The Man Within (6 page)

Andrews believed afterwards that in another moment he would have stepped out and greeted Carlyon, but as he stared into the orange glow, fear was given an opportunity to assert itself over friendship. A shadow for an instant striped vertically the glow and vanished again without a
sound
. Someone had entered the mist. Andrews cowered back against the hedge and listened. There was complete stillness. Andrews felt certain that somewhere within a few feet Carlyon also was listening, striving perhaps to catch those heartbeats which sounded so betrayingly loud. Then a stone was kicked and rumbled slowly a little way down the hill. A second shadow broke the glow and disappeared.

It was probably this second, more careless shadow, that Andrews next heard feeling along the hedge, with the noise of a small breeze through stubble. Progress was slow in a pathetic effort to be silent, pathetic with the pathos of a hippopotamus treading cautiously on dry twigs. The pathos, however, did not appeal to Andrews, who realized very clearly that in a few minutes he would inevitably be discovered. He could not fly without betraying himself, and his only hope was to step soundlessly into the middle of the road. But where was the first shadow? Carlyon? It needed a courage he was not accustomed to exercise to remove his back from the friendly firmness of the hedge and place himself defenceless in the road. He feared that if he moved he would come in contact with Carlyon. Only the slow pressure of necessity symbolized by the cautious crackling in the hedge creeping closer to him at every moment forced him at last to move.

The two paces which he took into the road seemed soundless even to himself, but he was not comforted. He felt completely exposed. Although he could see nothing, he felt, standing there ridiculously with slack, impotent arms, that anyone could see him. He thought he could hear them coming towards him and had a wild longing to cry out to them, ‘Stop, stop, stop, please stop.’ There was a game which he had played at school, where one boy, too often himself, stood with back turned counting ten, while the other boys advanced to touch his back. Andrews had perhaps forgotten, but he had never lost, the strain of waiting, hurriedly counting, for a hand to fall upon his back. So now
he
began to count in haste ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,’ as though there might be some remission for him at ten. He did not know why he counted and there was no remission.

He had a knife he remembered, in one pocket, but he could not remember which, and he did not dare to look. He was afraid even to raise a hand, lest it should make a sound in passing through the air. He let his arms hang limply at his side, like the arms of a doll empty of saw-dust. After a considerable time the rustle in the hedge ceased. Somewhere behind a whispering began, too faint for him to catch a word. Then there was a rustle in the hedge on the opposite side of the road, more rapid, almost perfunctory. Then that too ceased and the whispering returned and hovered elusively in the mist. Sometimes he thought it came from his right side, sometimes from his left, at other times from behind him. It grew more rapid, seemed to beat desperately up and down, like a lost bird in a room. He began to think that he could distinguish words. Several times he imagined his own name ‘Andrews’. Hope stirred in his heart that Carlyon would give up the search and take his escape for granted. As though to confirm this hope the whispers grew more and more careless. He could distinguish phrases. ‘Somewhere here,’ and ‘I’d swear to his step.’

After an interval Carlyon’s voice blew like a melancholy wind through the mist. ‘Andrews,’ it said, ‘Andrews.’ And then ‘Why are you frightened? What’s the matter with you? It’s Carlyon, merely Carlyon.’

The fascination of the voice! It seemed to hold for Andrews everything which he so much desired – peace, friendship, the end of a useless struggle. He wanted to say, ‘Here I am, Carlyon,’ and lie down there in the mist and sleep; and wake to find Carlyon sitting beside him talking of this and that with brooding kindliness, drowning the nauseating fatigue of danger, the acrid smell of smoke, the monotony of winds with the cool beauty of his voice.
Above
the eternally reiterated clatter of feet on deck, the beat, beat, beat of flapping canvas, the curses, movement, scurry, unrest; below Carlyon’s ape-like face transfigured with peace –

Ye have been fresh and green,

Ye have been filled with flowers,

And ye the walks have been,

Where maids have spent their hours.

‘Andrews, Andrews,’ with a soft melancholy. ‘I must not, I must not,’ he said to himself, sobbing hysterically and yet with an effort retaining silence, though the effort was a tearing pain in throat and chest. ‘That’s over.’ Over for ever friendship, poetry, silence at the heart of noise; remained fear and a continual flight. And he had intended to win peace.

