The Dark Labyrinth (13 page)

So much was easily told, but what interested Graecen was this: what should such a girl be doing with Greville's
Modern Poets
, in which his work was well represented? He could not approach the subject for a couple of days until he managed to see her alone. Then at last, one afternoon, he saw her lying alone in the deck-chair aft, and brought up the subject.

“The other day”, he said, “you were lying there with a book of poems.” (Miss Dale blushed scarlet, as if he had said something indecent.) Graecen went on: “You had it open at a poem which I myself wrote. I was so curious to know whether you read poetry for pleasure, or what you were doing with the book.” Miss Dale licked her lips and smiled.

“I'm trying to get my school cert.,” she said, “in order to get into the post office. You see, in my present work there's no old-age scheme, no pensions, nothing. In the post office, when you get to a certain age, you get a pension.” She said it with considerable middle-class pride. “I have no money of my own, you see.”

“But, good gracious,” said Graecen, both annoyed that he should be taught for the Oxford Locals, and flattered that he should be taught at all. “Good gracious me.” He often used expressions he had heard his mother use when he was a child. “So they are learning my verse in order to get jobs in the post office,” he told himself angrily. Miss Dale was looking confused.

“I should jolly well hope that a girl like you will get herself sensibly married instead of bothering about the post office,” said Graecen gallantly. To his annoyance, this seemed to dispose her to start crying again. He hated tearful women. She recovered her composure, however, with some effort. Whenever people spoke of marriage it made her remember Bob, after whose death she felt that her good looks, as well as whatever little courage she possessed, had gone for ever. As a matter of fact she remembered reading and re-reading Graecen's poem with an increasing sense of confusion and annoyance. Perhaps since he had written it.…

“I suppose”, she said, “you wouldn't care to help me a bit with my Litt. paper? I find the poems in that book so difficult.”

Was there ever an author who was not flattered by a request for an explanation? Perhaps. But Graecen was not he. He enjoyed himself a great deal in reading “The Winds of Folly” to Miss Dale in his best radio voice. He enjoyed even more dismantling it for her, showing the syntactical subtleties that held it together, the interior rhyme, the metrical felicities—in fact everything that made it one of the duller anthology pieces of our time. He was flattered at so attentive and modest a listener, and took Virginia Dale in hand. He not only explained his own work, but he explained also the work of his contemporaries—some of which he did not understand himself. “It will not be my fault”, he thought, “if the damned girl does not get a credit in English composition.”

They passed the coarse brown rock of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean.

The weather became milder, the air softer. The days of blueness began.

At Marseilles Campion came aboard with his rucksack and easel; his arrival was a not unwelcome surprise to Baird, who noticed that he had aged. “Fancy seeing you,” said Campion coming upon him as he was on his way down to the cabin he had wangled with the help of a shipping agent.

“You are the last person I expected to see,” said Baird, and accompanied him down to his cabin to help him unpack. “I wangled it,” said Campion crisply, unfastening his rucksack and pulling out a lot of dirty clothes, a tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush. He proceeded to clean his teeth and explain in little asides how he had managed to get aboard the
Europa
without troubling the purser or registering in the ordinary way. “I'm only going to Crete,” he said. “By the way, Baird, it will amuse you to know that I am still attached to the War Graves people. Not content with keeping me busy during the war and preventing me having my head blown off, they are keeping me busy in peace. I've got to paint a row of graves somewhere in Crete where half a score of idiots were interred after a gallant if unwise operation. Farcical, isn't it? But I'm painting like a fiend now. If only I didn't feel so much at the end of everything.” He sat down on the edge of the bunk and lit a cigarette. Then he took off his beret and absently combed his hair. “It's like getting farther and farther away from the human race—getting lost. Queer feeling.” Baird was interested. Campion whistled a couple of bars of a popular song and looked across at the stack of canvases on stretchers that lay in the corner of the cabin. “It's a dull world to live in,” he said at last, as if the impetus to frankness had been succeeded by a reticence more worthy of his listener. “What have you been up to?” he said, peering at Baird's medals. “Campaign medals I see. And the M.C. Well, my dear fellow, I have some campaign medals too. I wore them on the seat of my trousers last Armistice Day and coughed slightly at the Cenotaph during the silence.”

