Mr. Fortune (24 page)

“Did you see him? He has bought a motor bicycle.”

The scattered houses grew closer together, a group of trees and buildings emerged from the mist ahead, a goat clattered down the road with her kid after her, dogs began to bark, and, turned with a flourish, the car drew up before the church. Now that they were not moving it seemed to be raining much harder.

She had been thinking that he was probably a Protestant, and the thought had also come to her, though not with much importance, that he would have to be explained to the other members of the Sodality. But save for one old man who had come in for shelter and fallen asleep the church was empty, and her guest, accepting her loosely sketched invitation, walked in after her, carrying the calico lilies, as though he were pretty much at home. There was something, too, in his recognition of the altar that suggested he was acknowledging an old acquaintance. But the English have a way of being more or less at home anywhere.

Floating upon the chill of stone was a warm smell of incense and of burning wax, and the old man's snores fell pleasantly on the ear. The harmonium also gave a homely impression; but on the whole the effect was of bleakness. The building was in the baroque style; but either funds had run short or a later, purer taste had gutted the interior. Little remained but a handful of muscular cherubs starting from the arch-heads like people leaning out of upper windows to watch a street fight, the baldaquin over the high altar on twisted barley-sugar columns, and the dingy remains of the painted curtain draperies along the walls, between which the chromolithograph stations in Oxford frames seemed to shrink sullenly into their rectangles, as though conscious that they were several sizes too small to take up the challenge of such curves. Even the calico lilies which Angustias was now arranging before the Immaculate Conception had lost a good deal of their swagger since entering the building. However, they were large enough for her purpose, and stepping back she said with a sigh of relief,

“There! I shan't have to count her toes now.

“Have you ever noticed,” she added, “that the moment it is a statue, one begins counting up the toes? One never does it with real feet.”

“I like the other better,” he replied.

If the Immaculate Conception, so life-like and life-size, clasping her blue scarf to her bosom and looking upwards with an expression of bland assurance, was Sacred Love, then the other, thought he, must surely be the Love which is profane. For she was old, sad, and worldly. Her wooden cheeks still showed signs of painting, and she wore a ragged yellow velvet petticoat where the foil had once glistened like dew but now sagged limp and blackened from the cotton threads. Anxious and bedizened, she stared straight in front of her, as though she were still watching the space of empty air where a lover had stood and said farewell, powerless to move her eyes from the gaze which had last beheld him. There she stood and would stand, frozen in steadfast desperation while her finery mouldered about her, as though by a spell of watching she could watch him back again. Stiffly, on one arm, she held a very small child with a stern grown-up face. But it was quite inappropriate, she was so obviously a virgin, akin to those mad maidens whose forsaken ditties chime among the speeches of kings and warriors in old plays.

“She is very old, that one,” said Angustias. “They say she was carved from the timbers of one of the ships which came from Spain.”

A garland of wizened paper blossoms hung on her shrine—just such blossoms as a mad maiden might gather from the stage properties, too much distracted, poor soul, to know that they had never lived. A circle of iron spikes on a tray was before her. Angustias dropped a coin into the box—it rang hollowly, it found few companions there—stuck a candle on a spike and lit it. The candle flared up, and showed clearly the tattered state of the yellow velvet petticoat. Thus lit, the figure became more than ever desperate, ludicrous, and doll-like. The candle, a very small cheap one, and stuck on too hastily, lurched sideways, fell, and went out with a stink. The doll gathered her former dusk about her.

The stranger stared at the doll, absorbed and melancholy. Angustias found herself listening to the snores, and wishing they were not so regular. A growing constraint embarrassed her. Perhaps she had been rather foolish to light that candle. She had acted upon impulse, and the impulses of the old are generally foolish. She felt now as though she had committed an impertinence which had fallen flat, and murmuring something about fetching the key of the sacristy she left him. When she returned, only the old man was there. The stranger had gone back to the car, and sat there, looking dreamily at the church, the trees, the falling rain.

It was not happiness.

