Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  Mitchell went and switched on more light. Rosalia and I looked inquiringly at each other but didn’t say anything. Dailey shuffled over to a table and poured out some whisky. He was now exactly as he’d been earlier, the boozy bleary-eyed old charlatan of the arcade and nothing more. ‘Now ye’ll leave this entirely to me, the pair of ye,’ he wheezed. ‘Don’t forget now.’

  There was silence for a minute or two and then it was broken by the sound of at least two cars arriving noisily. I heard no ringing or knocking, only some banging about and loud commanding voices. Then our door was flung open, and they came in – Major Jorvis, tremendous in one of those mackintoshes that almost clash like armour; Lord Randlong, bulky and smiling in a raglan tweed overcoat; Steglitz, his egg face wearing two or three strips of sticking-plaster, pale and glittering with malicious triumph.

  ‘You’re all under arrest,’ said Major Jorvis.

  Dailey drank some whisky, then stared at Jorvis above the top of his glass. ‘Ye’re under some misapprehension, Major Jorvis.’

  ‘You know my name, do you?’ said Jorvis sharply.

  ‘I do, I do, Major,’ said Dailey in a wheedling tone. ‘Maybe you and your friends would like a drink of whisky, after your cold long drive – ’

  ‘Certainly not. And if you know my name, then you ought to know I didn’t bring two police cars out here – and I’ve six good men with me – to drink whisky with you people. I’m placing all four of you under arrest.’

  ‘I don’t think y’are, Major Jorvis.’

  And then I saw the other Dailey, the very different man who’d been answering our questions, come through again, like the sun through a cloud. Strange power was there, blazing in his eyes as he stared defiantly.

  I looked at Jorvis to see what possible resistance the blustering empty fool could make to such a show of power, so fierce a will. But then I saw, I knew without doubt, this wasn’t Major Jorvis. Somebody else had taken over, to oppose one show of power with another, one fierce high will with another that was its equal. Nothing more was said; the conflict had passed beyond words. Nobody moved for at least a minute. It was as if two swords, in the hands of masters, were crossed and locked, and nothing could move except the quivering light at their points. For my part I couldn’t have spoken or even stirred, I felt emptied of will. I couldn’t have even wished that whoever was staring now through Jorvis’s eyes would soon be overcome.

  Then Mitchell moved. He stood by Dailey’s side, and I saw his long, lazily humorous face begin to change, to sharpen, to focus itself, to reveal purpose and power. His eyes were widely-opened now, luminous, compelling. Nobody spoke, nobody stirred. The room was hardly there, just three invisible swords and a trance.

  Randlong broke the spell. He groaned, the colour draining out of his face. ‘I’m not well,’ he muttered, groping for a chair. ‘Warned you, Steglitz – shouldn’t have let you bring me up here – get me a doctor.’

  But Steglitz was now claiming Jorvis’s attention. ‘This is how it is,’ he shouted angrily. ‘Entirely mismanaged. No insight – no finesse – no subtlety. Cars filled with policemen – imbeciles. This is the last time, Major Jorvis, the very last time. Now we must go above your head in Security. This is how it is. My friend, Lord Randlong – ’

  His friend, Lord Randlong, however, was moaning for a doctor from the depths of the armchair into which he’d collapsed. Ignoring Steglitz, Major Jorvis, his bumbling old self again, after taking a look at Randlong, went to the door to ask for help in getting him out. I looked at Dailey and Mitchell. Dailey was once again the reprobate old fortune-teller, helping himself to whisky. Mitchell, looking exactly as I’d seen him the first time we met, was lighting one of the cheroots he liked to smoke. Randlong was carried out, and Steglitz, still complaining, went waddling out too, without a glance at us. But Dailey, who’d said something I couldn’t catch to Rosalia, stopped Major Jorvis from following them.

  ‘Major Jorvis now,’ he said. ‘Before ye go, here’s Miss Arnaldos would like a quick word with ye.’