One's dislike for Campion was always halted, reflected Baird, by the memory of those innocent powerful paintings. Perhaps an artist was not made to be liked, but to be put up with. Or was it possible to be a great spirit on one plane, and to be at odds with the whole canon of accepted human belief, on another? Or rather, perhaps, was not the work part of the life—a sort of propaganda for it in which one could see the miserable limitations of the human mind? He did not like Campion. Did Campion like himself?

“I'm on the edge of something good,” Campion was saying. “Something bigger than I've done to date. And it always makes one feel ill at ease and anxious. I've felt awful about this trip—a premonition that something would happen.”

He got up abruptly and took his sketch block and a thick copying pencil. “Let's go up,” he said. “I've never seen the town from the sea.”

Graecen was filled with vague alarm at being introduced to Campion. The little man looked so cold and intense, and was so articulate; he radiated a kind of power which put one on the alert. His very glance was critical and divining. One did not feel quite safe. It was as if the small figure had condensed and crystallized its essential experiences of men, enabling it to bring summary judgments to bear upon them. He was mollified, however, by Campion's description of old Conklin as a moron. The article on
Syrinx
still rankled. “You probably know the man,” said Campion. “I don't but I used to keep a file of his criticisms—some of the things in it were just unbelievable. I remember once, for example, he began an article ‘If Dostoievski had lived today he would be classed as un-British as well as unstable. The persistent vein of cruelty in his work makes one fear that he was the kind of man who would shoot at a fox.'” Graecen laughed politely. He was glad that Campion found Conklin so third-rate as a critic. He was flattered when he found that Campion was doing a sketch of him as he sat reading. The nervous small fingers moved in spidery fashion over the paper, deft and yet cautious. The eyes had puckered into slits. Graecen, whose taste in painting and sculpture was far more dependable than his taste in books or people, knew and admired Campion's work. He, too, found himself wondering why so violently unorthodox a man should produce painting whose innocence and serene power seemed to be the antithesis of his troubled, obscure and rebellious nature.

That night Campion went to bed early, after taking three aspirins. It was always the same. He was upset at leaving Francesca behind. And yet he made a point of breaking off his relations with the woman of the moment with wounding suddenness. Hardly had the telegram arrived from London when he felt as if a cloud which had been obscuring his vision for weeks was removed. He must leave at once. Marseilles had become stale. He must walk out of the old life once again into the new. There were problems to be resolved. Crete would make an admirable theatre of operations. This decision was so easily, so suddenly made that he wondered why it was necessary for the telegram to come at all. Could he not have thought of it himself? No, life itself was binding: to have a woman or a studio was binding: it needed a jolt from outside sometimes. How should he tell Francesca, who had been his mistress for a year now? In order to assist his own decision to become determination, he walked across the cobbles and tramlines of the Rue Pigalle to where the shipping agent had his offices. The
Europa
would be in that night. It was really a holiday-cruise liner, but it was half empty; for a small consideration he could have a cabin.…

