They had considerably enlivened the cabaret, a sentimental infamy, its men and girls drunker than the clients. Among their slobbering, rapacious familiarity, the three appeared like drunk young gods. And Felix, a young king receiving his subjects, was courtly to the fawning, swarming band of both sexes in changed clothes. Proud of his companions, unconscious that he was paying for the party, he did not know that Boris owed money there, how he balanced the chance of being dunned with his worth as conductor of a rich client, and hoped that his debt would be put on to Felix’s bill. A thing he would not arrange. He had not yet come to that.
Round their table moved the herd of painted animals, Felix’s subjects, their tongues parting their lips for what they might get out of the flower-skinned, sapphire-eyed boy, who looked at nothing but Boris. Black briar-rose, he called him, who saw Felix an absurd young splendour. Felix noticed him strange, observant, a moon-baby. Not how the infant was putting two and two together. Nor would he have cared, lifted above any complex of the shopkeeper to be paid in any kind of thanks.
It was the American, later, who developed an intoxicated conscience about Felix when, in the taxi, romantic metaphysics and song gave way to hysteria. He cuffed him roughly into place. Unfortunately, Felix’s head broke a window, and all he did was lean out and cry: “I want to suffer as you have suffered, Boris— Police! police!”
The taxi slowed round a corner. He was bleeding from a cut. Boris alone kept his wits. Withdrew Felix’s head delicately from the hole in the glass, shouted in Russian at the chauffeur he had picked. Felix had become merely a thing to get home. They pulled up at the Foyot and got him out. Out but not up. The American retrieved the silk hat rolling on the stones: while Boris extracted three hundred francs, taxi, window money and useful change for the next day.
Then came the pilgrimage to which they were hardly equal, in the liftless, ancient barrack, their support to each other physical not moral, an age of social hatred lived through as they hoisted Felix upstairs and round corners, indifferent to his cries that he must faire pipi, followed by the concierge jangling the key. Ages of dissimilarity between the American, sudden flower of strength and looks, and the russian-tartar brat of family, to whom neurasthenia had become a habit.
They dumped Felix on the bed. Boris sponged away the blood, and got off the clothes that would hurt. The blood sickened the other and made him fretful. He gave an odd exhibition of nerves. Boris soothed him and they stumbled downstairs. In the street he said: “I have a little money. Let’s go on.” The American refused. Boris circled a little on the pavement, and, finding himself alone, drifted off to his little hotel, and slept face-downwards in his only convincing suit.
CLARENCE
At the cottage on Tollerdown, Clarence began a call to order. He had stayed on a night with Ross, the last of them to scatter.
The cottage was indistinguishable from the white, flint-casing chalk rock out of which it was made. God knows when built, its walls sagged in a broken angle with the down-slope. Placed at the mouth of a quarry, he lived naked as could be after his late smothering in trees. A single mountain-ash at the quarry-mouth raised its scarlet against the hot white cutting and the burnt gold grass. From the door a path of glassy flints ran to the cliff’s edge, and joined the valley track. At the angle the cliff broke sheer. Four hundred feet below the sea murmured and tumbled on a beach of round yellow stones. Clarence had set the flint path, chipped and cemented them for a touch of construction in an air-haunted land. A place where no sane man would live. But there was generally water in the well-shaft, and just then a blood-mist of poppies on the stony earth, cultivated to just that level. With an ache that he did not understand was for Versailles, Clarence had swung in.
Inside there was not the mess men are expected to make for themselves. A little art and craft, a little cubism, a little chic, made interesting by one of Picus’s amusements, models of all sorts of ships.
A viking-boat was a dragon on the sail, a shield-wall along the sides. An Armada-ship, the Virgin all aboard. A lovely proa. A greek galley, and, the first thing Clarence saw, Picus’s card at the mast with “A present for Scylla” on it.
Now where did Picus find out how to do them? A family mystery. History did not exist for him. He hated the sea. And that black open boat might have come out of an egg hatched at Salamis.
In the living-room, panelled, and painted a flat jade green, Clarence plumped the scarlet cushions, making everything gay; while in the kitchen, the shepherd’s wife set the water running in the cobble channels, skinned rabbits, polished the blue plates. The particular master was back. Long ago, before she’d married the shepherd, and had ten children and lost but three and taken up with the soldiers before he died and his brother had come along, ’twas the same name, and they’d a disease in common, and she’d still be walking over to the camp at Chard, and though she’d lost her teeth, and the better part of her speech, the lads would be over themselves with beer in their pockets, she’d been kitchenmaid at one of the country houses.
She could not read or write, and her time must have been different from ours. Mr. Picus gave her port of an evening, but the one she felt about was Ross. This singular fille de joie, over fifty, toothless, palateless, type of disreputable peasant hag, when she knew he was in the land, would stand out on the turf and watch for him. Gobble at Clarence, cooking meticulously the food he would not let her touch: ask if Mr. Ross would be coming over. Scylla terrified her. Nanna laughed at her and was called ma’am.
Clarence strode out, collarless, in riding breeches, to draw water. He looked down into the well, dark fern-ringed tranquillity, round which had happened such a singular little event.
He drew one bucket after another, and sluiced them over his body, branded with shrapnel and bullet and bayonet thrust.
A vast, delicate strength, not used, not properly understood, piteously alone against the white rock and wash of the blue-wrinkled sea. A scarlet coat in a palace and some gold lace on his shoulders would have fitted him better, watched only as he was by a gasping, furtive old woman behind the kitchen panes. If the other had been there, he would have shewn affectation, talked about his nakedness and her. While Ross and Picus would have skipped through the house and chaffed her if they had noticed her at all. Such was Clarence’s audience, with a scattering of poppies, a house huddled against the ground, and below the aphrodite sea.
Indoors he preened and poked everywhere, exceedingly afraid of the coming night. Then he would be alone, the shepherd’s wife off at her mincing trudge to her hovel, where occasionally was heard the roar of a carouse. Ross might have joined it and been the life and soul of the party, or lain out sea and star sailing.
Clarence, by himself, was simply and terribly afraid. Not of individuals, but of a menace that walked hand in hand with night, joined with the fear natural in remote places to a man not intuitively tuned. First he told himself that everything would not be ready for Picus, and he would scold him: then that Picus’s scenes were a disgrace. Then that Picus was never coming back. Then that it was Scylla who would not let him come back. A rage got him by the throat, shook him, crawled over him. By the time it was night, he was incoherent, and half a dozen times started over the hill to walk seventy miles inland to Tambourne where Picus might be. It was not his humour that checked him, but fear of the vast spaces under the star-blazing sky. The stars were not his friends. The Pleiades may have been weeping uselessly for him. When he lifted his eyes up the hills, he averted them. Rough, barrow-haunted places. He shuddered and turned back.