Carlyon, he realized, had not spoken now for many moments. He was surrounded again by silence save for the drip, drip, drip of the laden boughs. Space that had closed in on him during the sound of the voice calling spread away again on every side. He was alone in a wilderness of white mist hopelessly barren of companionship. He waited listening for a little while longer and then stumbled back into the mist the way that he had come. He thought that Carlyon had been deceived or had given up the search. It did not occur to him that Carlyon might wait patiently and listen to find the direction which he took. Andrews ran crookedly along invisible ruts with a slow strange lightening of the heart.

HE BECAME AWARE
of the cottage again by the red glow of a hidden flame, which penetrated a little way into the white blanket of mist, with a promise of warmth and calm companionship and food. Fear had not dispelled his hunger, it had but overlaid it with a more fierce emotion. Now with the slow return of peace he remembered what his belly desired. He was not angry nor frightened now, only a little ill at ease. He advanced cautiously, with one arm of his spirit raised to ward off a blow.

Through the window he peered into a room deprived of daylight. A large fire burnt with a kind of subdued ferocity and its red rays, instead of bearing a light, spilt blacker pools of darkness in the room. Only in a small semi-circle before it was a space cleared, and the dark pushed back from there formed a more sombre and concentrated wall on the farther side. Squatting on the floor in the cleared space Elizabeth darned with a metallic flash – flash of the needle like sparks from a gaseous coal.

Her figure started so distinctly from the shadows, distorted though it was by the glass, that Andrews did not realize that his own face was veiled. He tapped with fingers which he intended to sound gentle and reassuring. She looked up and remained staring at him with a mixture of fear, perplexity and doubt, and let the darning fall upon her lap. He smiled but was unaware that she could not see his smile, or glimpsed at most a vague grimace from almost invisible lips. He tapped again and saw her lift whatever it was she had been darning to her breast and tightly press it to her. How slim, he thought, as she rose and stood (a dark Elizabeth, he wondered again) where the flicker of flames played up and down her body like the dazed, groping
fingers
of a lover. Her hand pressed so hard on her breast that it appeared to be reaching for the heart to hold it and still its beats. Only then did Andrews realize that she could not see him clearly, and that she was afraid. But at the moment when he prepared to reassure her, the small quiver of fear left her lips and she passed from the zone of the firelight and advanced to the window through the shadows.

He heard her fingers feeling not very certainly for the catch. Then the window swung open and he stepped away. ‘Is it really you back?’ she whispered, and he could not tell from her voice whether she was afraid or glad.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘it’s me.’

She said, ‘Oh, you,’ in a flat, disappointed tone. ‘What do you want?’ He became afraid that she would again shut the window, leaving him in the cold, deprived of the tossing fire.

‘Won’t you let me in?’ he asked. ‘You needn’t be afraid.’ And when she laughed ironically, he began to speak rapidly. ‘I did all that you told me,’ he said. ‘I got rid of all those wretched villagers.’

‘Was it necessary to come here to tell me that?’ she asked.

‘I want shelter,’ he said with despairing simplicity. He heard her leave the window and unbolt the door. ‘Come in then if you must,’ she called to him.

He came and moved at once to the fire, his momentary sentiment drowned in the mere desire to be warm, to drink heat with every pore of his body. He felt that he could with small encouragement have lifted the burning coals and pressed them to his breast. He twisted his figure into odd distorted shapes, so that every part of him might receive a blessing from gracefully gesticulating hands of flame.

‘Have you any food?’ he asked. With the cold acquiescence which he had feared she went and fetched a loaf of bread, and would have placed it on the table had he not stretched out his hands for it. Still crouching over the fire he
broke
off portions with his fingers. Only when his hunger was partly satisfied something uneasily stirring in his mind made him apologize.

‘I haven’t had food for fifteen hours,’ he said. ‘I was hungry and cold out there. It’s good of you …’

She came into the circle of firelight. ‘There’s no reason why I should shut you out,’ she said. ‘I’ve been alone. You are better than no one, even you.’

Warmed by the fire, hunger quenched by bread, he began to grow jocular.

