'Not all of 'em.'
'You are being vulgar, Julius. It is your least attractive suit.'
They wait, watch shadows, hear the peace of Sunday. Now and then, from overhead fall snatches of croaked song, whispered verses.
Sam comes back, marching like a drummer boy, George Pace scowling behind him, the ladder on his shoulder.
'Well done, Sam! My thanks to you, George. I shall see you right for it. This one here. You see him. Steady now. His name is James Dyer.' The Reverend holds the ladder. 'Can you reach him? Have you got him?'
George Pace comes down, alone. He says: "E's crawlin'. I can see 'em in 'is beard. That an' he stinks worse than a laystall.'
The Reverend says: 'Should you like it better if we had him doused in bergamot? Heavens, George, I only wish you to carry him down. You do not need to wed him.'
'Wi' respect, sir, I'd rather not. 'E looks plaguey to me.'
'Plague? Have you perhaps made a study of the subject- between laying traps for Lord Hallam's birds?'
'Do not rant so, Julius,' says Dido. 'If he will not fetch him down, he will not.'
'Are you volunteering, sister?'
'George may be right,' she says. 'He may have a disease. Nothing more likely.'
'In which case we are to leave him in the tree? I see I must do it myself. It is ever thus.'
Still garbed in the robes of his office, the ladder bellying out beneath his weight, the Reverend ascends, hand over hand, his mouth dry as a stone. A branch rakes off his wig and drops it like a shot bird at Dido's feet.
'Dr Dyer?'
An ankle presents itself before his nose. He grasps it. 'Dr Dyer? We must get you down, sir. You cannot stay up here. Place your foot on my shoulder. No, like this . . . ooof . . . come come, sir . . . and the other now, gently does it . . . steady, steady - keep the ladder still, George! Now then . . . good, sir, that's the way . . . so . . . and ... so ... ah ... a little more . . . now . . . there . , . Help me, George, damn your eyes. So . . . another step . . . and ... we have him . . . thank God.'
'Bravo, brother!'
The Reverend claims his wig, slaps it on, silently congratulating himself. James Dyer crouches, panting in the grass by Mary's knees. Out of the tree the full extent of his alteration becomes apparent. To the Reverend he looks like the survivor of a shipwreck, one who has escaped with his life, but barely, barely. The Reverend gets on his knees beside him. Pace was right about the lice.
'Can you walk, sir? We have a conveyance by the church. A very short step from here.'
At the house there is a small party to meet them. Mr Astick and his daughter, over for dinner; Sam, who has cut through the fields ahead of the cart and broadcast the news; and Mrs Cole with Tabitha, the pair looking anxiously out from the kitchen door.
Astick comes up and takes the horse's head, then goes to the back of the cart to help down the ladies.
'This is Dr Dyer,' says the Reverend. Astick looks up. The man he sees in the cart reminds him of the prisoners he saw after the Battle of Plessy in '57. Men whose beards seemed to sprout straight from their skulls. Eyes too big for their heads, seeing things invisible to fatter men.
'He's verminous,' whispers the Reverend as Astick reaches up to lift James down from the high seat of the cart.
'Never mind that,' says Astick. He is a powerful man, swings James down easily.
'Mrs Cole,' says the Reverend, 'is the room next to mine fit for use?'
'Lor', there's no bed made up, and as for airing . . .'
'Airing is not of the first, Mrs Cole. Tabitha, get some sheets upon the bed, quick as you like. Mrs Cole, can you make a little of your beef tea, or' - seeing the objection forming on her lips - 'any of your most nourishing beverages that may be quickly prepared. Where is Mary?' They see her sat with her back against the vv^all of the barn, head lowered, sniffed at by a cat.
Says Dido: 'Poor woman. She is quite done up. Miss Astick and I shall attend to her.'
'Oh my,' says Miss Astick, seventeen, 'I never looked after a stranger before.'
The Reverend and Mr Astick move the sick man up the stairs between them, gain the room where Tabitha is setting up a breeze with the sheets, and sit the doctor down on a dusty seat beside the fireplace.
