“God! I’m sick of this. Why can’t we be at Biarritz leading a reasonable life?”
A negro song came into Carston’s head: Bear your burden in the heat of the day: but it did not occur to him to tell it to the boy, whom it would have helped.
Clarence came in again. “I’ve ordered the car. We ought to get back. I’ll tell the others.” Carston saw him go into the dining-room and heard Scylla calclass="underline"
“Well, we want to eat. Tell it to wait.”
“We must go home.”
“Take it home then, and send it back for us.”
Silence again. Question of expense.
Carston saw Picus come into the dining-room from the garden and sit down at a table by himself. He heard Scylla calclass="underline"
“Clarence, leave your fancy-boy alone.”
That had done it.
Picus was eating alone. Anything might happen, only it was time for sleep. Half an hour later they had packed into the car and shot away, up into the hills the night wind had now made exquisite, to a different wood from the one in whose red-glass darkness Picus had lost them, moist and shimmering, a repetition of the tremblings of the stars.
Chapter X
The next morning the sky was white round a blue zenith. Carston came down, not pleased, because through every discomfort of soul he was feeling well, his body content with itself, a steady animal health. He should have been all of a tremble, and he was hoping that there would be fish for breakfast, lots of fish. There was fish, and after it the toast came up, hot and hot. He remembered again to make opportunity serve him. Health would give him power. Also he would desire Scylla more. Desiring her more, and not wholly as panache he might get her. Picus was bound to let her down. He was saying: “I’m sorry I lost my temper. It was trying to lose you three like that. You know how one is.” Scylla said:
“Served you right, when you’d lost them.”
“How did you do it?” said Ross.
There was no answer. Picus was giving the impression that he was about to flirt his tail and vanish. Carston was irritated again. There came droning into his mind an ugly sentence, a haunting from barren New England: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. He was hearing Picus say: “How’s the cup this morning?” and saw Scylla get up for it.
It was not on the card-table, folded over in a half-moon. It was not on the chimney-piece, or on the sideboard among the candlesticks, whose silver had worn down to the copper and polished rose.
They passed the morning entering and leaving rooms where the cup was not. Not in the kitchen, the lavatory, or the library. In twos and threes and singly, getting more silent as they passed each other. Up and down the curved stairs whose banister was a rope run through rings. Carston saw a good deal in that journey. Scylla’s room which had its objects of luxury, where the first time he stared at the bed, he suffered and desired to throw himself on to it. In and out of the room several times, he became indifferent, content with repeating to himself: “I shall sleep there.” Picus’s room, non-committal, in exquisite order like a manly woman’s and Clarence’s, full of frivolities. Then he remembered something he had read about an Emperor’s collection of hats and wigs ‘which sometimes solace the leisure of a military man.’ There were no wigs and no hats. But no memory in that place ever had a straight point. Only his room was a sad, gay, desperate display of something like toys. He pitied, without humour, having no humour; slightly wanting for himself a glass orange, each of whose fingers came out and held a different kind of scent.
All their things for art or sport were cared for like tools or choice animals. In Felix’s room there were leopard skins; in Ross’s a Buddha in a red lacquer shrine held a crystal, a reflection for their mutual contempt.
And the beds were humble and the linen darned, the bare floors solid like glass rocks. He could feel the weight of the blue slate roof, cooling and darkening the rooms, holding the house to the earth, while they searched it like serious children for a thing which could not walk. In and out and up and down a house much larger than it seemed, cooler than the wood’s heart.
Dazed Carston played too, arrived at the long attic, roaring dark, directly under the roof. The roar was from bees who hived under the slates, and the smell their fresh honey and the black clots, old combs. There was Felix opening a victorian work-box made out of an elephant’s foot. A place where it was utterly impossible for the cup to be. No more impossible than that it should have been overlooked anywhere else. Short of idiocy, a miracle, or a trick, the thing was off the map. A conclusion they had reached by lunch-time, after a morning’s exercise indoors.
It was a quiet meal. Two things had been lost. Picus and a cup. Picus had found himself. As for the cup, they had reached the time before the time for real consideration, when the instinct is to find something else to do. Carston, no more than the others, was quite ready to say that, since six pairs of eyes had failed to see something, then that thing must have been hidden, and hidden well. Instead he was made unhappy, because he heard Picus say to Scylla: “We don’t want to bathe to-day, do we? Come over to Gault Cliff and I’ll shew you something—”
“Birds?” He nodded once. “I’m coming.”
They were in the library, the sacred neutral zone for arrangements that had no reference to their life as a group. An arrangement Carston could not be expected to have understood. It was a very dark room. From a window seat he saw their bodies straining to be away. And hated it. Like a man put in a bag and shaken up, instincts were stirring in him, like muscles unused in years, and sore and strengthening.
The american appears to the english everything that is implied by saying over-sensitive, touchy, or abnormally quick to take offence. Our reaction is usually bewilderment, grief that our intentions have been misunderstood. Followed by a desire to give them something to cry about.
Carston thought they had seen him, could not have understood that no one was seen in that room. And they had not seen him. If they had, they would have supposed that he was there not to be seen. Scylla was sitting on the top of the library steps, made like everything in the house before the days of cheap furniture, shabby and characteristic as an old dog. She said to Picus:
“You idle baggage, what have you found on the hills?”
“Come and see!”
“Let me down!” He put his hands under her arm-pits and let her down, so gently that Carston did not hear her feet touch the floor. He saw their colours; her white; Picus’s blue and grey. He saw their beauty, their own, and the beauty of their passion. And another thing; that the man’s right hand ought not to belong to his body; that it was red and thick and swollen at the joints. He remembered the delicate adaptability of Ross’s, Felix’s, Clarence’s hands. This gave him a key. To a very old feeling about sin and fleshy lust. A refinement on sensuality, he knew, but an excuse for rage. And a warm feeling that what would relieve him would be right. Right for him to possess Scylla, if he had first rescued her. That would give him the claim on her body. Rescue her from what? From passion for a tall delicate man with coarse hands. Also because he had glory, a kind of lost god. From what was the glory? From the devil. How did one shame the devil? By taking the honour out of his sufferings. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And the reward would be Scylla.
What would he give her? Respect, for he did not respect her, or at least admire. Sincerity, loyalty, virility—after what? He was sure Picus did not respect her, was not sincere with her, had no loyalty, and he didn’t know about the last. The fantasy in this sequence escaped him, because of the naïveté of his cult for women. He had made a martyr of a person who was not a martyr, or to nothing which would have moved him. In the world there is a fifty-fifty deal of pleasure and grief. The excuse of that band was that they knew it, and that they had something else to occupy their attention, something that the wood knew.