Black Marsden

by Wilson Harris

  The bastard of the sky drew him out into a glittering world beautiful beyond dreams. A whiteness of earth which seemed so intense it became a porous fabric of infinite darkness reaching into the sky. But, all of a sudden, a hundred yards or two from his cabin he realized he had been tricked and it was snowing again.

  “I’ll get back,” he said to me. “There’s nothing to worry about. There it is … the light…. I put it there myself … in the window … in the face of my house. Let’s get there fast.”

  He travelled a hundred yards or more and stopped. Where home was, where light in the face was, no light was, no house was.

  “Extraordinary business,” Hornby said to the sky. “Where has it gone?”

  “You tricked yourself,” the bastard of the sky replied. “You thought you saw a light….”

  “I tell you it was here,” Hornby insisted.

  “Re-trace your steps, Hornby. Come this way.”

  Hornby agreed at last. “Now,” said Bastard Sky, “there it is.”

  “Thank god,” said Hornby.

  He began to make his way towards the light, his eyes glued upon it this time. But slipped. A patch of ice cracked under the snow. He was in, knee-deep.

  If Sky had let him down, now it was Creek (Hornby Creek on the map) and he was aware of the great danger in which he stood. The freezing subterranean ice-cap of water had come over the top of his boot and there were two options open to him. He could try and gain the safety of his house though to all appearances with his eye unstuck, unglued from the light, it had vanished again into the sky. Or he could light a fire in the open without delay and endeavour to thaw his foot out, dry his boot out.

  He was filled all at once with a sense of the callouses of infinity (the kiss of gloved hand upon booted foot), numb climax, freezing danger rolled into one enduring fabric as though Sky and Creek in deceiving him as reflections of many a dead mate or vanished expedition were ensnaring him into a revelation of the workshop of the gods….

  He stood upon the very rim of ghostland—one collective foot already in the grave, one legendary cabin already in the sky. Thus as he began to ascend and descend Sky and Creek he became aware that there were two Hornbys projected from him into the cosmos. One was a man drawn out of the hat of millions, so steeped in extremity and danger beyond humanity’s lot as to become a private body in the stars, quintessential solitariness, Arctic legend of soul. The other was a man standing in the boot of millions so benumbed by humanity’s lot as to die unsung, unheralded, Arctic function of non-memory, non-soul.

  Had he as private of space who had conquered the stars achieved his goal, or as the world’s forgotten boot computerized an infinite desolation and an infinite stairway into the ambiguous family of man? …

  Harp ceased his vivid and enormous and unfinished recital of the discovery of a new world. He had evoked such an unfathomable and rich correspondence between us that I felt strangely lost, strangely bewildered and yet face to face with him across a fire on the other side of the globe. “I hope,” I said, and pleaded with him across that living fire which drew us together, “you will not burn your father’s papers into a stoical wilderness.”

  Harp looked at me and I sensed the correspondence with Marsden’s sackcloth map which had been draped across a chair.

  “There,” I said, stabbing the map with a finger, “is Marsden Creek. Marsden’s legacy is everywhere.”

  “Ah,” said Harp laughing a little, “have you not answered your own question? …”

  *

  “Mr. Goodrich, sir, Mr. Goodrich,” said Mrs. Glenwearie shaking Goodrich gently. Goodrich woke but for a moment or two could not tell where he was. Mrs. Glenwearie looked distressed. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Goodrich dear, but you were crying out….”

  “I thought … where is he?”

  “Where is who?”

  Goodrich passed a drowsy hand over his eyes. “Perhaps he doesn’t exist. Perhaps I only dreamt….”

  Mrs. Glenwearie moved to a window and opened it wide to let some air in upon the lingering odour of tobacco. “Now, sir, I’ll get you a nice high tea in a little while, as soon as I’ve straightened the room a bit.” She tilted Harp’s cigarette ash into a tray.

  “He was here,” said Goodrich.

  “Mr. Goodrich dear,” said Mrs. Glenwearie gently. “I don’t understand half of the things you say. If it’s the wee gentleman in the long coat he left shortly after I got back from the butcher’s. I was very late today. And then you fell asleep for a bit.”

  Goodrich laughed and tried to make a joke of things. “I need an early night,” he said, “after this afternoon’s session.”

  “Doctor Marsden said not to leave supper this evening. What are your plans, sir?”

  “Nothing for me, thank you, Mrs. Glenwearie. I do hope my visitors aren’t proving too much of a bother.”

  “Oh no, Mr. Goodrich, don’t you worry over a thing. I manage very well. Mr. Knife is quite kind, you know. Sometimes he insists on washing up the dishes. And he’s a one for stories. He told me Doctor Marsden’s play may be in the Festival this year. I said I would go if it was.”

  “Did he indeed?” said Goodrich. “I hope it may be.” He mimicked Marsden: “Plays cost a pretty penny.”

  “I know,” said Mrs. Glenwearie. “Och, I remember as a young girl I did a bit of acting myself.” She looked both pleased and embarrassed.

  “You’ve never told me that, Mrs. Glenwearie,” Goodrich said.

  “Ah well, it wasn’t all that much. I was once Grace Darling and then again I was Haile Selassie in a church play.”

