She laughed with a confident joy he understood the first time.
“South-west wind. Listen!” He heard his heart beating, a hair in his ear, and a trans-finite length away, the stirring that had made uneasy the sea.
“A big storm,” she said, turning on him eyes full of an animal’s pleasure. Round the point where the day before he arrived they had played at Aphrodites, a boat came dipping back, the bowsprit dancing and dripping, where over the deep-travelling reef the sea had begun to coil under and over.
“Harris is back in time. We’re in for it. No more fish.” A note in her brain about the fish problem. More too freshly killed meat. Picus and Felix on the subject. Then the only good poem a bad poet ever wrote, anticipating jazz:
He took her hands and they rocked, saying with her:
Fallen into nature with her. For the first time in his life. Good old Gulf Stream.
Harris the fisherman had downed his main-sheet, flung out an anchor and was rushing a dinghy to shore.
“Take your fish, Madame Taverner, it’s the last you’ll see. I’ve got my pots to get in.”
“We’ll help.”
Two minutes later Carston was in a dinghy in a slightly resentful scoop of sea, and spent an ungrateful hour hauling up lobster-cages filled with kicking, pinching sea cardinals, ink blue; and the humanitarian protest came from Scylla when they were tossed into a cauldron bubbling on the stones, in an angle of the little secret cliff where England rose out of the harvested sea.
The wood was darkish, fearful and sad, until they saw the windows shut and already lit, a fire leaping up made out of the driftwood he had helped haul up. Blue sparks and white and green, wind shifting about outside in the trees, until with a scream the up-Channel gale was loosed and they became creatures couched under a stone that quivered in the uproar and mounted to bed with candles streaming.
Carston lay in bed and heard above the thunder a gull repeating itself. “Ai, ai,” it said, up somewhere in the tumbling sky, a little noise laid delicately upon the universal roar of air. The house was strong, he thought, its stone thrilling but not a window that rattled, tapped by their climbing roses.
There were pockets in the wind when he could hear the sea. A crash, then under-roar and scream of pebbles, the ravelled water dragged. A light-patch fell on his floor, a piece of the late moon racing apparently from a cloud whipped off her, and behind her a star or so, unhurried, observant and indifferent on a night when everything was out and about. He looked out to sea, surprised that it appeared no more than a bright silver lacquer, when water mountains should have been moving in.
Scylla alone wondered how the wood below Gault was bearing it, flooded with salt water, heaped with seaweed, the little stream choked with wrack.
Dark again in Carston’s room. A rain-flaw drummed on the panes. Then with a shriek the wind sprang again. He could not hear the gull, but a few seconds later a crack and a long crash, knew it was a tree gone, and looking out in the next moon-interval, saw something altered in the outline of the wood. It disturbed him to think how hopeless the dawn would be, the ‘dew silky’ quiet changed for grey air, spray-salted on the lips. Would the others enjoy it? Would it blow the nonsense out of them? They might be house-bound for days. Oh, God! He was wondering how to prevent this when he fell asleep.
Chapter XX
Breakfast reassured him how far they minded the weather. They had been out and there was news, a tramp aground on Tunbarrow Ledges, and twenty-three drowned men laid out on tables in the parish room.
“A danish boat,” said Scylla. “Does anyone here speak it?”
Carston did, but did not see that it was his duty to say so in order to assist what was left of the crew, who must have a consul somewhere. He bore it when Scylla took him out down the wood, quiet under a colonnade, until they came out and staggered against a wall of air.
The little bay disappointed him, packed with dull drift that choked the waves, a pocket for the storm’s mess, and on the headland they found the sea racing, but not with the explosion he had imagined up the cliffs side.
“Tide’s out.” So that formless bright patch of moon was still pulling the sea about, holding it off the land. Then she led him carefully to the edge, and he saw a hole in the clay, blue, raw and dripping from a wave’s mouth.
“That came out last night.”
Still the sky travelled, torn cloud and blue enough for trousers, rain-flaws, and air ribbons. The wildness enervated him. The excitement was cerebral, all spectacle, a whip-up for the eyes and the salt-refreshed palate, the ears cut off from common sounds.
At lunch words crossed his wind-filled head like the gull’s cry in the night. The well at the cottage on Tollerdown would be filling; floating corpses could be skimmed off: the vicar at Tunbarrow was reliable with the shipwrecked: Felix had gone over there.
While they relaxed over coffee, the boy came in, bareheaded, strapped into oilskins, pale, his cheeks burning with two red circles exercise would not account for.
“Eaten?” said his sister.
“I don’t want to. I’ve seen them.”
“Seen what?”
“Twenty-three dead men.” They all reacted to the young voice horror and drama made unsteady.
“Singularly drowned with their wounds shewing—where the fish gnawed—”
“Haven’t had time to be gnawed,” said Ross. “Don’t overdo it.”
“I saw them till they had no significance whatever, because I saw death. I suppose you admit they’re dead?”
“A death,” said Ross, coldly, “you court yourself in the cutter year in, year out. We court. What about it?”
Felix swallowed, and stared right and left.
“Death’s family party,” he said. “I’ve seen it. Getting nearer home. Don’t you know you’re in league with that sort of thing? And that your shifts for getting away are hopeless—”
“What shifts?” said his sister. “Ease up, boy, stop running round in circles. I didn’t drown them.”
He addressed himself to her:
“Your love affairs—what are they worth? and your famous strength that supports us? I know you’re a strong woman, with your stunt of opening doors every sane person knows are better shut. I’m your brother and you’ll not take me in. Twenty-three bodies, twenty-three pictures of death have taught me the worth of your tricks. And I don’t flatter myself I shall do anything on my own. You’ve sucked me too dry for that—”
Carston saw her swing the crystal slung from her neck he knew the boy had given her.
“Dearie,” said Picus, “let your back hair down, and be yourself.”
“Go away,” said Ross.
“Go and look for what you want where you think you’ll find it,” she said. Temperately, ineffectually, the reserve shewing how she loved him.
Carston wanted to kick him. Clarence yawned. The boy took no notice. Carston thought: ‘Ways of clearing the house. A full well at Tollerdown, and Biarritz the brighter by one cub.’ Whose adieux were being made separately.
“And Clarence can nurse his fancy heart-break and Picus his second-rate chic. And Ross make his appetites serve his art, or whichever way round he does it. And Carston get kick out of being taken in by our fake aristocracy. And Nanna slave and tell you how wonderful you are. I’m going where there won’t be any more fairy-stories, and my complexes can rot me or—”