The Dark Labyrinth (23 page)

They walked together up and down the still courtyard. Baird admired the new lamp in the chapel, the pots of basil, and the vegetable patch. The three other monks who shared the old man's monastic solitude were asleep. “I am very happy,” said the old man. “So very happy. I have never spent my time to better advantage. I see no one. I think of nothing. I pray a little and sleep a lot. As for the guns you mentioned, I will tell you about it so that you can reassure the citizens of London. There is no thought of revolution here. It is business only. I buy them cheap from the Jews in Palestine and sell them at a profit to the Jews of Tripoli. We are happily placed for communications here and recently some of the bravest seamen have come back to their villages. It is not a great profit, but it is a profit—and, of course, it is always a pleasure to make a profit from the Jews. Are you satisfied?”

Baird was glad that the whole subject had come into the open; it enabled him to compliment the Abbot on his honesty, when the old man knew well enough that for ten pounds down any peasant would have furnished the required information. They walked, their arms amiably linked, and Baird found himself once more admiring those eagle's features from which every trace of earthly grossness seemed to have been purged, listening to that musical-assured voice. The Abbot was a philosopher whose judgment occasionally foundered in his cupidity.

The old man's daughter came and handed him a bunch of spring anemone and kissed him.

“Come,” said the Abbot. “You must stay tonight at least with us. We have a lot to say to each other. You shall have Niko's little room.”

Together they mounted the long white staircase of wood to the terrace. Baird could hear snoring from behind a closed door. Brilliant dragon-flies scouted the flowers. The sea shook itself and settled into sleep once more.

The small white cell was spotless. It contained a bed, two vivid oleographs, a table and a chair. The window looked clear out on to the sea. “I will send you a couple of blankets. It must be very primitive after what you are used to, but it is all we have.”

Baird lay down on the bed and said: “Thank God, Abbot, for the Mediterranean basin. Do you still bathe at the point? I should like to try and get brown all over again.”

“After you have slept,” said the old man tenderly, shaking hands with him again and smiling. The little girl came in bearing a pitcher of fresh water and a bowl. “Ah, Calypso,” said Baird, “you are becoming a woman of the house.” She smiled and withdrew again, but not before the Abbot had pulled her pigtails and called her a werewolf-child. “In ten years' time,” he said proudly, “there won't be a prettier girl in Crete.”

“By that time”, said Baird, “we shall be fighting the Russians or the Chinese.”

The old man sat upon the chair and threw one leg over the other. He gazed earnestly at Baird for a long time without speaking. “There's something else as yet,” he said at last, with all his old shrewdness. “That is in your mind to ask me. Something you have come to find out.”

“Yes,” said Baird. “It's not important.”

“At the heart of the honeycomb lies the sweetness,” said the Abbot oracularly. “What can it be?”

He listened attentively while Baird told him of his dream; of the reappearance of Böcklin in his mind; of the visits to Hogarth. Somehow he found it very simple to express the basis of Hogarth's teaching to the old man. He nodded all the time. It was surely the first person he had met, thought Baird, to whom Hogarth's peculiar doctrines were not unfamiliar or downright insane. When he spoke of Hogarth's suggestion that he should return and dig up Böcklin and lay his body in consecrated ground, the Abbot John slapped his knee heavily and said: “This man is a very wise man. A very wise man. In this way your conscience would clear itself and the dream would lift.”

“But it has lifted anyway,” said Baird excitedly. “In fact, it has lifted by a miracle. For Böcklin is not there—is not anywhere, unless you have moved him.”

The Abbot shook his head. “Unless”, said Baird, “this sudden feeling of liberation is false. Unless I dream of him again. But I feel as if a miracle had happened; as if he had never existed.”

The Abbot leaned forward and patted his arm reassuringly. “You will see for yourself in time,” he said. “Now I am going to leave you for an hour's sleep. Then we shall walk down to the sea together like in the old times.”

Baird fell asleep as he was leaning down to undo his boots.