Four thousand miles away, across a continent, across an ocean, was an island. And there, secure in the timelessness of all things irretrievably lost, was happiness—local, like a bird singing or a flower growing. He had possessed it, he had misused it—for to do anything with happiness but to receive it as the ear receives the song of a bird or the nostril the scent of a flower is to misuse it; he had left it. But because he had left it of his own will it had given him—a parting gift—this touchstone to carry for ever in his heart, wherewith to try and infallibly dismiss any solace, whether of chance or plotted by the treachery of his desires, that might come to him and say, I too am happiness. Turn in with me.

Self-exiled, he still carried with him this divine right of not being taken in by imitations. And often he had known a strange mental pleasure in the exercise of this faculty, a faculty so sharp and unerring that the pinchbeck pretences of pleasure had become harmless, tolerable, indeed almost endeared, just because it was so easy to see through them. If from the first we could look into the hearts of those we meet, we should look on all men mildly. It is not our enemies that we seek to destroy, but our own illusions which mistook them for friends. It is our silly selves, lodged in them, fastened there with rusted loves, which we must pursue with unappeasable malice, till nothing remains to remind us how we were deluded. It is that we must away with, abjure, exterminate.

It was not happiness that he had found at the House of the Salutation, and what it was he could not well name; but whatever it might be that greeted him there, an instinct bade him respect it and submit himself to it. Naturally, being an honourable man, he had resisted that instinct to the uttermost. It was comfort, he told himself—the satisfaction, so long untasted, of smooth linen, regular meals, order, and decency. It was the unbalanced sensibility of convalescence, the reaction of the refreshed body upon the mind, or it might even be the effect of his sun-stroke—they often left one a little queer in the head. It was indolence, it was childishness, it was the shock of being so kindly treated. Who would not lend himself to such kindness, and fancy for a day or two that a new life had begun?

Once I leave (he told himself), and I really must leave tomorrow, it will all fall into place, and I shall see that it was just a pretty picnic, a fancy—something in the place, not in me.

Meanwhile he stayed, agreeing that it was at her bidding, and knowing that it was of his own will. Socially, staying was an easy matter. For many years now it had been one to him whither he went or where he stayed; and he was so indifferent to himself that he did not think he was likely to be a noticeable nuisance. Habit, not pride, made him feel that he should do something to earn his keep; but he had no ambition about this, and would have been as perfectly willing to work, had she asked it, twelve hours a day as a labourer, as he was willing to shake the apricot brandy and paint the dog-kennel.

After such activities his hostess would suggest that he should take a siesta, enforcing the suggestion with persuasive yawns. It was not for the first time in his life that he found himself among people who slept extravagantly. On the island, where happiness was, there had also been a vast amount of sleeping. But there his friends had been in the habit of casting themselves down in any place and at any moment, like dogs, whereas Angustias slept with formalities, and would no more wake through an afternoon than she would go to bed before midnight. For himself, he found this regimen difficult; but there was no doubt but that it agreed with her. She seemed to regard life through a perpetual haze of well-being and detachment, twice a day exchanging the innocent drowsiness of the newly-awakened for the sensual composure of one preparing for bedtime. In the first of these states she resembled a child, in the second, a very old lady; consequently it was not possible to have any exact idea of her age, though she must be older than he.

It was an elderly household. Discounting the puppies, Pepe and Rosa were its only examples of youth. They, with their smooth skins and eyes of violent brilliancy, were like creatures from another world, a fairy-tale prince and princess, only tethered to real life by their several passions—hers, for her shepherd; his, for the Ford.

A very old man, whose face, tanned to the colour of a winter sun, was surrounded by a frill of black and white striped whisker, giving him a mystical resemblance to a badger, worked in the garden, and in the intervals of his labour sat in the arbour smoking cigars. He was silent, unless Quita came into the garden for vegetables. Then, as abruptly as if he had been turned on, he would break into a torrent of injurious recriminations, smartly taken up by her. For a few minutes the two voices, gusty bass and strident alto, would clash together; then, when she had snatched the prey from his hands and rushed back into the house, he would turn himself off again. It seemed as though a stranger in the garden was less than a pebble to him. But one day, during the painting of the dog-kennel, he approached the new-comer, and asked,

“Were you ever in Greenock?”