'That beard must come off,' says Astick, 'and all the hair elsewhere. If you bring me a razor. Reverend, I shall see to it myself. And hot water. Look! On your sleeve . . . Allow me . . .' Astick destroys the insect between finger and thumb. Fine, thinks the Reverend, fetching the razor from his room, how the unexpected shows the character of a man. What a good soldier Astick must have been, a good Christian soldier. Glad to call him friend.
They strip their patient, bundle his clothes to be burnt, shave him like a corpse. He is as white as one, as white and as yellow. James gazes up at the ceiling as they work above him. His breathing is rapid, feeble. Sam is sent running again, this time to Dr Thome's. There are lice in James's eyebrows. They shave the eyebrows, crack the lice.
Mrs Cole comes in with the tea. The Reverend takes it from her at the door. He blows on its surface and seeks to spoon some
between the frayed skin of James's lips, but it spills over the sick man's chin. He says: 1 believe I never fed a man before.'
'Nonsense,' says Astick. 'You fed the vv^hole church this morning, Reverend. Bread and w^ine.'
'True, sir. But this is devilish hard to do. The stuff goes everywhere but his mouth.'
'Raise his head a little. There now. We must not drown him in broth.'
'Aha! He took some that time. And swallowed it down. This will be as new blood to you, Doctor.'
James drinks, spoonful by spoonful, half a cup. A heat spreads inside of him. For the first time in days he becomes aware that he has a body. He is not entirely pleased to remember it. When did he last eat? Mary fed him some manner of roots in the New Forest. Then in Salisbury, an orange from the market, crushed upon one side, and some bread. Nothing since then, nothing but greenstuff from the hedgerows. With enormous effort, as though rolling a stone off his chest, he turns in the bed. Who is that man there? He shouts: 'Mary!'
Says Astick: 'I believe he said something. Say again, sir.'
'Mary.'
'Mary?'
'Ay,' says the Reverend, 'the woman he came with.'
'She is his wife?'
'His companion. Or so I believe. Easy there. Doctor. She shall come directly. My sister and Miss Astick are setting her up. You have come a long way, I think.'
James says: 'A long way, a long way . . .' He is uncertain now if he is speaking aloud or only to himself. He thinks: It would not be so bad to die here. This is journey's end perhaps. Lolling his head to one side, he sees the Reverend Lestrade and Mr Astick stripped to the waist and facing each other as if about to wrestle. Up flies Astick's arm. 'Got one!' he cries. 'Well done, sir,' says
the Reverend. 1 have not been so verminous since I was last in France.'
James, moon-bald, floats in the subterranean rivers of fever and exhaustion. Thome comes twice, makes his observations, standing a yard from the bed, and leaves a box of Dover's Powders, a box that disappears without much mystery after one of Mary's visits.
Mary has her own regime: no one feels inclined to interfere. She forages in the Reverend's garden. At first light and dusk she sails up to the woods, returning with her apron full of angelica and cowslip and woundwort, and other plants less readily named.
She wears one of Mrs Cole's old dresses, the housekeeper being the nearest in size, though it was necessary to take up the hems in Dido's chamber, Mary standing before them, quite at ease, like a princess in the company of her maidservants. It was then, as they dressed her, they saw the tattoos, a shower of blue stars over the soft of her thigh and rump, extending downward to the crease of her knee.
She gives rise to talk, of course. Talk of spells, of the evil eye, of necromancy. And yet there is such a mildness in the stranger that come St Michael's Day, Mrs Cole, somewhat to her own amazement, consults
Mary about her swollen knees, and Mary treats her, pressing with her hands against the joints until there is a puddle of fluid around the housekeeper's feet. ('Lor',' says Mrs Cole to her gossip the following Sunday, holding up her skirts to show the evidence, the newly restored, muscular ruby globes of her knees. 'What hands she has. What hands!')
By Whit Sunday, James is out of his sick-bed for the first time; a clownish figure in an old suit of the Reverend's, shuffling about the yards and garden, often found asleep, lying in the grass, or even curled on the carpet in the parlour.