In the Darkness

F
or a time she sat in the darkness and tried to shake Fearmax awake, but after a while it became clear to her that he must be dead. The dampness of his clothes conveyed the horrible suggestion of blood flowing from serious wounds. His hands were cold and clenched. Miss Dombey had lost her little torch in the confusion, and she groped at his bony face in the darkness, uttering little wails of terror and supplication. “Mr. Fearmax,” she cried. “Mr. Fearmax.” There was no response. She got up at last and walked slowly down the narrow corridor; she was beginning to feel the staleness of the air, to wonder whether they were not bricked into a tunnel from which there was no escape. She was still moaning under her breath. Her hands outstretched like a sleep-walker she proceeded step by step. When she had gone some twenty paces in this manner her fuddled wits came to life and she remembered that there was a box of matches in her coat. With trembling fingers she cast back her tweed overcoat and took the little box out. The first match shone for a second along an empty black passage-way and went out. The second burned a little steadier. The corridor seemed to have become larger, the ceiling higher. Strange reverberations still shuddered through the length and breadth of the stone honeycomb; dust hung in the unbreathed air. The light went out.

Miss Dombey's mind was filled with a confusion of panic-stricken images in which all continuity was lost; past and present mingled freely. Perhaps
this
was the Second Coming she had been so assiduously advertising for so long? She saw the Guardian's face, with its pale attenuated lines, engraved upon the darkness before; saw Mr. Sowerby peering through his steel-rimmed spectacles at the Wigmore Hall. She struck another match in her nerveless fingers, and then another. She had concentrated so completely upon the death of the world and its summary judgment that she was totally unable to decrease the compass of her thoughts enough for the contemplation of her own personal death. Numbly, with chattering teeth, she went forward, without a plan, lighting match after match until the box was empty. Then she sat down in the darkness and began to weep. What would Andrew, her brother, say? She had not seen him for years. He had been in Quetta with the Army.

Growing up in her mind there came a feeling that perhaps some sort of summing-up, some sort of clue to her whole life's activities, might be disentangled from this terrible accident which had befallen her. Yet what? She saw her life stretching away, incidents appearing and dissolving before her eyes as meaningless as Chinese idiograms. She was back in the mission-house at Hwang-Tu. Her father was talking about the mystery of the Cross to a group of Chinese children. “To settle your differences with your own soul,” he was saying in that rich deep voice. His clothes smelt of cheroots, his silver hair played on his neck. Her fingers closed absently upon the little phial of sleeping-tablets in her pocket and she remembered Dr. Andrews, looking over the top of his glasses at her, warning her not to take more than …

She heard the dull roar of the minotaur sounding in the depths ahead. The noise passed her in the damp heavy air, almost like an object of weight and substance. She opened the bottle and shook out the little tablets into her palm. Something at the farther end of the corridor moved, a vague shape of darkness upon darkness. She shouted “Hullo! Anyone there?” but her empty voice was flung back at her from the stony throat of the tunnel in little flat echoes.

She swallowed them one by one, remembering how adept she had become at swallowing pills without any water. Malaria had taught her that during the last visit to Egypt. It was with something that bore a recognizable resemblance to relief that she lay down on the cold stone of the corridor wrapped in her coat.

Now she was walking once more across the paddy-fields, hand in hand with her father. Small clouds of thistledown floated in the sky above the river. At the door of the temple a little old man was sitting very softly carving upon a peach-stone; the brooch was one that her father had given her. She lost it one day walking across the wet meadows near Horsham. Search as she might, she could never discover where. It was like the severance of a link in time; she had been cut off from her father by that far more completely than by his own death in China years before. Cut off from her own childhood, that term of happiness and tenderness which she was never to know again once the sea was crossed and Dover reached. She remembered the silent reaches of the lock, the convoy of swans sailing upstream, the yellow kingcups standing attentively by while she walked backwards and forwards, searching and weeping.

Miss Dombey sat up for a moment and opened her eyes. She knew now, for the first time, with complete accuracy, that she was going to die. The familiar sluggish throb of her heart, its strange drugged rhythm had conveyed the information to her. In a sense she was no longer afraid of the labyrinth, since it was no longer the labyrinth that was killing her. Ah, but this was not the martyr's death she had dreamed about; it was something small and irremediable, lacking even the small logic of her faith and beliefs.

She did not wish to think of God, yet she supposed that someone in her position ought to be praying. “Oh God,” she began accordingly, repeating the formulae that stretched away on all sides of her like well-trodden paths, “Why have I never really believed in You?”

