The Flight From the Enchanter

by Iris Murdoch

‘What does man put in suit-case?’ said Stefan. ‘Pyjama, toothbrush, towel, vest — all like in English exercise book!’ He laughed again.

  ‘Look here,’ said Rosa. ‘Stop mystifying me, Stefan. What do you want?’

  ‘I want nothing, I say,’ said Stefan. ‘You not ask Hunter all time what he want. I live here now, I stay here, this room my room. That girl Annette go away. I come. That is all.’

  Rosa felt as if the temperature of her body were sinking violently. She tightened her grip on the handle of the door. ‘You can’t do that. Stefan,’ she said. ‘Annette is coming back to this room. In any case, this house belongs to Hunter and me.’ It was an odd, almost apologetic, way of putting it.

  Stefan was not smiling. ‘It is big house,’ he said. ‘There is room for all.’

  ‘Not for you,’ said Rosa. ‘You know Hunter wouldn’t stand it. Anyway, it’s impossible for every sort of reason.’

  ‘If someone go,’ said Stefan, ‘it is Hunter to go, not me.’

  ‘Oh, stop this nonsense!’ cried Rosa. ‘You must have gone mad. What about Jan? What about your mother?’

  ‘Is nothing now,’ said Stefan. His voice seemed suddenly several tones lower.

  ‘What do you mean “is nothing”?’ said Rosa. ‘Try to speak English!’

  ‘She is dead,’ said Stefan. ‘I clear her away like old sack. I bury her in the garden.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Rosa.

  ‘She is dead,’ said Stefan, ‘gaudeamus igitur.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Rosa. ‘Where is Jan?’

  ‘Jan is gone,’ said Stefan. ‘Jan is bad man. He go away. Will never come again, never.’ He sat up suddenly. ‘Now is only you,’ he said.

  Rosa sat down in a chair. She did not know what to think or what to believe. ‘Stefan, tell me the truth,’ she said.

  ‘All this is truth,’ said Stefan. ‘If you not believe, what I can do? Go and look at our room. All is changed, all gone. Never again you see Jan or that old woman. All gone, I tell you, Rosa.’ His voice now had the repetitive cadence of a lament.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Rosa.

  ‘I tell you hundred times,’ said Stefan. ‘I stay here. Now you are mother, brother, all. I stay with you.’

  Rosa threw up her hands. ‘It’s not possible,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.’

  Stefan, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed, came near to her and smiled for the first time.

  ‘You soon understand all,’ he said. He bent down towards her and his eyes blotted out the room. Without touching her he spoke very close to her face. ‘I soon give up factory too.’

  ‘And how will you live?’ said Rosa.

  ‘I live with you,’ said Stefan. His voice was soft and caressing. ‘You give up factory, and we live with your money. You are English lady, you have money, you tell me so yourself.’

  ‘You’re mistaken, Stefan,’ said Rosa, looking into the cold eyes.

  ‘We see that soon,’ said Stefan. Then he laughed. ‘Perhaps I joke about this. We see soon.’

  A door closed downstairs. ‘That’s Hunter,’ said Rosa.

  Stefan stepped back. Then he began to fold himself lazily on to the bed until he was reclining once more. ‘Go then,’ he said ‘and tell Hunter that now I am here.’

  Rosa left the room and began to go slowly down the stairs.

  Twenty-One

  HUNTER woke up and looked at his watch. It was only three. He had slept for an hour. Now he knew that he would not sleep again. He tossed about in an agony of discomfort. It was as if the room were disintegrating round him. He expected to feel things falling on his face. Then something did run across his cheek. He sat up, brushing it away with horror. It must have been a spider. He sat for a while with his hands round his knees. These three o’clock awakenings when one starts up, imagining that one has a mortal sickness; and indeed this is true. Life is that sickness, and at that cold hour one can realize it.

