Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (18 page)

Is this where it is rooted then, in the keeper? – a disease which he holds here, to infect suitable victims? Murder unresolved – the thought never consummated in the act: a darker hell than murder itself. . . .

I’d better go. No good waiting longer for him. Yet there’s still twenty minutes before the bus, and I feel I ought to check on some details of that vile mantrap. But I don’t; I stay, looking down at the table, and all I have written. I wait for the sound of his uneven footsteps outside in the half dusk. But all I hear is the steady fall of rain, rain gushing down now.

I think of Foster, four years inside, and his sister visiting him every day. I suppose, in his mind, he was always here –
is
always here. And Hubert Price, and Dorcas, Adelaide – always here at Coombe Morwen, with their keeper. . . .

Always here. . . .

That bloody leaf is scuttling across the flagstones in the kitchen again. I must get out of this place. . . .

X

Tyme Tryeth Troth

The field was very wide and the path twisted across it towards a tall stone hedge. Above the hedge the man could see the chimneys and the two top windows of a cottage, and as from one of the chimneys there was smoke, he assumed that the place was occupied. The path seemed to lead to some flat stone jutting out like steps from the hedge, and it would only bring him, he reflected, into the garden of the cottage. But peasant people would not mind him passing through; and he could ask them the nearest way back to the village.

The evening was October and the rose colours of sunset were dawning in the sky. He could smell wood-smoke as he drew nearer to the stone hedge, and looking to the window of one of the upper rooms he saw the face of a small child pressed against the pane.

He smiled, pleased by the picture. He was reminded of those old glass paintings which he liked to collect; and he had a momentary sensation that he was seeing the picture the wrong way round, not looking at the reverse side of the design which was meant to be seen but at the crude blobs on the back of the glass which were not meant to be seen – except by the craftsman himself. Then the child moved, and at the same time the sun burnt in the window and the image was dissolved into a shivering chord of fire.

His foot was on the lowest stone jutting from the hedge. And now his other foot touched the second step and he pulled himself up with an effort, feeling suddenly very tired although he had walked only a couple of miles from the sea. Tired and curiously anguished; burdened with matters he could not understand; an unhappy man searching for home, and hardly able to drag his body up to the hedge top.

He realized in those few seconds while he was climbing how intensely unhappy and desperate he had become, how much his soul longed for peace, how weary he was of being alone, and how futile his efforts to make happiness his child had become. A scruff of beard made this man look much older than he was; and the hand, rather yellow and wrinkled, that now touched the patch of grass on the hedge was more like the hand of an old man than a young one.

And all these hopeless feelings were centralized in a point of bitter envy for the inmates of the cottage on the other side who, he guessed, were happier than he was. For there was a child; there was smoke in the autumn sky; and (he noticed this suddenly as he drew himself up to the top) there was a woman in one of the downstairs rooms, sitting below a small table, writing, her hair as gold as the leaves that now began to drift from the trees, hanging loosely and obscuring her features. A wood fire was alive in the grate near her.

He watched her, deeply fascinated. Her attitude was so full of unconscious beauty, she was so completely wrapped up in whatever she was writing (perhaps a letter to her mother, he thought); she was so living and natural a part of her surroundings, he could not imagine her anywhere else but in that room, with the generous autumn fire burning yet never consuming its fuel.

And then, with a sudden shock, he realized he was not the only person watching her. Some way back from the window stood a man, a saw in his hand. There were many sawn logs of wood by the open cottage door, an old wicker basket twined with a green decoration; and on one of the logs a small white kitten played with its tail. This man, too, was watching the woman, very intently, with a happy reflective smile; a young man, clean-shaven, wearing only an open shirt and corduroy trousers, and looking full of that natural and beautiful tiredness which comes of physical labour.

The trespasser felt suddenly that he had committed an unforgivable sin. It was not possible to talk to this man and thus to break in upon what was so obviously a touching family reverie. The wife busy with her letter; the child, supposed to be in bed upstairs, who had climbed to the window-seat to watch his father sawing wood and to see the sun slide the day away; the husband pausing in his work to survey his treasure and to wonder at the beauty of his wife – all this had a significance that meant much to the traveller. He was a very sensitive man and he dared not break in upon their peace; for he feared that his own unhappiness would infect them and leave a mark of disquietude in the air.