To the Reverend's relief, James shows no more desire to climb trees, no evidence of a continuing distraction. Whatever he has
been, whatever strange latitudes he has travelled in, he now appears quite sane, answers sensibly all enquiries, though these do not as yet extend beyond the simple catechism of: 'How do you do today, sir?' 'Better, I thank you'; Will you walk today?', 1 shall'; 'Will you take some refreshment?', 'A dish of tea if I may, sir'.
Little or nothing is learnt of his history between the last time the Reverend clapped eyes on him in his rooms in Russia, and his reappearance in the apple tree at Cow. Lady Hallam, following the case from the airy prospect of her park, counsels patience.
With summer flying into the trees and woods, the fields high with corn and the village braced for the great work of the harvest, there is an air of transformation about the Reverend's house. Tabitha - the talk is not hard to come by - is enamoured of a soldier, a northerner, down for the harvest, spilling stories of war and cities at the far ends of the earth. George Pace wears knots of wild flowers in his hat as though he were a guest at a perpetual wedding. Astick visits regularly to view James's progress, and his daughter, such an awkward, spiky creature six months before, has acquired a fragile and unnerving beauty. What, ponders the Reverend, is not possible in such a season?
The nights of the first week in August belong to some more southern country, have flown up from Italy or Moorish Africa. Squadrons of slowly sailing stars inch across the heavens. The narrow casement windows of the cottages and the great sash windows of the Hall stand wide to stray breezes. Lady Hallam sits up till dawn, dabbing at her temples with a scented handkerchief, looking out over the paling darkness of her parkland, listening to the shriek of the peacocks and allowing herself, in the privacy of isolation, the luxury of a profound melancholy.
The Reverend also keeps late hours, walking softly about the heat-ticking house, hearing occasionally from the rooms above the creak of a floorboard as someone goes to the window for a draught of this musky, mysterious air. It cannot last, but if it could! The
Reverend imagines the village of Cow translated into La Vaca, the fields fiill of vines, the villagers tanned and swaggering, the church a mysterious pool of shade.
Near the last of this halcyon season, the Reverend steals out of his house in the small hours, wigless and coatless, a good stick in his hand, the taste of wine in his mouth. He sets off towards the woods across fields of grazing. He has no conscious destination in mind and only after twenty minutes' steady progress under a moon that throws on to the grass behind him a clearly defined shadow does he realise where he is headed. The 'ring', he calls it - it has no more proper name he knows of, is marked on no maps. Indeed, there is little or nothing to mark, merely a circle of oak trees, though he has found there, while picking mushrooms, certain stones, suggestively marked, that make him think there was once something there, a pagan temple perhaps, and it pleases him to imagine some white-robed predecessor of his, officiating at ceremonies before the woolly-haired ancestors of the present villagers.
He walks for ten minutes under the canopy of trees and breaks into the ring, certain now, seeing it lit by such a moon, that he is walking into sacred ground.
A man is sitting on a tussock in the centre of the ring. The Reverend freezes, grips his blackthorn more tightly, readies himself to melt back into the treeline, but the figure turns towards him and the Reverend stops. 'Is that you, Dr Dyer?'
'It is.'
The Reverend approaches, stiU cautious, as if this figure, not quite substantial on the tump, might yet prove false, a figment of his own mind, or worse, some familiar of the place. These woodland spirits, whom the Reverend cannot quite bring himself to disbelieve in, are said to be very ingenious. And who better to play tricks on than a portly, middle-aged, moon-drunk cleric?
When they are close, James says: 'Pity the poor lunatics on a
night such as this. I have heard three or four since I have been here, howling at this great moon.'
'Bless me, it is you, Dr Dyer. How did you find this place?'
'I merely wandered into it. In these days I do very little intentionally. Here, sir, drink a little of this comfortable cider. I took the liberty of bringing out some from the kitchen. There is plenty left.'
The Reverend drinks from the stone lip of the jar. James is right. The cider is good. One can taste the whole tree in it.
1 perceive you have been sketching, sir.'
'I like to try my hand. Do you wish to see them?' He lays on the silver grass five sheets of paper, each of which has only a single inky circle, crudely done, yet with an undeniable energy.
