The Man Within (7 page)

‘They are not of silk,’ he said, still seeking for disguised mockery.

She held out a hand which she had kept pressed to her side. ‘Here is a stocking,’ she said; ‘see if it will fit you.’

He took it from her as cautiously as if it had been a
strange
reptile and turned it over and over. He saw that it had been partly darned and remembered how he had seen her from the window working in the firelit space.

‘You were mending this,’ he said, ‘when I came to the window.’ She made no answer and he examined it again. ‘A man’s stocking,’ he commented.

‘It was his,’ she replied.

He laughed. ‘Do your spirits wear stockings?’ he asked.

She clenched and unclenched her hands, as one nervously wrought up by another’s stupidity. ‘I had to do something,’ she murmured rapidly as though her breath had been nearly exhausted by a too long and fatiguing race. ‘I couldn’t just sit.’ She turned her back on him and walked to the window and leant her forehead against it, as though seeking coolness or perhaps support.

Andrews turned and turned the stocking in his hand. Once at the window Elizabeth’s figure was motionless. He could not even catch the sound of her breathing. A gap of shadow separated them, and the flickering of the flames made useless but persistent attempts to cross it. He was shamed by the patient obstinacy of their compassion, and was temporarily rapt from his own fear, hatred and self-abasement, touched for a lightning instant with a disinterested longing for self-sacrifice. He would not cross that bridge of shadows, for he feared that if he touched her he would lose the sense of something unapproachably beautiful, and his own momentary chivalry would vanish before the coward, the bully and the lustful sentimentalist to whom he was accustomed. For that instant his second criticising self was silent; indeed he was that self.

He was on the point of making some stumbling gesture of contrition, when the coward in him leaped up and closed his mouth. Be careful, it cautioned him. You are a fugitive; you must not tie yourself. Even as he surrendered to that prompting he regretted the surrender. He knew that for a few seconds he had been happy, with the same happiness,
but
a stronger, as he had gained momentarily in the past from music, from Carlyon’s voice, from a sudden sense of companionship with other men.

The mist which had been white was turning grey. The real dark was approaching, but it made no apparent difference to the room. Andrews, feeling the comfortable warmth of the fire behind him, wondered how Carlyon was faring in a colder and surely more alien world. And yet was it more alien? Carlyon had the friendship and the trust of his two fellow fugitives. He was not alone. The old self-pity began to crawl back into Andrews’ heart, as he watched the girl’s motionless back.

‘Can we light some candles,’ he asked, ‘and make this room more cheerful?’

‘There are two candlesticks on the table,’ she said, keeping her forehead pressed to the window, ‘and two on the dresser. You can light them if you like.’

Andrews made a spill from a playbill, which he found in his pocket, and lit it at the fire. Then he passed from candle to candle making little aspiring peaks of flame pierce the shadows. Slowly they rose higher and small haloes formed round their summits, a powdery glow like motes in sunlight. Cloaked from all draughts by the surrounding mist they burnt straight upwards, tapering to a point as fine as a needle. The shadows were driven back into the corners of the room where they crouched darkly like sulking dogs rebuked.

When Andrews had lit the last candle he turned and saw that Elizabeth was watching him. Joy and grief were both moods able to pass lightly across her face without disturbing the permanent thoughtfulness of her eyes, which seemed to regard life with a gaze devoid of emotion. The candles now tipped her face with gaiety. She made no reference to her short surrender to grief, but clapped her hands, so that he stared at her amazed by this rapid change of mood.

‘I like this,’ she said, ‘we’ll have tea. I’m glad to have
someone
to talk to – even you,’ and she moved to the dresser and began to take out plates, cups, a loaf of bread, some butter, a kettle which she filled and put upon the fire. With proud and reverent fingers she drew a caddy from the dresser, handling it as reverently as a gold casket.

‘I haven’t had tea,’ he said slowly, ‘like this since I left home … I’ve wanted it though.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s queer that you should be treating me like this, like a friend.’

Pulling the only two chairs which the room held up to the fire, she regarded him with sombre amusement. ‘Am I treating you like a friend?’ she asked. ‘I can’t tell. I’ve never had one.’

