Once more Campion hung over the edge of their eyrie and stared down upon the sea, trying to measure the distance with his eye. It was hopeless. He tossed a large boulder over and it seemed to take ages to reach the water, settling slowly in the viscous blueness with barely a splash. Suddenly he had an idea.
Turning, he called the dog to him, wheedling it with the promise of food. Then, taking it in his arms he stood up and was about to pitch it over when the girl rushed at him. “What are you doing?” she shouted, and half-dragged him back. Campion disengaged himself from her with fury. “Idiot,” he said. With her scuffling he might easily have been pushed over himself. “Can’t you see we must find out?” She protested indignantly against the use of Spot as a guinea-pig for such an experiment. “Don’t be a fool,” said Campion again, and grabbing the now struggling dog he advanced to the parapet once more. Spot squawked loudly and struggled. “Shut up,” cried Campion, and gave a sharp exclamation as the dog bit him.
Spot pitched out into space, and for a second seemed to hang in the air before he began his slow parcel-like flight towards the sea; Campion lay sucking the wound in his hand and watching. The little dog turned over and over, and finally melted with a small white feathery scar, into the sea’s blueness. For what seemed centuries Campion lay, his eyes fixed on the spot. Presently something rose slowly to the surface, and after lying still for a few moments began to weave slowly towards the shore. Campion shouted.
The girl was sitting where she had originally been, with her back pressed to the wall, examining her fingernails. “He’s all right,” said Campion again, and at his cry she rose and came to his side. Spot was out of sight now round the edge of the headland, but moving under his own steam. Campion lay back and breathed a sigh. “Well,” he said, “that gives one some indication.” Virginia was suddenly elated. She clapped her hands together and said: “What a wonderful chance.” Campion lay still blowing smoke softly into the air above his face and thinking. It was, of course, not certain that a human being weighing twenty times as much as an animal, would escape as lightly.
“What are you thinking?” she said, noticing his preoccupied face.
“There’s only an hour of sunlight to go. I think we should wait until tomorrow morning. Even supposing we get down safely and crawl out on to the land we may find ourselves miles from anywhere, wandering about in the dark with wet clothes.”
“Yes,” she said slowly, as if unconvinced.
They sat together and watched the sun sinking ponderously into the sea. Somehow the very act of sitting there, without speculation and anxiety, quietened and soothed their nerves. Gulls wheeled with anguished cries below them upon the great mauve expanse of water. The wind had crept up to pencil its strange hieroglyphs on the southern half of the bay. Slowly, very slowly the great golden drop touched the horizon, and the blue meniscus of evening ran, a crack of nacreous red, from one end of the sky to the other. They had no light, save the box of matches in Campion’s pocket; but there were plenty of cigarettes. The wind was not blowing directly into their balcony of stone. The night was warm. They settled themselves as comfortably as they could against the stone, he placing his arms round her shoulders. The darkness came on, blue and dense, and the stars put up their high malevolent lights, winking like the eyes of so many needles. “Campion,” she said drowsily, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings just now.” Campion pretended ignorance of any slight, but he knew quite well what she meant. “I mean’ about being a Jew,” she added. Campion smoked on in silence for a while. “I think you are unjust to me,” he said at last, “in assuming that my idiosyncrasies are racial; I do belong to a race — but the race of artists: the Jewish part is what is personal in my nature, but there are other difficulties which belong to my other racial inheritance. As a matter of fact,” he went on with a chuckle, “I am not a Jew at all. I am just one of the others.” He began to talk slowly and without emphasis of what the artist was, what his peculiar needs were, his fears, his ambitions. It was only when he realized that she was asleep that he desisted.
They dozed fitfully that night under his coat, and rose at the first light of dawn. The air was cold and they were both cramped. A heavy dew had settled over everything. They ate the remains of the food left over from their lunch the previous day, and smoked the last two cigarettes left in Campion’s case, waiting for the sun to warm the rock upon which they sat. “So you do want it all,” said Campion at last. “Golder’s Green? The rain? The damp tubes? The last bus?” The girl stopped her ears in mock horror. “Please,” she said. “Don’t spoil it. It isn’t that I want. It’s other things, can’t you see?”