  Rosalia went towards him. ‘Major Jorvis, there are some lawyers in Sydney who are doing some work for me. I talked to them the day before yesterday. You know them. They know you, and don’t like you. Now I could sue Steglitz tomorrow for keeping me in a locked room. And if there’s any more from you about arresting anybody here, I’ll turn those lawyers on to you – ’

  ‘Oh – ye wouldn’t do that to poor Major Jorvis,’ said Dailey. ‘He’s only trying to do his duty – ’

  ‘I’ll sue him in every court in Australia,’ said Rosalia, well into the part, ‘if it costs me a million dollars.’

  ‘Go on now, Major Jorvis,’ said Dailey. ‘Get your friend, Lord Randlong, to a doctor as soon as ye can. Meanwhile, I’ll talk her out of it – she’ll not harm a hair of your head – I’ll talk her out of it. Go on, Major Jorvis. Good night to ye – an’ drive easy down the mountain road.’

  If Jorvis had anything to say, he didn’t say it. Two or three minutes later, we could hear the cars moving off. Rosalia and I were talking to each other by that time, but keeping our voices low, so I overheard Dailey tell Mitchell that it had been a close thing that time and that he himself had been over-confident and careless, an old fault of his.

  ‘I did what you told me to do,’ Rosalia began, to Dailey.

  ‘Ye did, m’dear. A nice little performance. Ye’ll have no more trouble from him – ’

  ‘You mean the real one,’ said Rosalia. ‘Not that other one who was suddenly there – it was terrifying – ’ She stopped, and looked from Dailey to Mitchell, but they said nothing. ‘Can’t you tell us what that was about? And stop pretending to be a drunken old Irishman. Look – I’ll turn most of the lights off again, if that’ll help.’ She came back sounding quite maternal. ‘There – it’s just as it was before. Now then.’

  ‘Wait a moment now,’ said Dailey. ‘Keep still and be quiet. Don’t ask questions. I’m tired. So I’ll do this my own way.’ He was silent for a little while. This time I didn’t look at him. ‘The world in this coming age of Aquarius,’ he began slowly and very quietly, ‘may come under the influence of Saturn or Uranus. If one, then not the other. Here there’s a difference, a conflict, between what we’ll call thrones, principalities, powers, dominions, between spirits and disembodied intelligences, between men – for they’re still men – invisible and free of time, men visible and in time. Masters and servants, in sphere within sphere, level below level, give and take commands. One great design clashes with the other. What is invisible and bodiless moves the visible and embodied like a piece on a chessboard. But the game is in five dimensions. Very complicated, but then it’s a very complicated universe we’re in – even this little corner of it. Mitchell, I’m tired – I needn’t tell you why – perhaps you could tell these children anything else they ought to know.’

  ‘I can’t project for them,’ said Mitchell. ‘And there was something you wanted to show them, remember.’

  ‘The Saturnian Chain, yes,’ said Dailey. ‘You’ve helped us to destroy a few links in it. But now see how much is left. You’ll have to be patient. Keep still, keep quiet – look into the dark there – watch now.’

  As before I felt as if I was drifting away into sleep and yet kept alert in the centre of this drift and dreaminess. At last, after what seemed a long time, though it can have been only a few minutes, a great globe gradually took shape and colour in the darkness. It turned slowly, so many delicate blues and greens and browns all faintly luminous, our own beautiful earth. Then across the turning continents, now easily recognised, went continuous flashes of red fire linking places where it seemed to burn white-hot or pulsate in crimson and orange. I had time to notice one line streaking down from the United States to Brazil and Argentina, another running from Central Europe through Egypt to East Africa, another through Central Africa, another from England and France down through West Africa towards the Cape.

  ‘Saturn over the Water,’ said Dailey very quietly.
‘There you have the lines, the pattern, the size of it.’ As he spoke the image of the globe began to fade. ‘With men of power and influence working for it, and behind them, their masters, thrones and dominions, forces and intelligences, beyond your imagination or scope of belief. But so have we, as you might be ready to understand by this time.’ As he struggled out of his chair, and we got up too, he became old Pat Dailey of the resort arcade again. ‘I’m old and tired and go to me bed now. Me friend Mitchell will show ye to yours – for it’s too late for ye to go tonight – an’ while he’s doing that he’ll give ye a bit of a small message I have for ye. Now then, young people’ – he had one hand on Rosalia’s shoulder now, the other on mine, and he was peering and grinning at us and giving us more than a whiff of whisky and musty careless old age – ‘I’m saying goodbye to ye – for ye’ll be down the mountain in the morning before I’m out of me bed. Now d’ye think ye’ll recognise me next time we meet? Ye do? I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.’ And he shuffled away.