Francesca was busy in the kitchen among a litter of pans. He caught sight of her long coltish figure and beautiful legs as he shut the door and threw his beret on the table. She had, he guessed, spent the morning mending his clothes, about which he had made a row yesterday, and in trying to make him the little sesame cakes he had demanded. He sat down, a small and grim figure, at the table and studied the newspaper, reading with great deliberation the account of a murder. It was as if he had no other object in life than to sit there, his lips moving, as he spelt out the unfamiliar French words and let their meaning soak into his brain. “C'est toi, Campyon?” she called musically from the kitchen. He grunted. No one was ever allowed to call him anything but Campion. He laid down the paper and stared with a grave deliberate abstraction at the painting on the wall. It was one of the Aries paintings that Francesca had liked and had insisted on keeping. A peasant seated at the door of a cabin. A tree. It was a complete statement made with the utmost economy, the utmost concentration. What could Francesca like in it? He half-closed his eyes, the better to test the blue of the wall against the shell-pink, almost nacreous tone of the woman's dress. Still sitting thus, he cleared his throat, and said in a definite clear voice. “Francesca, je pars ce soir pour l‘Angleterre.” She came in to him, all concern, with a dish in her hands. He continued to look at the painting, focusing all his interest on it. She put down the dish and said: “Mais, Campyon.” He felt the faintest stirrings of compassion, mixed with an overwhelming disgust. Why the devil did one need women; or needing them, why the devil did one create dependencies that one could not satisfy? “I have to go,” he heard himself saying stonily. “Help me pack.” She moved across and taking his face between her hands she turned it towards her, fixing her great troubled eyes upon his two stony blue eyes. “Is it true?” she asked. You could never be sure. Campion was always pretending to leave her for ever whenever the evening meal was late. “My mother is dead,” said Campion—a remark which he felt was almost irresistibly funny; yet his voice preserved its leaden calmness. “I must leave tonight.” For a long moment they stared at one another. Then she bent down and kissed him on the mouth, carefully wiping away the lipstick mark with the corner of her apron. “It is not true,” she said slowly and sadly. “It is not true. You are leaving me.”

It seemed to him that all his life he had been enacting and re-enacting this scene, in dozens of different languages. Francesca was a charming and a beautiful creature, but she was no easier to shake off than had been the girl in Syria, or the girl in Paris. Or was she? Francesca sat down opposite him and put her chin on her elbows. He turned his gaze back to the painting and began to study it with complete absorption. They sat for a long time thus. Then she burst into tears, which she quickly stifled in the folds of her apron. Campion winced. Now it was coming.

“Why?” she said.

“My mother is dead,” he said, suppressing a temptation to giggle.

“Your mother died years ago. You said so.”

“I lied.”

“Is it because the food was late?”

“No.”

“Because I did not mend your sandals?”

“No.”

“Is it because you are tired of me?”

“It is because my mother died,” said Campion with a freezing dignity. He took out the War Office telegram and laid it on the table. The pose of her head with its long throat was beautiful as she bent down to study it. Francesca was incapable of reading English, so there was no fear that she would realize what was in the telegram. He fell to studying her pose with the same concentration as he had studied the picture on the wall. His eye indulged itself with the sweet firm line of the chin and the broad mouth. She had been a wonderful bedfellow. And an excellent girl to have about the house. Why did he not take her with him? It was not because he was tired of Francesca as a person. It was because he was tired of all women—fed up with the whole race of women he told himself. As for Francesca, if he had met her as he was getting off the boat the other end he would in all probability start all over again with her. She was a fine creature. But he just could not be bothered. As he sat on the uncomfortable wicker chair he felt his freedom oozing away second by second. Why could not women realize that all he wanted of them was their friendship—and their cooking? It was reasonable enough. They considered that by making love with you they had the right to tie you down to a small orbit of domestic life. Campion longed suddenly to become a domestic man—a husband, a father, a churchwarden. Anything to break the monotony of this life of change. But not here; not now; not with Francesca.

He got up suddenly and began to pack while she sat with her face red from the heat of the kitchen stove, crying very softly and repeating to herself in a small voice, “J'comprends pas pourquoi, J'comprends pas pourquoi.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Campion in his own mind, as he packed his few belongings. His mind was already busy with the thought of escape, escape across the sea to Crete. He had never been to Crete. He stifled a temptation to whistle. Francesca was not making as much of a scene as he had imagined she would; if his attention wandered she might get really angry. Hence it was wiser not to whistle or sing until he was in the street. And yet, how lovely she was; what a beautiful animal with her tawny skin and brown eyes.