She took out her pocket comb and balancing a strip of mirror in a cranny, made up her face as well as she could, combed out her hair, and smoothed down her eyebrows with her finger. “I’m ready,” she said quietly. Campion stood up with a sigh. They took off all their clothes except their shoes, and made them into one bundle. Then, naked, they stood hand in hand upon the last jutting foothold of the balcony. “When I give the word,” said Campion. His voice had gone flat and calm and without emphasis. She leaned forward, bracing her toes against the stone. “Wait,” she said suddenly and leaned forward to kiss him on the mouth. Campion smiled and called: “One, two …”
The rushing of wind struck the last word from his lips, and he felt himself turning over and over as his body was poured down the ladder of blueness. A red roaring seemed to fill the horizon. Frightened kestrels fell with them from ledges of rock for a few metres and then planed out, whistling their curiosity and terror. The sea turned up its expansive shining surface and waited for them.
The Roof of the World
Truman dragged his wife clear of the chute of rocks and earth, dusted her down with many a violent oath, and suffered her to cling to his arm as they stood side by side, and watched the corridor fill up until the pile of dirt had completely sealed it off. The sound and fury of the fall was gradually sealed off too until at last they stood, as if in a padded cell, hearing the concussions and rumblings upon the other side continuing. Sound had become soft and distended — so that what they knew to be boulders falling beyond the wall seemed to be merely the noises off of some celestial pillow-fight. He was still panting from the effort of having to drag her away from the fall to a point of safety. “Listen to it,” she said shakily turning away and sitting down upon a rock. Truman listened grimly, his hand groping in his pockets to feel the comforting bulge of the lunch-carton and cold edges of the little torch.
They were standing in a corridor illuminated by the faint greyish light from a slit in the roof of a nearby cavern. The blocked mouth of the tunnel from which they had retreated still trembled under the landslip, whose echoes ran away in all directions, repeating themselves from all points of the compass. Truman listened carefully, hoping perhaps that some information might be gained from the noise. It still rang in his head, but soft and muffled, like a pulse; like the tapping of a finger upon the bone of the frontal sinus, or upon the mastoid. “Well?” said his wife anxiously, watching him. He sighed and turned to her. “I’m afraid they’ve caught it,” he said darkly. “Not a sound from them.”
He sat down beside her and mopped his forehead. Then he examined his cigarette-case, and the crumpled pouch in which he carried the coarse tobacco for his pipe. “Well,” he said, “there’s a smoke or two left.” He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. They smoked together in silence for a time, their faces turned upwards to watch the dense beam of dust-motes turning and twirling in the light from above. Truman was thinking frantically as he smoked, his jaw set at the angle necessary to register absolute determination. His wife had produced a pocket comb and was slowly combing her hair. She had recovered a good deal of her composure now. “What are you thinking?” she asked in a whisper; the dank gloom reminded her of a church and made her whisper. “What are you thinking?” she repeated again in a normal tone. Truman was thinking in a confused sort of way that there must be some exit, some opening of the corridors which would enable them to regain the daylight. He looked at her quietly and reflectively for a moment, saying nothing. She went on combing her hair, and then with a little smile got up and retreated to the farther end of the tunnel for a moment. He watched her as she squatted down, gathering up her skirts. “You’ve got a smut on your nose,” he said absently. He was trying to calculate how far they had come into the labyrinth, but the task was a hopeless one. In the darkness a journey of a few moments felt like a journey of hours — or even days. It seemed useless to speculate, to plan. They could only wander on and on until they ran out of food. His wife came back to him, brushing a cobweb from her mouth. She perched herself once more upon the rock beside him and said: “What do you think of the chances, eh?” The question was more rhetorical than anything else, yet Truman felt impelled to answer it. He coughed and stamped out his cigarette on the cold stone. He cocked his head and listened for a second as a small tributary series of bangs told him of landslips in other corners of the labyrinth, before speaking. “It’s like this,” he said at last forcefully, placing the forefinger of one hand in the palm of the other in a gesture of determination. “We have enough food for perhaps a day and a half if we’re careful. We should be able to walk about twenty miles before we have to pack up. Now this place can’t be more than a couple of miles long at the most. I think with a bit of luck we have a very good chance indeed.” It was a masterstroke, and she smiled her pleasure at the proposition, putting her hand in his arm and giving it a squeeze. “Let’s just go on,” he said, pleased at his own reorientation of a desperate situation in terms of probable success. “As if we were walking … in Devonshire.” This was an even happier illustration, for they had once been lost for a day on the moors above Tyre Basin, and had enjoyed the memory of that hazardous adventure ever since. They stood up and faced one another for a few moments while she smiled lovingly and brushed some of the dust from his lapels. “Now”, he said, “take it easy. Every hour we’ll rest for fifteen minutes. We won’t eat until three o’clock today. Got it?” While Elsie Truman was grateful for his masterly presentation of the fiction, and glad that their plan of action had been so intelligently developed, she could not resist a little banter — if only to let him know that his optimism had not completely taken her in.