  “Haile Selassie?” Goodrich was astounded. He stared at Mrs. Glenwearie, trying vainly to imagine the transformation.

  “It was a long while back,” she told him. “And then I remember my mother being very proud when I was chosen to read Tam O’Shanter at a Burns Supper.”

  Goodrich was fascinated. “Can you remember any of it now, Mrs. Glenwearie?” he asked.

  “The whole lot,” said Mrs. Glenwearie astonishingly. “My favourite bit was:

  ‘She ventur’d forward on the light;

  And vow! Tam saw an unco sight!

  Warlocks and witches in a dance;

  Nae cotillion, brent new frae France,

  But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys and reels,

  Put life and mettle in their heels.

  A winnock-bunker in the east,

  There sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast;

  A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,

  To gie them music was his charge:

  He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,

  Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.—’”

  She stopped, ash-tray in hand, her cheeks slightly reddened, and exclaimed apologetically, “I was quite swept away there, Mr. Goodrich. You’ll have to forgive me.”

  “Not a bit of it,” said Goodrich. “I enjoyed it.”

  “It’s kind of you to say so, sir,” she told him. “But I’m afraid my style is not what it was.” She paused. “It’s all this talk of plays from Doctor Marsden and the others brought it back to my mind.”

  Goodrich was secretly moved. It seemed to him that Marsden’s presence had fired in some degree everyone with whom he had come in contact. He was suddenly curious to know his housekeeper’s real feeling about Marsden.

  “What do you make of Doctor Marsden?” he asked softly. “Do you like him, Mrs. Glenwearie?”

  Mrs. Glenwearie looked away from him and out through one of the windows. “It’s not for me to say, sir,” she said. “But since you’ve asked me I would say he’s a very unusual gentleman. My dear mother would have called him a kind of hutherer.”

  Goodrich was baffled. “What is a hutherer?” he asked.

  “It’s just,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “och I don’t rightly know how to explain it. Just a hutherer, that’s all.” She was silent for a moment then became very brisk. “Mr. Goodrich, dear, I’m forgetting your tea. I’ll go and get it.
” The subject was obviously closed.

  Goodrich felt somewhat lost. He felt he should say something in a different vein. “How is your niece?” he asked. “I trust she’s better now.”

  “Poor lass,” she said. “She’s a bit better this summer but it’s been a great worry for my sister and her husband. In fact my sister’s ailing herself.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, Mrs. Glenwearie, any financial help or anything of that sort, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Goodrich. It’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Glenwearie and bustled from the room, taking with her Grace Darling, Haile Selassie and Tam O’Shanter.

  7

  The incongruous triggers of the day—comic and serious—evoked an involuted spectre in Goodrich’s mind and he dreamt that night he stood at a wall overlooking a wide and deep terrain. The light was uncertain. It may have been close to nightfall or it may have been the approaches of dawn. He had come there to meet someone he had known in some buried or vague connection a long time ago. Someone who had been blind, a blind woman he surmised. He himself at this moment could not see her because of the peculiar light in which he was steeped. But he felt all of a sudden that their positions were reversed and the blind woman could see him; something had happened to her across the years since they had last met in an underground of lives. As the feeling entered his mind she arrived and spoke to him. He could not make out entirely what she was saying but her voice rang in his ears with a new and remarkable tenderness which warned him he must keep a secret. That was all he could make out from her words. What secret? he asked but she had already vanished. It was a deeply puzzling dream, and yet it left him with an extraordinary revitalized sensation, a validation of identity.

  As though a mysterious cycle of contrasting spaces peculiar to time had come full circle at last. He was now seen for whom and what he was in space. Seen by some intimate blind spectre or caveat of history whose judgement was no longer blind. Seen through—or in spite of—himself.

  Goodrich made a note in his diary about his dream:

  “I had a strong sense of space in my dream. How should I put it? Let me put it perhaps in this way. Space is a symbol or apparition of self-conscious properties and of human and cosmic desert. At certain times in one’s life the human or cosmic desert personalizes itself! The question is—what does this personalization mean? I would hazard a guess that it is a way of bringing to one’s attention the hubris of self-consciousness, the hubris embodied in a ‘technology’ of space. In a sense, therefore, the personalization of the human or cosmic desert in one’s dreams is a kind of ironic acquittal from the charge of hubris. I say acquittal in that a motif appears and asserts itself in the dream to define and redefine the nature of community beyond conformity to a status of hubris. Acquittal, therefore, from hubris is nothing more than the revitalized life of the imagination to re-assess blocked perspectives and to begin to digest as well as liberate contrasting figures….”

  That morning he joined Marsden in the sitting-room filled with a most curious and uncanny tide of energy. Something had validated him. It seemed an irrational conviction and yet it persisted: a sensation of grotesque yet deeply significant transfigured relationships, forgotten relationships which possessed ironic powers to return and acquit him not only of hubris but of forgetfulness: despised or forgotten vocations within the muse of history.

  It was stimulating and sobering. Indeed the very stimulation was a caution. In describing or gloating upon his dream, had he not partially betrayed it and succumbed to an order of self-congratulation or inflation?