  We watched him go, not saying anything for some moments after he’d gone. Rosalia, as I found out afterwards, felt as I did, that somebody enormous and quite incomprehensible to us had just walked out of the room, somebody who, so to speak, jiggled this Pat Dailey character on the end of a finger at us, to amuse himself or for reasons we couldn’t understand. I’ve simply not been able to do him justice. I don’t think I’ve been able even to suggest the impression he made on us, the way he made us feel towards the end that the whole of Pat Dailey was just a small part of him deliberately performing, often overdoing it. But not overdoing it just for fun, we decided afterwards, but to make us feel that what we took to be the whole of life was only a thin section of it, that even here, in this so-called real life, there’s a charade element, and that behind our reality there’s another deeper reality and behind that another and another and another.

  Rosalia said she wanted some more coffee now and perhaps another sandwich, so we returned to the back room, which had a cheerful kitchen atmosphere and wasn’t associated in our minds with projections and visions and duels of mysterious forces and wills. Sitting round the table again, we found it easy to talk freely to Mitchell.

  ‘I wish you’d tell us who you are,’ Rosalia said to him.

  ‘I have told you, both of you,’ he replied, grinning. ‘I used to be in the shipping business – ’

  ‘Oh – shucks!’ Rosalia drank her coffee, then looked at him again. ‘Did you – either of you – give Lord Randlong that pain he had?’

  ‘No. That was his heart. He shouldn’t have come up here. But of course that struggle we had didn’t help. But we’re not killers – we don’t work that way.’

  ‘Then you didn’t make Nadia Slatina send that car off the road – to kill Merlan-Smith and Giddings?’

  ‘No. She did it herself. She didn’t care any more. This is the weakness of the Saturnian method – all control and authority. Where there’s no love, there’s no loyalty.’

  ‘What about Major Jorvis?’ I asked. ‘Are we through with him? And if so, is it because something decisive happened in that struggle of wills? Or is it because of what Rosalia said to him afterwards?’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was talking about – really,’ said Rosalia.

  ‘It was both. A challenge on two different levels,’ said Mitchell. ‘But of course the Jorvis who defied Dailey – you saw him – wasn’t really Jorvis at all. We hadn’t expected that. But they do it, we do it.’

  ‘What happened to Steglitz,’ I said, ‘when he suddenly began shouting at Jorvis?’

  ‘Just reacting after a defeat,’ said Mitchell, ‘though he didn’t really know exactly what had happened. He couldn’t blame his masters so he turned on Jorvis. But they’ve done with Steglitz, I think. I thought so at Charoke. His is the kind of cleverness that won’t let a man have any humility. He’s been suffering badly from hubris – ’

  ‘And I’ll bet that’s a word used every day in New Zealand shipping circles,’ I said. Mitchell only grinned.

  Rosalia stood up. ‘I want to smell some fresh air before I go to bed. Oh – gosh – I’ve just remembered. Our bags are miles away – in that car we left by the rain forest. I’ve nothing to wear.’

  ‘You’ll have to wear me.’ But I muttered this close to her ear as we all went to the door.

  The storm had rolled everything away but the stars. There were millions of them, from low-hung distinct twinkling lights to the illimitable arch of silver dust. The air was cool and fresh. Rosalia and I stood close together, our hands tightly clasped. Mitchell leant against the doorpost.

  ‘If you want to stay out for a while,’ said Mitchell in his most casual manner, ‘then I’d better tell you now that if you go through that door to the right, in the back room, you’ll find somewhere to sleep – there’s even something that looks nearly like a bathroom. Now about that message to you that Dailey mentioned – you remember? Well, it’s like this. Now you know more than most people do – all but a few of us – about Saturn over the Water. You’ve some notion of the size and strength of it. This country isn’t important now. But think of South America. Think of Africa – where I’m going soon. Now I know – I’ve heard you on the subject – you’re in love, you want some ordinary life together. We can’t pull you out of it. We don’t work like that. But Dailey says – it’s his message, remember – you both have something, and you’ve been told roughly what it amounts to, that we can use again.’