The answer not meeting with his approval, he turned away.

It was his birthplace, Angustias explained, though he had left it so long ago that now he spoke only Spanish if he spoke at all. Harry had found him, penniless and drunk, prodding a quayside with a spud, and had brought him to be a gardener. With wry deliberation he had settled down, his only acknowledgment of the animal kingdom to strew the neighbourhood with bastards. Gregorio was one of these, an easy transition from McGregor.

He lived, solitary, in a thatched hovel, some two miles away. The herdsmen and other farm servants lived in similar hovels, linked by leisurely paths that curled over the waste with no appreciable scheme, a map as baffling and traditional as though it had been traced out by hares. There seemed to be little or no cover in this flattened landscape, yet a few minutes of following one of these paths would dandle one on the edge of a prospect apparently unknown. A clump of gaunt thistles reared against the sky. Was it newly seen, or was it but a new aspect of the thistles skirted already? Somewhere hereabouts, surely, the path dipped into a little hollow where three willows sheltered a drinking-hole? The path dipped duly, and here was the hollow; but instead of the willow-trees and the muddy brook stemmed up there was a tarred shed protected by a tangle wreath of barbed wire. Lifting one a few feet higher, the path disclosed itself running towards a distant roof, a feather of smoke. But negotiating another group of thistles it shook itself free of that intention and brought one out into a vast grassy place where a herd of cattle were feeding. The different aspects of the unvarying landscape melted into each other like thoughts merging, colliding, returning, sliding off for ever, conditioned and unforeseen. And then, breaking in upon it like the tones of speech, one of those hovels would rise up, and perhaps a troop of children would run acclaiming from the doorway, or McGregor's shirt hang airing upon the line.

Her guest had explained to Angustias, a little firmly, that at his age it would be more dangerous to learn to sit a horse than to go afoot, even among cattle; and that, as he always kept to the paths, it was a logical impossibility for him to be considered as losing his way. As regarded going on foot, she was too deeply embarrassed by his ignorance of horsemanship to make any demur; by the second thesis she had seemed imperfectly convinced, had expostulated a little, putting on that peculiarly rational tone, that air of making everything quite clear, proper only to people roused from sleep to cope with a situation. But, never having been acquainted with women, he found her solicitude no obstacle to continuing to do as he wished.

He wished very much to continue these rambles, and that not only because they removed him from the household of women. This was a natural desire and he felt it; but it was not his prime motive. He went out for corroboration. This landscape, so flat and blank, matched the flatness and blankness of his mind, and thus to be released into indirection was like the comfort of sleep without its cheating. For sleep is a danger to the unhappy; dreams, lovely and ruthless as wild beasts, lurk in its thickets, ready to pounce out and tear the mind. But here he might wander as he willed, yet never be betrayed into forgetting that he walked an exile from joy. Often he would stop and look about him, thinking that perhaps nowhere else in the world would he find a landscape so perfectly fitted to his requirements; and he felt a satisfaction so deep that it was almost as though he rejoiced in his surroundings, rejoiced with much the same durable joy as with which one rejoices in a good coat. For he was a quite ordinary man, a desert would have been no use to him, he would have felt abashed had he been called upon to walk out his sorrow amid the declamation of rocks and torrents. But here there was nothing grand, nothing poignant. The texture of the scenery bore everywhere faint signs of use, it was, however sparingly and casually, subdued to the ordinary fate of being useful; the landmarks meeting his eye were all reassuringly insignificant—a tarred hut, a zinc water-trough, a rubbish-heap; and even the vastness extending round him seemed only the extension of a very large field. Perhaps there was a hint of melodrama about the vultures; but they soon took upon themselves the colour of being just birds, even useful birds, like hens, with a function of being convenient about carcasses. The sky was moderately supplied with clouds, the grass was a rather fatigued green, when it rained it rained in a matter-of-fact way without thunderstorms. There was a familiar badge, too, upon the flocks and herds inhabiting this great field. They were owned and doomed, the sheep for shearing, the cattle for slaughter. Only by its extent did the great field differ from any other field.