Unknown (170 page)

What Bloody Johnny was really struggling with, however, as he splashed along in his frail tub, past the outskirts of Beckery and of Paradise till he reached the swirling current of the flood-swamped river, was his love for Megan and Crummie. Of Cordelia he hardly thought at all; though it must be confessed that a faint and clinging sweetness, like a fragrance within a fragrance, drew his mind now and then towards the figure of Lady Rachel.

It was painful to him to condemn his wife and daughter—left up there on Wirral Hill in that strange camp tent—to what he knew well enough would be a pitiful if not a rending shock. Over and over again he placed the alternatives before himself—to go on with his life and spare them this blow, or to follow the devouring death-lust which had gathered upon him and ruthlessly plunge them into this human loss.

He was in the river current now, flowing westward in furious angry eddies which the incoming sea tide forced back upon themselves. In spite of the roll of the great flood eastward, as soon as he reached the centre of the river the current swept him west-" ward, rocking his tiny skiff in the most threatening manner and rendering it totally unnecessary for a while even to attempt to use his oars. So he just pulled them in and let them lie across the little boat in front of his big stomach.

Mr. Geard's character will never be understood—or the monstrous inhumanity of his departure from the visible world condoned—until it is realised that the unruffled amiability and the unfailing indulgence of his attitude to those near and dear to him concealed a hidden detachment from them that had always been an unbridged gulf.

The mass and volume of his being was composed of a "weight of cold phlegmatic substance that was always sinking down, by a weird gravitational pull, to a species of preorganic cosmic inertia. His great moments came when this heavy inertness, pulling him down into the silt and slime of the chemical basis of life, was roused to activity by his erotic mysticism. For the truth is that the psychic-sensual life-lust in Mr. Geard was always being lulled to dormant quiescence under the weight of his sluggish physical nature. The spirit within him needed to be roused and stirred up, before it could feel really alive, by some super-formidable and super-dramatic Quest. Such a Quest had been his passion for the Grail Fount; till that Welshman's question about Arthur had confused his mind*

But he was weary of all that now; and if his nature was not to sink back into its heavier elements of sluggish neutral indifference, he must get into closer contact with his invisible Master than was possible in this “muddy vesture” of earth-life!

He was muttering to himself now as his little boat began whirling round and round in one of these dangerous confluences where the salt flood met the river's current. Ha! The ocean smell was in Ms nostrils, and there in the water, whirling round with his >shell boat, was an authentic piece of white seaiveedl

He Jied out one of his plump hands—his left hand it was— to this bit of seaweed, his mind racing back to old childish da s^eymouth Beach. This would have been the end of him; fol /Water was very deep here, and Mr. Geard had never leaf> *> swim; but at the moment he began this stretching gesture, S^nich—carried an inch further would have upset his boat— the river current defeated the sea flood, and swept him on, out of the dangerous circle of that vortex, and carried him forward with increasing rapidity towards Lake Village Great Field. He had lost the white seaweed; but he had escaped being drowned by an accident. But what was this? Something vast and glittering swept into view in the very midst of the river.

A portion of Philip's new bridge! Torn from its shaft holes in the mud banks, and dragged, steel and scaffolding and crossbeams and all, into the centre of the torrent, this towering symbol of the power of Capital, of the power of Science, was now the sport of what looked like a mocking, mischievous, taunting cuckoo-spit out of Chaos itself!

Mr. Geard neither smiled, nor chuckled, nor congratulated himself at this surprising sight. He just surveyed it with a lively, objective, inquisitive interest, an interest worthy of Bert Cole or of Timothy Wollop.

But the apparition of this costly piece of wreckage served to divert the drifting of the boat that carried him, sweeping it, as the two objects collided, across the submerged northern bank of the Brue towards the middle of Lake Village Field.

Here the water was a little shallower; but still quite deep enough to drown a man whose height was not over six feet, and in special hollows on the edges of the mounds much deeper than that.

Mr. Geard now re-claimed possession of his oars, thrusting them into the row-locks and pulling energetically towards all he could see of the dwelling of Abel Twig.