  He waited a moment. I could feel Rosalia pressing her nails into my palm, as if she was warning me against anything else Mitchell might say.

  ‘And he told me to tell you – for he can see images of possibilities sometimes, because they already exist in their own place – that if, wherever you might be, a tall black man wearing a pink headdress comes to see you – he might be an emir or chief from Northern Nigeria – then you’ll know, without being told, we believe you could help us again. That was Dailey’s message. It doesn’t need any reply. Just remember, that’s all. Good night.’

  We didn’t stay out very long; the night turned cold on us. We exchanged whispers about what had happened, both of us still haunted by those images – the desolated continents, the dying hemisphere – the turning globe with its Saturnian chains of fire, its red pulsating wounds. We stood there wondering, close to the edge of the invisible, the unknown, and so half afraid, half jubilant. Two people not sure of anything, but hopeful. Two on a mountain somewhere, we didn’t quite know where. But it was in starlight.

  End of Tim Bedford’s Story

  Epilogue

  SPOKEN BY HENRY SULGRAVE

  Well, now that you’ve read it you’ll understand what I meant, the other day, when I said how obstinate he’d been, refusing to write a final section to round off the narrative. You remember I said I’d have to do something about it, more or less along these lines. They drove back to Sydney, where Rosalia persuaded Joe Farne and Barsac to return to Uramba and take charge of the Institute. Tim deducted the fare back to England from what he had left of Isabel’s money, then insisted upon Joe’s taking the rest of it. Tim and Rosalia took a big jet plane from Sydney and then ran straight into trouble – personal, not air trouble. I’ve never made that kind of journey but apparently it doesn’t lend itself to making up quarrels properly. They had words, as people say, at Fiji. At Canton Island, both hot and sticky and irritable, they really lost their tempers. They were cool and polite at Honolulu, wasting an enormous moon, and Tim drank rather too much and Rosalia went off and cried in the ladies’ lavatory. In San Francisco, even cooler and politer, Rosalia said she must see some friends and Tim said he must visit a waterfront bar he’d been told about. But fortunately, as she explained afterwards, Rosalia’s friends almost dragged her to this same waterfront bar, where she was able to pull a rather tight and truculent Tim out of a dangerous disagreement with three sailors. Seeing that he was in such an ugly mood, as she also explained afterwards, she allowed him to force her into a taxi and then in
to a motel – though each had booked an hotel room elsewhere – where they spent a wakeful night as Mr and Mrs Pink of Surfers’ Paradise, and Tim, in the longest and most eloquent speech he’d ever made to her, told her exactly why he couldn’t live without her and why he couldn’t marry her, even pretending for about ten idiotic minutes that he was married already. This was what the quarrel had been about, of course.

  After she’d agreed with him that he wasn’t the sort of man who could be expected to marry all those oil wells, refineries, tankers, millions of dollars, they flew to New York. There, after astonishing arrangements he never did understand, they got married, attended by Sam Harnberg and Marina Nateby, two people I’d like to have met again in his story. You may remember that when I first got to know Tim, his wife was away, but she came back before I’d left my Cotswold pub and I spent a good deal of time with them both. Rosalia’s a splendid girl – magnificent to look at and full of life and fire and fun – and I’d say on the whole far more attractive and lovable than he makes her appear to be. But she told me, in front of him, laughing at him but not without a touch of seriousness, that because he’s English and she’s a foreigner, and he’d been writing to be read by other English, he leaves out all his advances to her and just puts in all her advances to him, as if he was just letting himself be chased, and that even when he was shaking her in her studio, pretending to despise her, she knew then, otherwise she’d never have taken him to that villa outside Lima. She’s certainly a very sensible girl. She takes from her fortune every year the exact equivalent of what he makes from his painting. All the rest is spent either on the Institute at Uramba or the new Arnaldos Art Foundation, for which she buys – Tim often tells her – a good deal of charlatanry and messy junk. They still quarrel about painting, and I gathered there are still times when he shakes her as he shouts at her. What I never heard them mention was Saturn over the Water.