  As he confronted Marsden the question assailed him: Marsden’s phenomenal expression of world-weary conductor, an indefinable shroud or pallor (so it seemed to Goodrich in the wake of his own stimulation or tide of energies). For in the shroud Marsden appeared to wear this morning Goodrich sensed a paradoxical feud as well as debt to nameless and intimate resources planted in his dream. Over the past months he had given clothing, food, money to Marsden but it was Marsden who symbolized the Bank from which he had drawn rather than the beneficiary to whom he had given. He was indebted to Marsden as the most signal contradiction in his life—a shared community of goods and dreams. An enigmatic historical bank and beneficiary within whom the very act of giving became a receiving, a dangerous hypnotic legacy at times as well as a revitalized caveat of originality and community.

  “Is this true?” asked Goodrich.

  “What?” said Marsden. “Is what true?”

  “Oh forgive me—it’s nothing at all—I was thinking aloud.”

  Marsden laughed and Goodrich felt sudden anger: anger at the shroud or pallor of history to which he was indebted in forms beyond tabulation or classification. It was one of Marsden’s agents or mistresses—he thought perversely—who had conducted the dream scene by the wall….

  “Lazy bitch,” said Marsden.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It’s my turn to ask forgiveness, Goodrich. I too have been thinking aloud. Jennifer should have been down early. She can be a fiend at times….” There was a calculated venom in his voice and Goodrich’s attention was drawn to a nearby table on which lay an African hunting knife in its sheath. “Ah,” said Marsden, “that’s Knife’s knife. The one with which he will kill me.”

  “Kill you?”

  “In the theatre.”

  Lucky Knife, thought Goodrich, and an almost irresistible desire tickled both his hand and his heart. Irresistible desire to unsheath the African hunting knife, lift the shaft to his chest and turn the point towards Marsden. Then stab. What a river of blood would flow down Marsden’s vest, what scarlet bank of fanaticism in sackcloth and ashes. What scarlet river in black-vested camera. What a flag of joy, of release, of revolution, of liberation. What a hand would be his to stab the very bank and beneficiary of loves.

  Marsden reached forward and covered Goodrich’s hand with his. “What about a drink, old boy? The bottle on the mantel-shelf is empty. Whisky cheers one up.”

  “I felt quite cheerful this morning. I confess I am now depressed.”

  “My dear Goodrich….”

  “I dreamt …,” he stopped.

  “Dreamt? What did you dream?”

  “I thought you knew. You seem to know everything.”

  “Goodrich! Me know everything?” He laughed. “Tell me your dream.”

  Goodrich recounted his dream of Marsden’s blind mistress and the verdict of acquittal….

  “Ah—a good dream but good dreams are also dangerous as you know yourself. You need to guard against a tendency to over-compensate….”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “For example, how do you see me this morning?”

  “I see you in relation to my dream—I find myself indebted to you.”

  “Ah! quite so. You have given me money, yet you are indebted to me.”

  “Schizophrenic, isn’t it?”

  “Goodrich! Dear fellow. What a word. But perhaps you are right. We are all schizophrenic in some degree or other. In your dream of acquittal there exists, for example, a mysterious court, a mysterious dawn or a mysterious sunset. Depends on how you relativize or relate the two. But as you can see now that isn’t so easy and you may be overwhelmed by what I call myself over-compensation ritual—over-compensated sunset or over-compensated dawn. You start out in the first place with a feeling of over-stimulation and then you begin to feel cheated, miserable, drained on one hand, or endangered out of all proportion on the other. You are steeped in an over-compensated sunset (the end of an age with its pollution symbols etc.) or over-compensated sunrise (the dawn of an age with its revolutionary overdrafts etc.).” Doctor Marsden was laughing now with the air of an inimitable clown, philosophical and therapeutic masquerade.

  “No wonder, Goodrich,” he said, “that you project it all on me: as many project it all on you: in your eyes at this moment I am seen as one acquainted with all your fears, your hopes, your dreams; everything I say a
ppears to anticipate or express your innermost dreams. No wonder I have become the one who taps your telephone, spies on you, reads your diaries, who threatens, in fact, to rob you of a private existence. You may shout on the rooftops about this or that enemy but it’s really a secret power of choice which you fear to lose … or to surrender of your own accord for the good of the state to me or someone like me (you will rationalize it in different ways according to your temperament).”

  Knife came into the room at this juncture. There was a toothpick in his mouth and he spoke in muffled rude parody of Marsden’s head of state. “Let there be a grave economic landslide or projection in the wind, and everyone believes a totalitarian monster is born.”

  Goodrich failed to see the joke and took him seriously. “Distinctions and choices and sanctuaries exist,” he muttered, “in the civilized world anyway within law and economics and other institutions, the church, the university etc. etc.”

  “How right you are,” said Marsden. “The sanctuary is so perfect, each area or discipline so self-sufficient, that over-compensation ritual is the most natural thing in the world. A natural enlargement of one thing at the expense of the other. For some the U.S.A. is an economic sanctuary. For others South Africa is a political sanctuary. For others Cuba a revolutionary sanctuary.”

  “The law is a sanctuary,” said Goodrich.