He had a sudden wish to tell her everything, from what he was fleeing and for what cause, but caution and a feeling of peace restrained him. He wished to forget it himself and cling only to this growing sense of intimacy, of two minds moving side by side, and watch the firelight gleam downwards into the dark amber of the tea.

‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘how often I’ve longed for a tea like this. In a rough, hurrying sort of life with men, one longs sometimes for refinement – and tea seems to me a symbol of that – peace, security, women, idle talk – and the night outside.’

‘A loaf of bread,’ she said, ‘no jam, no cakes.’

That’s nothing,’ he brooded over the thick china cup, which he held awkwardly with an unaccustomed hand.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. ‘You don’t belong. You should be a student, I think. You look like a man who day-dreams.’

‘Doesn’t even a student need courage?’ he questioned bitterly. ‘And I’m not a dreamer. I hate dreams.’

‘Is there anything you care for or want?’ She watched him as though he were a new and curious animal.

‘To be null and void,’ he said without hesitation.

‘Dead?’

The sound of the word seemed to draw his eyes to the window, which stared now on complete darkness.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not that.’ He gave a small shiver and spoke again. ‘When music plays, one does not see or think: one hardly hears. A bowl – and the music is poured in until there is no “I”, I
am
the music.’

‘But why, why,’ she asked, ‘did you ever come to live like this?’ and with a small gesture of her hand she seemed to enclose his fear, his misery, his fugitive body and mind.

‘My father did it before me,’ he replied.

‘Was that all?’ she asked.

‘No, I was fascinated,’ he said. ‘There’s a man I know with a voice as near to music as any voice I’ve ever heard,’ he hesitated and then looked up at her, ‘except for yours.’

She paid no attention to the compliment, but frowning a little at the fire nipped her lip between small sharp teeth.

‘Can’t he help you now that you are in trouble?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you go to him?’

He stared at her in amazement. He had forgotten that she was ignorant of his story and of his flight from Carlyon, and because he had forgotten, her remark came to him with the force of a wise suggestion. ‘Andrews, Andrews,’ an echo of a soft melancholy voice reached him. ‘Why are you frightened? It’s Carlyon, merely Carlyon.’ The voice was tipped always with the cool, pure poetry which it loved. Why, indeed, should he not go to Carlyon and confess the wrong he had done and explain? That voice could not help but understand. He would go as the woman who had sinned to Christ, and the comparison seemed to him to carry no blasphemy, so strong was the impulse to rise and go to the door and go out into the night.

‘Is it of him you are frightened?’ she asked, watching the changes in his face. He had thought her voice also near to music, and now he sat still, watching with a strange disinterestedness the two musics come in conflict for the mastery of his movements. One was subtle, a thing of suggestions
and
of memories; the other, plain, clear-cut, ringing. One spoke of a dreamy escape from reality; the other was reality, deliberately sane. If he stayed sooner or later he must face this fear; if he went he left calmness, clarity, instinctive wisdom for a vague and uncertain refuge. How would Carlyon greet his confession? Carlyon was a romantic with his face in the clouds, who hated any who gave him contact with a grubby earth. Andrews remembered suddenly, his mind still drifting between the two differing musics, another Carlyon, a Carlyon who had shot one of his own men in the back, because on a cargo-running night the man had raped a young girl. No trouble followed, for the man had been a coward and unpopular in a crew of men, who with all their faults and villainies, had the one virtue of courage. Andrews remembered Carlyon’s face, as he stepped back from the dark bundle where it lay on a beach silvered by the moon. The thoughtful eyes which peered from the ape-like skull had been suffused with disgust and a kind of disillusionment. They had re-embarked with the utmost speed, lest the shot should have aroused the revenue men, but Carlyon was the last to enter the boat. He came with evident reluctance like a man who had left a lover on land, and he had indeed left a lover, whom he did not see again for many weeks, a dear and romantic illusion of adventure.

‘Andrews, Andrews,’ the voice had lost its charm. That music was spell-less, for Andrews remembered now that it was with the same soft melancholy regret that Carlyon had spoken to the offending smuggler. Pointing out to the sea he had said, ‘Look there. Can you tell me what that is?’ and the man had turned his back to scan a waste of small ridges, which formed, advanced, fell and receded, and continued so to form, advance, fall and recede, as his eyes glazed in death.

‘I can’t go to him,’ he said aloud.