'These two I did with my finger.' He shows the dark tip of his index finger as evidence.' I have more paper - will you not have a turn? The trick is to think of nothing. Not how beautiful it is, nor how difficult to catch, nor of catching it at all. The doing of it should surprise you.'
*You mean I am to do it and not to do it at one and the same time?'
James says: 'Precisely so.' Then, seeing the look of confusion on the Reverend's face, he says: 'Perhaps we have not drunk enough of the cider.'
Each man takes three long swallows. The jug gives back a strange, hollow music. The Reverend belches, then plunges his finger into the open ink bottle and draws a ragged loop that is yet, somehow, very moonlike.
'Bravely done!'
They sit, untalking, long enough for certain stars to slip beyond the fretted horizon of the oak-tops.
'Dr Dyer, sir, I should wish you joy of your recovery, for I see now that you are indeed recovered. I confess we all greatly feared for you at Easter.'
If I am recovering - I would not say recovered, not yet a while - then it is your kindness, and the kindness of your sister, your household . . .'
'And Mary . . .'
'And Mary, of course. Her ways must appear very odd. But then, you know something of what she is. You were the first to see her. In some measure she owes you her life.'
The Reverend nods and remembers: torches, dogs, the woman's silent running.
'She is,' says James, 'so I believe, an infallible judge of a man's character. It was no accident she brought me here.'
'That is an endorsement. Doctor, that I will cherish. You know you must stay, of course - you and Mary - quite as long as you wish to. The room you occupy at present can be made more homely with a few alterations, and Mary' - he treads lightly - 'is, I think, tolerably comfortable in the little room next to Tabitha.'
'We are both very comfortable. But I feel as if I should explain to you ... I mean, you must wonder . . .'
'I confess it, but I require no explanation. First we must confirm your recovery. Is that leg still sore?'
'It gives me some trouble. It is a very old hurt. It is the same with my hands. The pain is not violent now. It is almost companionable.'
'Forgive me. Doctor, but you were once, so it seemed, impervious to its fangs. Pain, I mean.'
'Not "seemed". Reverend. I did not feign it. It was precisely as I said. I never had a moment's physical suffering until. . . well, until Petersburg. I begin to find it hard to believe in it myself. Suffice to say, I have been making up for what I missed.'
'He is quite gone, then?'
'Who sir?'
'The old James Dyer.'
'Quite gone.'
'And you do not regret his passing?'
'There are times when I think of the great certainty my
immunity provided me with. I have become something of a coward. Always filled with some morbid dread or other. And whereas once I was as free from hesitation and doubts as any man may possibly be, I am now constantly prey to them. Ha! I am half an hour deciding what coat to wear in the morning, and as you know, I have but two of 'em.'
'This will pass. It is but an effect of your being ... so unwell.'
'I wonder. I have been born into a new state, a new self, one as distinguished by weakness as the other was marked by strength.'
Says the Reverend: 'Is not this new self marked also by a certain softening, a gentleness?'
'It may be. I hardly know yet what I am, what I may expect. Sure my days with a knife are done with. Perhaps I might turn a shilling with my painting.'
'Lady Hallam remembers you from your Bath days. She says you had the most remarkable reputation.'
'I had several, and it is kind of Lady Hallam to remember me, though God's honour, I could wish myself, my old self, as unremembered as if it were a handfiil of dust.'
'We shall not chase you with your shadow. Doctor. After all, a man must be free to change. Many are trapped in old skins they would do better to shed.'
'Like the adder? I hope, sir, you shall not shed your old skin.'
'I would not have your courage, though you call it weakness.'
'It was not a thing I chose.'
The Reverend, feeling the intimacy of their meeting in such a spot, emboldened by it, says: 'In Russia, at the apartment on Millionaya, I witnessed something that . . .'
James raises a hand, leans suddenly forward, staring, as if, in the summer night air, he had glimpsed some large and elusive matter, some form that signed to him a message which he must
immediately grasp. The Reverend, following the other man's gaze, sees only a family of rabbits, their coats silvery in the moonlight, romping in the grass ten yards from their feet. He looks at James's face, whispers: 'What is it, sir?'
Ingenious Pain Page 28