And the man had not seen him. It was still possible to retreat before he should turn round. Perhaps the child might have seen him; but he would be too young to relate it. The picture of this visitor who had paused on the hedge top would drift deep down into the child’s memory and one day, perhaps many years hence, float up to the surface like a rising tendril of weed in spring water.

Quickly he jumped back into the field, extremely anxious now not to be observed. Right back across that long field he hurried, the day hurrying with him and night calling a full moon up from the fir trees across the downs. Presently he was on the main road and walking back towards the Trevelyan Arms, where he lodged.

After he had had supper and was in the bar, drinking with one or two local people whom he knew slightly, it occurred to him to ask who lived in the cottage. But being bad at describing places he could make no one understand exactly where it stood. There were so many cob-and-plaster cottages like that. ‘A mass of tree lupins in the garden,’ he explained, ‘and a young family, with a small boy – at least, I think it was a boy.’ But there were many families with small boys. Where was this cottage, he was again asked. He could offer no precise guide to it and so the subject was dropped.

Thinking of that happy family, he sat till the bar closed, drinking beer, and looking, without noticing it, at an account of the Trevelyans, extracted from some old antiquarian journal and framed above the bar. It was a Trevelyan who had escaped on his white horse from the devouring wave that had lost Lyonesse under the sea. A glove was in their arms. And the family motto was printed in large gothic lettering at the end of the article: Tyme Tryeth Troth.

Tyme Tryeth Troth . . . The words rang the bells of memory in his mind, and repeated them lazily to himself as he sat there in the quiet bar. It had turned two, and the landlord, with whom he had become very friendly in the past few weeks, wanted to close the house. The bar was empty but for him, and he, in a happy and thoughtful mood, had fallen half asleep over his midday pint of beer. And in his dreaming he had retraced his steps across that field ten years ago, a walk that had ended in the bar where he now sat, though there had then been a different landlord and the house had not been in so smart condition as it was now. But the outline of the fortunes of the Trevelyan family had still hung on the wall, in the same corner, below a faded photograph of the village football eleven taken in
1913
; and as he looked at it now he realized how deeply the words had become engraved on the tablet of his mind . . . engraved like lovers’ names in an old tree-trunk, obscured by the weather of many years, yet never lost.

He read a modern version of the motto: Time Testeth the Truth. And considering the wisdom of this statement – of the human and the universal meaning contained in both – he said goodbye to his friend the landlord and wandered out into the October sunshine. He was a composer and, wanting to think out the form of a new work, he had told his wife he would go for a long walk that afternoon. She would expect him back towards sunset.

But instead of the actual shape and colour of his music he found himself alive only to thoughts concerning himself, the woman he had married four years ago, and the son that had been born to them. Soon there would be another child and his life would grow more complicated. It was hard to keep his mind clear and faithful to the work he knew lay within him to do, when the demands of others, now dependent upon him, had, above everything else, to be met. He was certain that he was happier now than he had ever been; but to live firmly upon that knowledge was no easier.

He walked to the sea, and then along the coast, and rested by a fringe of tamarisks over feather waves that brushed the quiet shore. He watched shag and cormorant over the grey-gold sea where the sun enriched the water as it fell; they flew so close to the surface that it seemed as though they were chained to a submarine self who floated beneath them.

He thought how strange it was, though not in one sense at all strange, that he should have come to live for a time in that same cottage which had so much attracted him years ago; not strange, because the unknown family he had that evening for a moment studied had fixed his mind upon a destiny which for him, he had then realized, was meant to be his. And strange, because at a time when he had brought his wife and child to the West in search of somewhere to live, that particular cottage should have been empty.

Yet this all fitted into a pattern and had never surprised him; for on that first evening when he had walked to the cottage and had so hurriedly jumped back again into the field for fear of breaking in upon another’s peace he had known instinctively that he would come to live here; and that he would find and bring the one true lover whose troth would be plighted with his: whose truth, united with his, would resist the tricks of time. And, after all these years, he had come: the troth was plighted eternally; time had, and certainly would again and again, test this indisputable union of flesh and spirit whose validity lay open for all to see in a son; and he was – he knew it – happy.

