Mr. Fortune (30 page)

“Mrs. Bailey, and the man of her husband's race.”

She paused, as though in saying this she had said everything. Neither hearer spoke, and the noise of their journey swept over the place where her words had been. Just so, he remembered, had the dusk swallowed up his vision of that other steadfast one, the wooden, velvet-petticoated doll in the church, who, being so old, sad, and worldly, had seemed to him the representative of profane love. And forgetting alike the comfortable Angustias of every day and the termagant who this very day had so imperiously constrained him, he waited for the doll, come to life and sitting at the back of the car unseen, to speak once more. For it must be she. Long steadfastness, long neglect, the long-husbanded spark of that tragic worldly love that knows how, sooner or later, the body must fail, betraying its spark of love and guarded memory to oblivion—only these could speak so, teaching the voice such proud patience and simplicity.

“I speak no longer to you, my child. You cannot understand, now, what I say. It is to
him
I speak. I tell him that for the sake of his race and the sake of my husband the House of the Salutation shall shelter him as long as he chooses to stay and I am mistress of it. I do not know where he came from, and I do not ask. I do not ask even what he was seeking and whether he has found it. If Harry had been alive
he
could have asked, but it is no business of mine. Once, long ago, an Englishman came to the house while Harry was away, asking for shelter. I took him in, I said to him, Though my husband is away, you are his guest. Be welcome. The next morning, very early, he disappeared, taking with him a horse and money which he had stolen from us. But I had done rightly. Now I say to this one, Though my husband is dead, you are his guest. I tell him too—he will not remember, he could not know when it was—that there was a moment when I thought, I cannot keep him here. It was no fault of his, but he reminded me of what is past. But with us, who are old, it is small blame to feel such impulses, and no merit to overcome them. The heart is like an old dog. It barks, and lies down again....”

Listening, he had forgotten that his hand still rested upon the catch of the door. Suddenly the spring yielded, and the door opened, wrenched back by the wind of their passage. A thrust of icy air surged into the car, and as though they too came in, the fireworks flashed with a violent reality. The incoming air was cold and heavy as a surge of water. It seemed about to break the flimsy box of glass and fabric. Like the thrust of a wave, impelled by all the weight of the real world outside, it drove in through the wound of the opened door, pinning the car to a standstill, toppling it over.

Disaster had been implicit in that rigid violence, though what had seemed the moment of death had been indeed the moment of waking—a rupture so annihilating that for some time he lay motionless with closed eyes, not daring to put his senses to the test. Yet what remained most actual of the dream was the last sentence Angustias had spoken; or rather she who, in the guise and with the voice of Angustias, was the doll out of the church, the doll who had once been a tree in Spain, and then, in a first widowhood, a timber darkened with Atlantic salt, and then, widowed even from that existence, hewn into human shape to suit the needs of man's soul, and by man's soul finally forsaken. The running sap, the tears of ocean, the tears of man—she was dried of all these. But loyal still to some integral pity that nourishes the universe she had borrowed flesh from his dream, and spoken.

“The heart is like an old dog. It barks, and lies down again.”

Strange words, fast shrivelling into something meaningless, discolouring and growing stiff and brittle, like some frond of seaweed pulled from the salt and laid open to the execution of air. Already they were little more to him than the end of a dream, at every reiteration of his mind losing more of what had seemed their deep intent and gracious purpose. Our dreams should warn us of ourselves, he thought, slowly acclimatizing his eyes to the grey light of morning; for they, more obviously than ourselves, are at the mercy of chance. A nothing deflects them. The end of my dream, that seemed so terrible and yet so full of dark consolations, may well have been spun out of a draught from the window, the bark of the old bitch in her kennel. And now, rousing his mind, he looked back with little but curiosity upon the dream, admiring its coherence, its deference to what might have been. As far as the rhea he could trace it back. And he recollected how, a few days before, Gregorio the shepherd had spoken of shooting a rhea. There was the seed from which, wafted hither and thither in its growth by accidents of body and mind untraceable, the dream had sprung. A dream spanning two days—and perhaps it had been devised in five minutes between sleeping and waking.

The day lightened, the house began to live. But this was a real day, the true cocks crowed, he would not, for all her eccentricities, hear Quita polishing the passage before breakfast. And though, even to the time when he got up and began to dress, the dream was present in his mind, it was beginning to disintegrate, so that, recollecting fireworks or Alfredo jumping from the falling palm-tree, it required an effort of mind to restore these incidents to their sequence. It only waited, his dream, for an exterior contact to vanish. At a glance, a word, from some one whose dream it was not it would be gone, snapped like a bubble.

From step to step of the stairs it dallied, just as a bubble does, bouncing intact, lightly rolling to its doom. In the sitting-room the sight of the gun-cupboard gave it a momentary corroboration, but with the same glance he saw Angustias, who turned to him with an inquiry as to how he had slept. So, every morning, she would inquire, the anxiety in her voice the last vestigial remnant of his illness, a something added to the House of the Salutation that would be preserved with all the other relics, long after its justification was lost.

“I slept very well, thank you.”

In her hand was a letter, which she laid upon her bureau, thoughtfully smoothing it.

“I have had a letter from my grandson.”

“Alfredo?” he heard himself say.

“Yes, Alfredo. He is coming here for a little visit, inviting himself. He comes here whenever he can, poor child. He loves the place.”

But even if there had been words it was too late to speak. For, as he had foreseen, the bubble was snapped, the dream broken and gone. Too late now to cry out a warning against what threatened her and himself, and this other one, already aimed towards them. And as a bubble, in the moment of its dissolution, utters a little gasp, a soft sigh of relief, as it were, at being ended, he felt, exhaling from him, a sigh of thankfulness that a responsibility was lifted from the uneasy soul, dismissed again for a while into its limitations of flesh and blood.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1927, 1932 by the Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Introduction copyright © 2001 by Adam Mars-Jones

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Saul Leiter, Kutztown, 1948; © Saul Leiter, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 1893–1978.

[Mr. Fortune's maggot]

Mr. Fortune / by Sylvia Townsend Warner ; introduction by Adam Mars-Jones.

p. cm. — (New York review books classics)

Previously published as: Mr. Fortune's maggot.

ISBN 978-1-59017-458-6 (alk. paper)

I. Title.

PR6045.A812M74 2011

823'.914—dc23

2011022234

eISBN 978-1-59017-403-6
v1.0

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