  For Hunter this was the third night of sleeplessness. A hundred times during every night he heard the footsteps coming from upstairs towards his sister’s door. He knew that this was imagination and that Rosa’s door was locked. But he could not prevent himself now from getting up yet again and going to stand on the landing. He wanted very much to go and wake Rosa, but he knew that she would only send him away angrily. There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Rosa had not explained Stefan’s presence in the house. She had only said to Hunter, ‘Put up with him. He’ll soon go away.’ But Hunter strongly suspected that Stefan had no intention of going away. He could see that Rosa was afraid; and like a child that sees its mother upset, he felt the foundations of the world rocking. Especially, he felt that he ought somehow to deal with the situation. The notion that Rosa was expecting something from him had increased since the previous afternoon, when she had suddenly asked him to go with her to the house in Pimlico. There had been nothing to see there but an empty room; which was what they had expected. But Hunter was both moved that Rosa should have depended on him, and terrified at the sense of responsibility which this dependence was beginning to awaken.

  Since the arrival of Stefan, Rosa had given in her notice at the factory and had stopped working at once. It was as if she were clearing the decks for some terrible struggle. Only, Hunter thought, the protagonist might turn out to be not her but himself. He had a sense of being hemmed in by evil. This feeling, as he stood now in the darkness of the landing, listening for noises, became overwhelming. He went back into his own room and put the light on. He lit a cigarette. He wondered whether Rosa was asleep. What she now did with her days he did not know. She left the house early and returned late. He knew that she had called in vain on Mrs Wingfield, and that she had made an equally vain attempt to see Annette, who had been discovered to be staying in a hotel at Maidenhead. Annette had left the hotel just before Rosa arrived. Rosa had told him these facts, but without revealing her state of mind.

  If only I could sleep, thought Hunter. Then in the morning I might know what to do. His bed, crumpled and undone, was the very image of sleeplessness. Hunter was beginning to know the real torture of insomnia — the terrible continuation of one day into another. I shall become ill, he told himself with relief. But then the twisting and turning of indecision began again. Ill or not, he must act. The centre of Hunter’s anguish was the knowledge that he, and he alone, was in possession of the weapon which could destroy his sister’s tormentor. Hunter had cherished, with anxious care but without much further reflection, the information which he had gained on the day of his visit to John Rainborough’s office. The Lusiewicz brothers were born east of the Line. They were in England illegally. Rainborough had said that if this became officially known they would be deported. So, Hunter told himself, he had after all got the whip band. But what was he to do with it? To hold a weapon is one thing and to strike is another.

  Hunter was not a man much addicted to harming his fellows. The harm which Hunter had done in his life had usually been done accidentally in the course of seeking easy and unobtrusive ways forward for himself. He was an animal whose protection was not teeth but flight and camouflage. However just the cause, he shrank from the dealing of blows. He shrank in this case particularly because of the extreme obscurity of the situation: he was, as usual, in the dark about what exactly Rosa wanted, and whether she might not be right in thinking that Stefan would soon go away. Hunter also disliked the idea of harming anyone, however detestable, in this particular way. He would, he thought, have been more ready to act if there had been some definite crime which he could bring home to Stefan, and from which the punishment would follow automatically. But, on the one hand, what Stefan’s crime consisted in was very unclear — Hunter shrank from considering how far his sister might not have brought all her troubles on herself — and on the other hand what Stefan would be punished for if Hunter moved would be the fact of having been born east of a certain arbitrary line. As Hunter
very much disapproved of a world in which people were penalized for accidental facts of birth, he especially bated the notion of using such a weapon against even his worst enemy. There was, further, the practical difficulty of invoking this cruel power against Stefan without hurting a lot of innocent people as well. Hunter was alive to all this. A tender conscience was among his assets. Strong nerves unfortunately were not.

  Neither had Hunter forgotten the card which Calvin Blick was holding in his hand. After the debacle of the shareholders’ meeting, Hunter had written to Calvin saying that he hoped that Calvin did not imagine that he had intended this, and that he would be glad to see Calvin any time to discuss what should be done, as he did not regard the question of the Artemis as closed. Hunter did not like remembering this letter, which he had written in a moment of panic, and which smelt both of servility and of disloyalty to Rosa. However, Calvin had not replied, so that here too Hunter was in the dark. This anxiety was strangely joined in his mind to the distress caused him by Stefan’s presence in the house. It was as if these two menaces were echoes of each other — and although Hunter knew that he could not by destroying one destroy the other, yet the two conjoined to make him feel the urgency of his sister’s peril; and in the background of it all stood the figure of Mischa Fox. It’s all out of proportion, said Hunter to himself. The shapes that surrounded him, he told himself again and again, were grotesque shadows of realities; and he could perhaps have convinced himself of this if it had not been for the spectacle of Rosa’s fear.