Yes, Sam Dekker was right. There was not much else than the chimney of Backwear Hut, together with a small fragment of its roof, visible across the surface of a mud-coloured lake, above which its brickwork showed almost black. But several of the bigger mounds of the old Lake Village were still visible, their round tops protruding from the waste of waters like diseased excrescences on the wrinkled surface of a vast brown leaf.

But Mr. Geard found himself confronted now by several ob< jects more exciting to a human brain, lodged in a wooden tub on a brown flood, than mere chimney-tops. He became aware that upon the largest of these Lake Village mounds there were living figures, consisting, as far as he could make out, of a man, a child, and an animal, among whom the man and the child were desperately summoning him to their aid. There was something floating m the water too, with a dark object clinging to it that was also waving to him.

So detached was the man's mind at this juncture, with his own life and death held in the balance, that he found himself in the coolest and calmest fashion comparing the scene before him with an old Bible picture of the Flood which used to obsess his mind as a little boy at Town's End in Montacute. Here, again, the difference between water and fire rose up, and manifested itself! Had the element that threatened the lives of all these living creatures been fire, there would have been such an automatic beat of panic fear in his pulses that such mental detachment as he now. felt, would have been impossible.

Living spirits they were—he and these two gesticulating figures—each one of them with a whole world of clear-cut feelings, images, memories. And now, against them, this swirling brown mass of water, this enormous entity without consciousness, or purpose, or feeling, or pity, was gathering itself up to obliterate in one swallowing gulp of drowning suction, everything, everyone—until blackness alone remained.

Blackness? But what was he thinking? It was not to gain blackness that he was choosing to die rather than to live this day! Or was it? Was what he fancied to be his superhuman mania for heightened life in reality a secret longing to plunge into the dark abyss of non-existence?

Mr. Geard now allowed his oars to rest on the water, which was comparatively calm just here, and hoisting himself up on the palms of his big hands endeavoured to get a clear sense of what confronted him, before he took any action. “Why didn't the Dekkers see those two?” he thought. “That barge of theirs must have come from the other side of the Hut and unless they were so occupied with their rabbit-hutch------”

He could now observe that the ground beyond the Hut, on the further side of Godney Road rose up well out of the water; and it occurred to him that a strong swimmer, from any of these mound-islands, could reach dry land without much difficulty.

“Bugger me black!” he muttered to himself, “if there isn't a man on that floating thing over there!”

With distended eyes he surveyed this man astride of the out-stretched wing of what he now recognized as the Crow airplane. Yes, it was Philip himself! Drawn by an irresistible instinct towards his steel flying machine and his steel bridge, the manufacturer had done exactly what Mr. Geard had been thinking a spirited man might do, he had swum from the high ground above Godney Road—which he had managed somehow to reach on foot—and had got hold of the airplane. The unlucky thing was that when he got there he found himself seized with such an evil cramp in both his legs as rendered him totally hors-de-combat.

Seeing the man clinging so helplessly to the wing of his submerged machine, Mr. Geard naturally supposed that, like himself, Philip was no swimmer. Without thinking very much about it he vaguely took it for granted that the manufacturer had tried to land from the air in the darkness of last night, and had found water where he had expected to find grass.

“He must have been hours in the water, poor devil!” thought Mr. Geard. “I'll deal with him first and let the ones on the mound go for a while.” He began—after his curious fashion—to shiver and shake just as he imagined the man in the water must be doing, after so long an immersion! Why it was that he began to experience, as he gazed at him, an extremely unpleasant feeling in his legs, was more than he could explain.

He now proceeded to row straight up to the floating airplane; a movement which evoked cries of disappointment and then a miserable silence from the man and the boy on the mound. But Philip received him with a smile of intense gratitude. The rival kings of Aval on met thus at last on what was certainly a spot— though it could scarcely be called a ground—of undeniable neutrality.

“I don't think she's seriously injured,” was Philip's characteristic remark as Mr. Geard clutched at the edge of the great protruding wing and steadied his cockle-shell craft.

“Legs hurt?” panted Mr. Geard, thinking of the man rather than of his machine.

