been devised in five minutes between sleeping and waking.

  The day lightened, the house began to live. But this was a real day, the true cocks crowed, he would not, for all her eccentricities, hear Quita polishing the passage before breakfast. And though, even to the time when he got up and began to dress, the dream was present in his mind, it was beginning to disintegrate, so that, recollecting fireworks or Alfredo jumping from the falling palm-tree, it required an effort of mind to restore these incidents to their sequence. It only waited, his dream, for an exterior contact to vanish. At a glance, a word, from some one whose dream it was not it would be gone, snapped like a bubble.

  From step to step of the stairs it dallied, just as a bubble does, bouncing intact, lightly rolling to its doom. In the sitting-room the sight of the gun-cupboard gave it a momentary corroboration, but with the same glance he saw Angustias, who turned to him with an inquiry as to how he had slept. So, every morning, she would inquire, the anxiety in her voice the last vestigial remnant of his illness, a something added to the House of the Salutation that would be preserved with all the other relics, long after its justification was lost.

  “I slept very well, thank you.”

  In her hand was a letter, which she laid upon her bureau, thoughtfully smoothing it.

  “I have had a letter from my grandson.”

  “Alfredo?” he heard himself say.

  “Yes, Alfredo. He is coming here for a little visit, inviting himself. He comes here whenever he can, poor child. He loves the place.”

  But even if there had been words it was too late to speak. For, as he had foreseen, the bubble was snapped, the dream broken and gone. Too late now to cry out a warning against what threatened her and himself, and this other one, already aimed towards them. And as a bubble, in the moment of its dissolution, utters a little gasp, a soft sigh of relief, as it were, at being ended, he felt, exhaling from him, a sigh of thankfulness that a responsibility was lifted from the uneasy soul, dismissed again for a while into its limitations of flesh and blood.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1927, 1932 by the Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Introduction copyright © 2001 by Adam Mars-Jones

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Saul Leiter, Kutztown, 1948; © Saul Leiter, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 1893–1978.

  [Mr. Fortune’s maggot]

  Mr. Fortune / by Sylvia Townsend Warner ; introduction by Adam Mars-Jones.

  p. cm. — (New York review books classics)

  Previously published as: Mr. Fortune’s maggot.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-458-6 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PR6045.A812M74 2011

  823’.914—dc23


  2011022234

  eISBN 978-1-59017-403-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014