  Hunter had been sitting on the edge of his bed with the light on for nearly an hour. Tears of misery and frustration were coursing gently down his cheeks and falling off on to his pyjamas. He got up at last and drank some water and put his face into the wash-basin. Then he said to himself, I can’t stand this any longer. He went out again on to the landing. There was no sound from Rosa’s room. He began to mount the stairs. The light from his bedroom showed him the stairway and his own enormous shadow sliding on ahead of him until it reached as far as Stefan’s door. Silent and barefoot he followed it. At the door Hunter stopped. His terror made him unable to breathe quietly. He gave a sort of choking sound which he felt must be ringing audibly through the house. Then he tried the handle. The door was unlocked. In a moment there opened before him the dark void of the room. He stood upon the threshold, knowing that he must be clearly visible in silhouette from within, and as he stood there trembling he felt himself to be more victim than actor. He wondered if the Pole was awake. He had come to wake him — yet he was silencing his movements in a sweat of terror in case he should wake him inadvertently or find him already wakeful. The darkness and stillness of the room continued unbroken. The idea came into Hunter’s head that perhaps Stefan had gone. He fumbled in the pocket of his pyjamas for a box of matches. He dropped two on the floor before he managed to make one strike. He moved the flaring flame away from his dazzled eyes and looked towards the bed. Before the tiny light went out he saw that Stefan was sitting up and looking at him.

  If Hunter had seen a corpse quicken he would not have been more scared. He almost turned and bolted. A very dim illumination came as far as the doorway from his own door on the floor below. But in Stefan’s room the darkness was like velvet. Hunter took a step back and struck another match. From the way in which he immediately found Stefan’s eyes fixed on his own he felt sure that the Pole could see in the dark. The match went out. He sank on one knee.

  ‘Listen — ’ said Hunter. His voice, coming out of hours and hours of silence and darkness, seemed to him like a voice heard at the bottom of a well. As he spoke he knew that he had committed himself to action, and the fear that had been fluttering about him nestled down in his heart.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you, Stefan.’ He spoke very quietly, hardly above a whisper. He needed desperately to hear Stefan’s voice, to be persuaded that it was not a demon but a human being that lay before him; and as he unexpectedly uttered the Pole’s Christian name he felt it as an appeal to the community of human beings with each other.

  ‘What you want, coming here at night?’ said Stefan. He also spoke softly — and as Hunter heard the hatred in his voice he thought: he believes I came to kill him. At this thought Hunter almost groaned aloud; and what he felt most immediately was the danger to himself.

  ‘I mean you no harm,’ said Hunter. This was a lie, but as he saw himself in the role of a murderer he had suddenly to say it.

  ‘But you must leave this house,’ he said. At this he struck another match. He needed to see Stefan’s face.

  The Pole was sitting bolt upright now and had cleared the bedclothes aside as one who prepares to defend himself. His long neck and white chest were bare, and there was no fear in his expression, only extreme venom.

  ‘Why?’ said Stefan.

  ‘Because my sister wishes it,’ said Hunter. The match went out.

  ‘If your sister wish it she say it,’ said Stefan. ‘Is between me and her. You little boy keep out or you get hurt.’

  Hunter felt a tide of incoherence rising within him — and at that moment the thing he feared most was not the violence of Stefan but the proximity of tears. He moved closer to the bed and pinched his fingers savagely upon his thigh to stop the tears.

  ‘She does wish it and she has said it,’ said Hunter. His voice was beginning to tremble. ‘You get out of this house or you’re the one who’ll get hurt.’ His face was screwed up in the darkness in an agony of self-control.

  There was a sharp hissing sound and a sudden light. Stefan had struck a match. It flared between them for a moment revealing Hunter’s burning cheeks and eyes and the intent white face of the Pole.

  ‘I am master in this house,’ said Stefan. He said it in a slow almost contemptuous way which made Hunter breathless with anger.