‘But if he came to you?…’ she asked, as though she
intended
to make up a quarrel between two schoolboys on their dignity.

‘No, no,’ he said, and suddenly rose with a poignant, stabbing sense of fear. ‘What’s that?’ he whispered. Elizabeth leant forward in her chair listening. ‘You are imagining things,’ she said.

With unexpected brutality he struck her hand, as it lay on the table, with his fist, so that she caught her breath with pain. ‘Can’t you whisper?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to tell the whole world there’s someone here? There, didn’t you hear that?’ And this time she thought that she could hear a very faint stir of gravel no louder than a rustle of leaves. She nodded her head slowly. ‘There’s someone moving on the path,’ she murmured. The hand which he had struck stiffened into a small and resolute fist.

‘For God’s sake,’ Andrews muttered, staring round him. She jerked a finger at the door which led to the shed where he had slept the previous night. He half ran to it on tiptoe, and as he looked back, he saw that she had again taken up the stocking which he had dropped unused upon the floor. The red glow of the fire struck upwards and tinged with colour her serene, pale face. Then he closed the door and stood in the dark of the shed, giving occasional rapid shivers like a man in a fever.

The next sound he heard was Carlyon’s voice. Its suddenness pierced him. He had expected at least to have been given warning, and time to brace his knees and heart, if by no more than a knock or the click of a lifting latch.

It penetrated to him through keyhole and crack, kindly and reassuring. ‘Forgive me,’ it said. ‘I’m completely lost in this fog.’

Countering the deceptive music with its own clear tone, Elizabeth’s voice struck against Carlyon’s like sword against sword. ‘Why didn’t you knock?’ it said.

Had she realized Andrews wondered, listening intently in the dark, that this was the man he feared. He searched a
frightened
mind in vain for some way of warning her. He could imagine Carlyon’s ape-like face gazing at her with a disarming frankness. ‘One can’t be too careful around here,’ he said. His voice sounded a little nearer as though he had come over to the fire. ‘You are not alone?’ he asked.

Andrews put his hand to his throat. Something had betrayed him. Perhaps as he stood like a blind man in the dark she was giving away his hiding place soundlessly with a wink, a lift of the eyebrow. He had a momentary impulse to fling open the door and rush at Carlyon. It would at least be man against man with no odds, he thought, until the unsleeping inner critic taunted him: ‘You are not a man.’ At least a coward can have cunning, he protested, and kneeling down on the floor, he put his eye to the keyhole. It was a moment before he could find the position of the speakers. Elizabeth was sitting in her chair, hand thrust in the stocking, calmly looking for holes. She is over-acting her calmness, he thought fearfully. Carlyon stood over her, watching her with an apparent mixture of reverence and regret. He made a small motion towards the two cups, which stood with brazen effrontery upon the table.

She finished her search of the stocking and laid it on her lap. ‘I am alone,’ she said. ‘My brother has just gone out. He is not far,’ she added. ‘I can easily call to him, if you don’t go.’

Carlyon smiled. ‘You must not be afraid of me,’ he smiled. ‘Perhaps I know your brother. Is he a little over the middle height, slightly built, dark, with frightened obstinate eyes?’

‘That’s not my brother,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He is short and squat – and very strong.’

‘Then I am not looking for your brother.’ He picked up one of the cups. ‘He must have been here very lately,’ he said. ‘The tea is hot. And he left in a hurry with his tea unfinished. Curious that we did not meet.’ He gazed round the room with no attempt to hide his curiosity.

‘That is my cup you have,’ Elizabeth said, and added with sarcasm; ‘Will you allow me to finish it?’

Andrews kneeling by the keyhole put up his hand to ease his collar as Elizabeth’s lips touched the cup and drained what he had left. A strange loving cup, he thought bitterly, but his bitterness vanished before a wave of humility which for one moment even cleared his mind of its consciousness of fear. He had been kneeling to gain a view of the room beyond, but now in heart he knelt to her. She is a saint, he thought. The charity and courage with which she hid him from his enemy he had taken for granted; but to his muddled unstraight mind the act of drinking from the same cup came with a surprising nobility. It touched him where he was most open to impression; it struck straight at his own awareness of cowardice. Kneeling in the dark not only of the room but of his spirit he imagined that with unhesitating intimacy she had touched his lips and defiled her own.