There had been an apple once. There had been an apple tree. When it gave no more apples, it had made fire, and a slice of its trunk had become a bowl cut out into birds. The bowl unless it was turned into fire again, would stop growing and last for ever. Things that came out of time, and were stopped; could be made over into another sort of time.
Clarence sat silent, a tear or so falling, shame and anger mounting. Once away, he would leave Carston; would not go to Tambourne. He would go to Tambourne because he must have somewhere to hide. The old parson might have comfort for him while Picus was with Scylla, and she enjoyed the reward of warriors. She and Picus alone together, playing at happy warriors.
If there was nothing for him at Tambourne, there would still be Picus’s father, a fine story to pick over together.
He said:
“Perhaps you’ll send my clothes. We must go before mid-day. I shouldn’t like Carston to have a repetition before he gets me to Tambourne.”
And bring our souls to His high city.
He took Scylla’s hand, remained a moment in her embrace. Carston followed him down the hill.
That afternoon cloud flecks flew over and the wind freshened. Ross and Nanna left the house scented with boiling sugar and took a walk down to the sea. He listened to a comparative history of her jam-making and a sketch of her intentions about the vegetable marrows with the interest he gave to each man on his subject alike. From the cliff above the fisherman’s hut they saw a ketch running before the south wind, straight for the bay.
“A french boat,” he said, “they’re running her in too close to the reef.” The old nurse shaded her eyes.
“It’s Mr. Felix steering. In a hurry he is as usual. It’s a nice way to bring his friend home.” Silence. A Russian brought over in a fishing-smack: in a hurry. The ketch made the channel (where the bluff hid it from the coastguards’ telescopes and the sooner the better), and Ross saw Felix and a sailor drop into a dinghy and pull fast for shore. In the stern sat another. They went down to the water’s edge to meet them. A few strokes out, Felix sprang thigh deep in the weed and dragged up the boat till her keel scraped the rocks. He embraced Ross, turned and gave the boy a hand to spring to shore.
“Ross, this is Boris.”
“But what made you come this way?”
He thought that he was looking at something at the same time old and young. A youth he understood. An age he did not. Also that it was worn and tired and sick. And that Felix’s eyes were like dark-blue coals, his step certain, his voice without petulance.
“I had no papers,” said Boris.
“We got into a row,” said Felix, “the police raided a café, and we did a bolt. We ran straight into two men up a back street and sent them spinning. One was hurt. Then I saw that it was no good, especially for Boris, and got a car to the coast. Paid up those chaps to bring us and cut back. There’s a third man below to replace Boris in case we were seen from the shore.”
Not bad for Felix. Ross looked again at what he had brought, standing on the tide-mark, his back to the water, the ooze soaking his poor shoes. The sailors landed two suit-cases.
“See here,” he said, “and excuse us. D’you mean you have no papers and no papers you can show—?”
“He’s a White,” cried Felix, “and he lost them.”
Boris said: “That is exactly so.”
“And you’re not running dope, or away from any crime worth mentioning?”
“On my honour, no— I need a holiday and your cousin was good enough—”
Ross saw that, so far as it went, this was true. The vistas opening were more oblique. He had only to look at that head in its sea-wide aureole, the high forehead and temple-thinned black hair, the slanted cheekbones, and observant green eyes. From the remote east. Out of the sea. Lovely, ugly, helpless, high-born thing. Whipcord and ice and worn out. Wangle him papers in London.
“Boris, our stranger,” he said. “Our nurse.”
Boris kissed her hand. They climbed the little cliff path. At the top he began to look around him.
Out at sea, it had been land, earth under his feet after a night and day’s pitching. Land: an interesting new place. Another people who might have no use for him. Why should they? No longer in doubt, soon there would be food and a bath and fresh linen and bed, he took a look at England. He saw a line of treeless hills, a puzzle of fields; under his feet a pattern of sweet herbs. An arrow of wood they entered, into a tunnel of light where birds broke cover, green even under the feet. A house where the windows were doors and stood open, in front of which a yucca, taller than a man, had opened its single flower-spike. Over the house, a hill turned wall. Into a room where air and bees whispered, honey smelt and the sea. And something he remembered: the smell of fruit bubbling in copper pans, in a kitchen—a child with his nurse—in a country-house, in Russia, in a pine forest.