“The bridge is down,” went on Philip, his face giving a convulsive, involuntary twinge as he dragged himself a little further out of the water. Being a Crow, this twinge, which was repeated every time he made this least movement, took the form of the twitching nerve in John's face. Mr. Geard thought of John as he saw this twitching face above the water-line.

“I'm glad he's safe out of this anyway, the poor lad,” he said to himself.

“Legs hurt?” he repeated, refusing to join this builder of bridges in his present straining effort to get a glimpse of that steel wreck.

“I've got a devilish cramp,” murmured Philip.

“You swam out here?”

The manufacturer nodded. “Only from just over there,” he said. “From just beyond the road. I've got cramp” he repeated.

“We'll deal with it,” said Mr. Geard, “presently. Only first we must change places. It's only your legs, eh? Your arms are all right?”

Philip re-assured him about his arms with a feeble smile.

“There are people on those mounds,” went on Mr. Geard. “When we've got you safe to land, we'll cope with that trouble. But one thing at a time is my motto—and I daresay it's yours too. We're agreed anyway there. And I think we're agreed too, Mr. Crow, whatever folk may say, on one other thing.”

“What's that, Mr. Mayor?” enquired the twitching white face above the airplane's wing.

Bloody Johnny noticed that the water had been washing so long in the same place—for the man's legs hurt him at the slightest move—that it had deposited a sort of windrow of minute bits of scum and weed across Philip's neck. A bit of green dyke-scum clung, too, to one corner of the man's mustache, producing an effect that was unpleasantly grotesque. But Mr. Geard's mind had already forgotten what it was; this second point upon which their characters agreed!

“What we've got to do now, Mister,” announced Bloody Johnny from his seat in his coracle—and the jostling in the water of these two vessels, the boat and the aircraft, were like the coming together of two aeons of time—“is to change places! You've got to get into my boat . . . and Yve got to get into your airplane!”

Philip smiled a rather sickly and tantalised smile.

"You've come to mock me, Mr. Mayor! When I first saw you coming I thought, here's someone who'll pick me up, but I see

now that your little tub couldn't possibly hold------ Well, off

with you! And if------"

“That's just what / say,” remarked Geard of Glastonbury, and without more ado, he began divesting himself of his coat, his trousers and his drawers.

Philip, with the green weed hanging from his mustache and his neck surrounded by a windrow of scum, contemplated these movements with astonishment. There was even a faint glint of class-conscious physical distaste in his white flood-dirtied face as he beheld, so shamelessly displayed before him, the private parts of the tenant of Cardiff Villa.

But Mr. Geard now pulled himself close to the wing of the airplane and peered down into the water where the other man's cramped legs were twisted between him.

“Are you standing on anything?'” he asked.

Philip did not seem to hear this question. The wrinkles of his forehead as he hoisted himself a little out of the water showed a swift, violent, interior conflict.

“If I take his offer,” he thought, “I'll get into the town and ha\e him picked up much quicker than he could do it for me. The fellow's no more good at rowing a boat than he is at spending a fortune! Damn! I suppose the noble thing to do would be to refuse his help. But what if I get cramp in my belly? My plane's ruined. My bridge is down. My road is sunk. Not an ounce of tin in Wookey for the last three weeks. That Birmingham man thought the whole vein's exhausted- The new dye works —all that these demons have left me—a foot deep in water! What have I got to live for?”

But the hard, narrow, invincible back portion of his skull visualised the new start of his career as if it were a steam-tug in this brown littered water!

“Begin again,” he thought to himself; “and to Hell with mock-heroism! Geard and I are two beasts fighting for our lives. / knoiv it. He doesn't know it! His soft, crazy idealisms, his 1-am-the-one-to-give-my-life-for-my-enemy, is simply his handicap in our struggle. If the man does drown before I get back, it'll only prove that he preferred his ideal gestures to life. I prefer nothing to life. Oh, to the devil with these haverings!”' In Philip's secret heart was a blind confidence in the airplane as equal to this crisis. He had so closely identified himself with this potent, yet pliable structure, that below all practical reasoning he had a superstitious faith in the spirit of his machine to outmatch the elements.