The children played on. Aunt Molly knitted a jersey. Aunt Teresa suffered from headache. I basked and dreamt in the sun.
We were a raft drifting on the sea of eternity. Long, long ago, having seen it face to face, we had fought shy of it. We saw a raft, and made for it. But even safe on the raft we are on the sea of eternity. Three had now been washed off by the sea, but we others still clung to that raft. A crowd of bewildered spirits caught upon a planet. We merely brush against each other’s surfaces, and something deep down, unexplored, is ignored or dismissed. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar in the sunset; there was a pink gleam of light in his eye. I wondered if he had a soul. We caught a glimpse of Captain Negodyaev gazing steadfastly to sea, puffing hungrily at the remainder of his cigarette. I looked up at the sky: what shall we take from you for taking this life from us? There was no answer, save a blighting sense of our impotence. ‘Poor man,’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘We must do something for him.’ And looking at this red-eyed creature gazing at a world of red despair, Uncle Emmanuel took the cigar out of his mouth and sighed. ‘Yes, he is a good fellow, le capitaine. I will recommend him to the Ministry of War for the Ordre de Léopold 1er when I get back to Brussels. I am really sorry for him.’ The sky was a pellucid mother-of-pearl — as though through all the shadows and clouds, the suffering, confusion and doubts, God smiled: I still knew what I was doing. And curling up into vistas of space, it spoke of what is beyond time, beyond loss, and the need of redemption.
The sun had set, and at once the ocean looked dark, the sky was unfriendly: God had gone back to His bunk. Then, strolling about, I came across Captain Negodyaev. He sat very still on a bench at the stern, gazing at the dark trail running away from us, as if asking a meaning from it of a death that had no meaning. In the day-time, half dazed by the sun and the heat, he had braved it somehow, pacing about, avoiding condolences, unable to find a place for himself. But now with the twilight, his grief, like a vulture, descended upon him, and cringing in the corner of the bench he began to cry. I touched him on the shoulder: his face convulsed, he covered it with his hands.
‘Trust your feeling. Remember Turgenev: “Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, holy, devoted love, is not all-potent? O no! However passionate, sinful, rebellious, may be the heart that has taken refuge in the grave, the flowers which grow upon it gaze tranquilly at us with their innocent eyes: not alone of eternal repose do they speak to us, of that mighty repose of ‘indifferent’ nature; they speak also of eternal reconciliation and of life everlasting.” ’
‘Flowers,’ he said, after a moment’s pensive silence, and looked at the dark burrows that eluded our steady course into the loneliness of the ocean, unafraid. ‘Innocent eyes …’ He choked.
‘It didn’t need the war. It didn’t need the revolution.’
He rose and stalked away. He went back to his wife, who henceforth lay in her cabin, a wounded thing, and was never seen to emerge. Whether he was kind to her, we did not know. I passed the half-open door of Aunt Teresa’s cabin. Aunt Teresa’s going to bed was always rather an event. She took pyramidon for her head, and aspirin for her cold, and pills to counteract the effect of pyramidon on her stomach, and a remedy to counteract the effect of aspirin on her heart, besides which she used lotions: a tooth lotion, a gum lotion, a jaw lotion (to prevent dislocation), and sunflower seed oil as a general lubricant, and of late a lotion to rub into the roots of her hair. She was sitting now in her chemise upon the bunk in an attitude of great distress and, with the help of Berthe, was rubbing coconut oil into the nape of her neck. In the last few days she had suddenly begun to lose her hair at a terrific rate; there was a bare space on the nape as large as the size of an average saucer. ‘C’est terrible,’ she was saying to Berthe, ‘there will be nothing left.’
I went out on deck. The nocturnal sky, vigilant, soared above me. The stars looked at me kindly, good-humouredly. The ship’s lights twinkled demurely in the dark. I stood very still, following the dark phosphorescent trail that now and then gave a glint of light in the moon. When I was alone I whispered: ‘Can you hear me—?’ But only the wind that ruffled the topmost flag on the mast answered me. The wind and the lazy splash of the waves.
50
THE DAY WE CAME TO PERIM I WAS ORDERLY OFFICER, and had to take a party of soldiers, bluejackets and marines to bathe off the island. Aunt Teresa, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel, and Berthe (very meagre in her bathing-dress) also came on our launch. There were naked black men and women on the beach, and Aunt Teresa and Berthe cleverly pretended that they did not see them. They did not look aside; they looked at them as though they were so much air. And a black beauty had taken Uncle Emmanuel’s fancy. We were back on the launch, and nearly alongside the boat, but he was still standing inert, his binocular gaze fixed on the shore, till Aunt Teresa saw fit to interrupt him: ‘Emmanuel! Eh alors!’
‘Ah, c’est curieux!’ he said genially, looking round at us, as though inviting assent. ‘There are no trees, not a single one! Extraordinary country!’
‘Mind the steps, dear,’ I said tenderly, as we were alongside and climbing the slippery ladder to the quarter-deck.
I know I felt that there was something ineffably pathetic about our anchoring in the fading sunlight of a scorching afternoon — gliding noiselessly into the silent harbour, still as doom. What spots there were in the world. What places! Aden, the back-stairs of the globe. Sylvia leaned on the rail and looked, and I beside her. It made her want to weep softly and woefully, she could not say why. And when the boat, gliding noiselessly, halted still in this uncanny stillness of moist air and yellow water, she looked at me as though expecting that I too must be aware of her emotion. Beastly looked too. He shook his head slowly. ‘What a black hole to live in!’
We dined on board, and after dinner stepped into the launch and crossed the tepid shark-infested strip of water to the cheerless shore. Not a tree, not a patch of grass. The sun had sunk into the sea, but the baked desert earth still glowed with heat, and when, driving through the dark of night in a car dashing at full speed, I held out my hand, it was like putting it into an oven. The Sahara was breathing on us from behind. The moon in heaven seemed stifled by the night. The General with the mad eyes who was not allowed to come with us (lest he detract the Arabs from the line of duty to iniquity) asked me to buy a packet of tobacco for him. This done, we visited the famous cisterns deemed to have been built by King Solomon, passed down the many flights of stairs into the hollow depths wherein our steps and even whisper resounded magnified a hundredfold. The night was black, and Aden a dark pit. The car put on speed. We were back at the coast — back on the boat.