  ‘We — we — we’ll see,’ said Hunter, stammering with fury and confusion. ‘I’ve given you a chance. You drive me to it. I can have you turned out, turned out of England if I want to. I know where you were born. It was east of that line. You know what that means, don’t you? It’s not legal for you to be here. If I tell, you’ll be deported tomorrow. I give you warning. If you don’t leave this house, I’ll have you turned out of England.’ At last hatred and anger had made him brave. He was leaning over the Pole and spitting the words into his ear.

  There was a silence. As he waited for the reaction, Hunter’s courage began to wilt. Then Stefan struck a match and lifted it between them like a torch with a gesture which was almost leisurely. His eyes pierced Hunter as if they were trying to brand him before the light was gone again.

  ‘Listen you now,’ said Stefan, and then his voice continued in the dark. ‘I tell you something true. If you make such trouble for me I kill you.’ He spoke slowly and there was something cold and objective about his tone which made it impressive. ‘I not say this for threat. I tell you it as fact. If you do this thing I hate you so I kill you. I not want to perhaps, but I cannot stop myself. It will be so. I swear it by Holy Mother of God.’

  Hunter rocked to and fro in the dark. He was very close to Stefan now. As he felt the reality of the threat spreading through his blood he shook in a crisis of helplessness and despair. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no! You must leave this house! You must leave this house!’ He rocked about and his breath came in a low humming moan.

  Stefan struck another match. In the golden light their faces stared, close together, Stefan’s tense with hatred and Hunter’s crumpled with misery.

  ‘I say I am the master here!’ Stefan said. He whispered the words, but they echoed like thunder inside Hunter’s head. Then, before the match was extinguished, Stefan’s hand shot out and grasped a lock of Hunter’s yellow hair. He drew Hunter’s head back until the eyes were ready to spin from their sockets. For an instant he held him so. Then with a quick movement he brought the lighted match close to Hunter’s face and set fire to the lock of hair.

  The hair sizzled and flamed up. With a scream Hunter leapt to h
is feet. He beat his head with his hands. A sharp pain was searing his forehead. A terrible smell was in his nostrils. It was dark now, and Stefan was laughing. Hunter blundered towards the door. He almost fell out of the room and down the stairs towards the light, holding his head in his hands.

  On the lower landing Rosa appeared in her nightdress. ‘For God’s sake, Hunter!’ she cried. ‘What is it?’

  Hunter kept his forehead covered and pushed past her. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, ‘I just hurt my head. It’s nothing.’ He went on down and into the kitchen. Rosa followed him in and shut the door behind her.

  Hunter was fumbling awkwardly in a drawer. After a moment or two he let everything drop and turned round and buried his face in Rosa’s shoulder.

  Twenty-Two

  ALTHOUGH Rosa did not know about Hunter’s secret weapon, she had no difficulty in reconstructing in outline the events of the previous night, It was now 9 a.m. and she was drinking coffee and observing her brother, who was sitting with a white bandage tilted over one eye like a drunken maharajah and looking more wretched than Rosa had ever seen him look.

  ‘Eat something, Hunter,’ said Rosa. But Hunter just shook his head miserably.

  Stefan, who had not yet carried out his threat of retiring from work, had disappeared at an early hour to the factory. As Rosa looked at her brother, she felt tempted to rush upstairs, throw Stefan’s goods into the street, and barricade the door. But she knew that at the moment she was simply not able to do it. Hunter hung limply upon her spirit. He filled her with feelings of softness and despair. She needed some stronger ally before she could bring herself to be completely ruthless.

  She had thought of going to Peter Saward for help. But what could Peter do? He, too, affected her with something of the same soft protective and yet helpless feeling that she had in relation to her brother. Saward had for her the dear authority of a father, and yet, too, something of a father’s remoteness. In Rosa’s mind he represented the sweetness of sanity and work, the gentleness of those whose ambitions are innocent, and the vulnerability of those who are incapable of contempt. He would be unable to conceive of such a character as Stefan Lusiewicz: more important, he would be unable to understand that part of Rosa herself which answered to Stefan; and Rosa had indeed very little wish, in this matter, to instruct him. She decided that only darkness could cast out darkness.