‘You oughtn’t to find any difficulty in getting company,’ he laughed. ‘And who was it you expected to find outside the window?’

‘We’ve buried him,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose that he’ll return.’

Andrews looked up in astonishment at a pale, set face, touched with a reluctant grief. ‘You don’t mean,’ he asked in awe-struck astonishment, ‘that you thought …’

‘Why shouldn’t I think that?’ she asked, not with indignation but with candid questioning. ‘He’s only a few days dead.’

‘But they don’t rise again,’ Andrews said in the kind of solemn whisper which he had used as a boy in the school chapel.

‘Their spirits do,’ she answered, and her white, still face continued to question him.

‘Do you believe in all that?’ he asked, not in mockery, but in a curiosity tinctured with longing.

‘Of course; you can read it in the Bible.’

‘Then,’ he hesitated a moment, ‘if men are not quite dead, when we bury them, we can still hurt them, make them suffer, revenge ourselves.’

‘You must be bad,’ she said fearfully, ‘to think of that. But don’t forget that they can hurt us, too.’

She came up to the fire and stood beside him, and he shifted a little under the clear, courageous gaze of her eyes.
‘I’m
not afraid of you now,’ she said, ‘because you are just a person I know, but when you came last night you were a stranger and I was afraid. But then I thought to myself that he,’ and she pointed to the table as though the coffin still lay there, ‘would not let me be harmed. He was a bad man, but he wanted me, and he’d never let anyone else get me.’

‘I never meant any harm to you,’ Andrews muttered, and then added with a convulsive pleading: ‘It was only fear that made me come. You other people never seem to understand fear. You expect everyone to be brave like yourself. It’s not a man’s fault whether he’s brave or cowardly. It’s all in the way he’s born. My father and mother made me. I didn’t make myself.’

‘I never blamed you,’ she protested. ‘But you always seem to leave out God.’

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘That’s all on a par with your spirits. I don’t believe in that stuff. Though I’d like to believe in the spirits, that we could still hurt a man who is dead,’ he added with a mixture of passion and wistfulness.

‘You can’t if they are in heaven,’ she commented.

‘There’s no danger of that with the man I hate,’ Andrews laughed angrily. ‘It’s curious, isn’t it, how one can hate the dead. It makes one almost believe your stuff. If they are transparent like the air, perhaps we breathe them in.’ He screwed up his mouth as though at a bad taste.

She watched him curiously. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘where have you been since we buried him?’

He began to speak with resentful anger. ‘I told you it was only fear that drove me to you last night, didn’t I? Well, I don’t want to trouble you any more.’

‘And fear brought you back again?’

‘Yes – at least not entirely.’ Looking down at her dark hair, pale face and calm eyes seemed to infuriate him. ‘You women,’ he said, ‘you are all the same. You are always on your guard against us. Always imagine that we are out to get you. You don’t know what a man wants.’

What do you want?’ she asked and added with a practicality which increased his meaningless anger. ‘Food? I have some more bread in a cupboard.’

He made a despairing motion with his hand, which she interpreted as a refusal. ‘We get tired of our own kind,’ he said, ‘the coarseness, hairiness – you don’t understand. Sometimes I’ve paid street women simply to talk to them, but they are like the rest of you. They don’t understand that I don’t want their bodies.’

‘You’ve taught us what to think,’ she interrupted with a faint bitterness breaking the peace of her mind.

He took no notice of what she said. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘a reason why I came back. You can laugh at me. I was homesick for here.’

He turned his back on her. ‘I’m not making love to you. It wasn’t you. It was just the place. I slept here and I hadn’t slept before for three days.’ He waited with shoulders a little hunched for her laughter.

She did not laugh and after a little he turned. She had been gazing at his back. ‘Aren’t you amused?’ he asked ironically. His relations with her seemed necessarily compounded of suspicion. When he first came he had been suspicious of her acts and now he was suspicious of her thoughts.

‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘whom you were frightened of and why I like you.’ Her eyes wandered down his body from face to feet and stayed at his right heel. ‘You’ve worn your stockings out,’ she said simply, but the way in which she turned the words on her tongue till they came out with a rounded sweetness gave to their simplicity a hidden significance.