Even through her drowsiness she recognized this as a very remarkable beginning to a prayer; yet the sense of something lacking, even in this confession, persisted. Father, Son and Holy Ghost—what did they mean? They rattled about inside her mind like nutmegs in a tin. Yet over and above it all she felt the emanations of her father; her father reading from the big black book; her father preaching; climbing on to his knee to let him cherish her and rub his warm palms upon the back of her small neck. In some vague way the Second Coming had been designed as a plot to bring him back. It was in the shadow of this immense Imago that Miss Dombey fell asleep at last.…

Fearmax, for his part, awoke with a large lump on the top of his head, and the feeling of having been involved in an earthquake. For a long time he lay quite still, moving his arms and feet gently to see if they were intact. Apart from the contusion upon his head, and the feeling of sickness he could trace no other infirmity due to the adventure. He had fallen sideways, so that his body rested upon his mackintosh, in whose pockets he felt the hard edges of the carton containing his lunch. He lay for a long time staring into the blackness, every nerve relaxed, wondering what he should do next. His last coherent memory was of the guide planing through space towards him astride an enormous boulder. What had happened? The debris, perhaps, had pushed him to one side, down this stone chute. Slowly he sat up, groaning more in anticipation of broken limbs than in any real discomfort. His head, however, throbbed from the blow; but did not appear to be bleeding. His feet were chilled to the bone from the large pool of water in which he had been lying. He picked up the sodden mackintosh and groped for the box of matches he knew he had been carrying. In the little yellow spurt of flame his eye caught the glimmer of something on the ground not three paces away. It was his torch, and picking it up with trembling fingers, he pressed the button, relieved to see once more the powerful yellow beam without whose aid he would have been as helpless as a blind man.

He turned it first upon the blocked passage-way behind, examining the great mound of stones and mud which had been forced like a cork into the neck of a bottle; before him, however, the corridor stretched away into infinity. What was he to do? Fearmax felt a strange calm descend upon him, a sense of well-being and relaxation. It was as if there were nothing more to wish for, and nothing to fear—a resolution had been made in terms of destiny. He must walk as fast and as far as he could, in the hope of finding an issue. But first he sat down and ate, balancing his torch on his knee to do so. It was a welcome pause, too, for he had not fully collected his wits. He noticed the wet footmarks leading from the puddle with a sudden start; he had not been alone, then. But who had left him like that, without a word, and walked off down the corridor? The footprint was small enough to be that of a woman.

Fearmax bolted the rest of his food in his excitement and set off down the corridor, stopping at intervals to shout “Hullo!” Hope sprang up in his breast at the thought that he was not alone in the labyrinth. But as the corridors multiplied and ramified, stretching away into infinity, he became despondent. How could one find anyone in this maze? It was possible, too, that he was only going in a circle.

He passed through a cavern into which the blinding blue sky peered and threw up startling images of volcanic rock, blue, gold and green, which covered the walls like dried sealing-wax. Fearmax looked longingly at the sky, raising his thin arms and shouting until the echoes wheeled down over him like a flock of exhausted birds. Ten feet of rope was all he needed to gain his liberty. Yet it would be fatal to linger.

He started off once more at a great pace. At least if he could reach the river they had crossed it would be something, but cavern led to dry cavern, tunnel to tunnel, until he felt completely dazed and bewildered. Several times, too, he stumbled and bruised his ankles, for the going was rough and the surfaces uneven.

Now gradually his pace slackened and he became more composed. He had found a battered cigar in his coat-pocket and the rich smoke soothed his nerves. In his mind he found himself composing sentences which, if he were to escape from the labyrinth, would find a place in the book he planned to write. The theme was a simple one and owed a good deal to Hogarth; he was writing a treatise upon the psychic mind—its predisposition to epilepsy and schizophrenia. It was to be a guide to the mediums of the future. “To deal with evidence that cannot be reconciled to the body and canons of everyday science has been the task of all independent minds since the beginning of history. It is no less the task of the individual in whose experience must inevitably arise emotions or thoughts which are neither rational nor commonplace. The body of work left us by men like Blake or Nostradamus.…” He bumped his head on a ledge and stopped to swear. “Madness, therefore, must be a conditional term in our judgment of them.” His torch picked up arch after arch, corridor after corridor. The labyrinth seemed to have no end.