Yet – ‘Again and again,’ he murmured as the sun toured slowly across the sky. Again and again time would test them. This very evening, perhaps. One had to be for ever on guard. However firm the link uniting them, there was, just precisely because of that link, a constant tug to snap it. Cruel and sharp and saddled with resentment these divisions had been, some too terrible to be remembered. It must happen no more, he told himself; never again. She was too beautiful, too secure in her universe, too serene in her inner detachment ever again to be submitted to the bitter misery of his own rebel self.

And now he had walked again across that field and was climbing the hedge, and only realized how tired and hungry he was, with no conclusions reached regarding the music he wished to write, and the sun setting in the clear autumn sky. She had lit a fire. He could see her through the window of the sitting-room, sitting by the small table with the remains of tea scattered round her, writing a letter. Probably to her mother, he said to himself. Then he jumped down into the garden in a curiously excited way. Near the open door were logs of wood, and a basket with green twine circling its rim.

On the ground was his saw, left where he had thrown it down that morning. He stooped to pick it up, then stood with it in his hand, staring at the window where the red firelight leapt in the lower room. For a moment it seemed to him that he was struggling to remember something, to recall an instantaneous image which had flashed in and out of his mind. He felt tormented by a question, and he did not know precisely what the question was.

Suddenly he turned his head to the hedge, thinking he had heard somebody there. He climbed to the top and looked across the field; but it was empty, very long and broad, with the greenhouses at one end shivering in the vivid colour of the sun. Then he turned back to look at the cottage and saw a white kitten, their own, sitting on a bit of wood by the open door and playing with its tail.

Upstairs, from one of the windows, came a tapping sound. He looked up and saw the little boy standing in the window-seat, trying to attract his attention with a cotton-reel he was tapping on the glass. For some reason he could not respond; he even felt irritated by the sound which had broken in upon the strange confusion of time in which he found himself. And he felt it was impossible to go into the cottage and interrupt his wife, though he knew she would be glad he had returned to her. But he could not go in. He had the most certain foreknowledge that if he did go in now he would quarrel violently with her. He would invent some excuse to anger him. For he was at war with himself; an intense battle was taking place inside him, and if he met her now he would only drag her into the conflict.

Crossing the field very quickly, his hand shading his eyes against the brilliant light, a burning impatient feeling sending him on, as though he were in pursuit of some enemy, he returned to the village and sat in the bar of the Trevelyan Arms, talking in an absent way to friends there, knowing his wife would be wondering where he was, reluctant to return home till something had been answered.

And now one question clarified itself from the muddle of his thoughts: what had he seen on the occasion of his first walk across the field, ten years ago? A child’s face painted on glass? (But
had
there been? Wasn’t he confusing the scenes?) A white kitten and a basket with green twine? (Again, was this
certain
?) A woman with golden hair writing by a wood fire? (Yes – surely he had seen her?) A man standing with a saw in his hand, watching the woman through the window – a man intensely happy and proud and full of peace in his soul whose vitality leapt towards the vitality in the woman and the children, born and unborn, as the wild flames of the first autumn fire leapt into the soot-encrusted chimney of the old cottage?

Oh – but had he seen that –
had
he?

Suddenly, from his seat in the now crowded bar, he rose to his feet. The words ‘Tyme Tryeth Troth’ stared him in the face. ‘The illusion we have made of time,’ he muttered, ‘mocks at and challenges the truth of eternal instant which is at the very heart of all of us.’ And then again he thought: a troth is plighted, two hands clasp in the eternal truth; this is not just something that once happened. Like the hands plighted upon the cross of man’s intolerable misery, this happened, was happening now. And the false fruit that man had eaten in the garden – was this the fruit of the great illusion? That self-wounding half-knowledge of existence and essence which had crucified man to the unfolding of seasons and the toll of the bell of midnight?

A strange desperate feeling seized him. He wished his lover were here now. For it was dark, it would take him half an hour to walk home, and in that time the urgency of what he wanted to say to her would be lost. Yet to hurry away from here when he had found no solution to his problem seemed impossible. Already he hesitated. Somebody was offering him a drink. He smiled, accepted it, began to chat. And then the question that he had asked once before came from him.