Mr. Fortune (26 page)

Thereafter, muffled in fever, his recollection preserved only disconnected fragments: a horrible meal, costly and greasy, after which he had vomited; looking at a full moon; the shade under an avenue of cork-trees; hearing from a solitary farmhouse—for he had left San Diego and all this while walked on, directionless—the strains of “The Belle of New York” played on a mechanical piano; a rhea, with the feathers slipping from its wing like overbalancing panniers; the silence of late summer suddenly trampling him with terror as he stood among the endless ranks of tall grasses, so that he began to talk to himself, and then as desperately desisted, knowing this to be the behaviour of a madman; and a long argument he had held with himself, later in the day, as to why he should not wish to run mad, since sanity had done so little for him. These, with thirst, headache, cold at dawn, the grasp of the midday sun, and countless cattle, and endless herbage, and occasional unreal meetings with herdsmen and once with a postman, made up the sum of he knew not how many days.

But to mind, sourly rankling inside his sick and insatiably enduring body, there had been no release, no moment when he could put on that rich garment of sorrow. He had walked in a dull and angry dream, feeling himself made a fool of. Here he was, amid the landscape and solitude he had promised himself, on the right side of those mountains at last. Here was the place, his world's ending in this unending plain. Here, if he chose, he could sit down and fully possess himself of sorrow before he died; for it takes many hours to die: if those who drown can find time to review a whole life, one dying more slowly of starvation should have leisure for the longer exploit of one minute's absorbed accepted grief. There was nothing to say him nay, no policeman to move him on, no public opinion to clap him into a workhouse or an infirmary. A rhea, wearing its feathers in that fatalistic manner, would not put out the slightest objection to his death on its territory. Yet he walked on, never finding the place, the unforetold aspect of grass and sky which would say to him, Here! Sit down, Sorrow. With a melancholy exasperation he continued his frantic stroll, and took pains still to preserve his life, even his comfort, seeking signs of man so that he might buy food, and being careful not to sit on a thistle. So, perceiving the House of the Salutation, he had turned his steps that way, and stopping by a brook had washed himself, and scraped away a two days' beard, being anxious to make a good impression.

Presumably he had done so, since the owner of the house had taken him in and nursed him. Waking from a vexed and unsatisfactory stupor to her kindness, he had felt grateful; but it irked him to find that she spoke English, and during his convalescence he had felt an increasing desire to get away as soon as the conventions of this odd situation would allow. Not that there was anything to go away for. Every hope of possessing his sorrow had fallen off him now. During the time he lay a-bed he had been haunted by the recollection of a swarm of butterflies which had settled upon the boat as it left Rio de Janeiro. At the moment of departure they had come after it, thickly, impetuously, as bees follow the queen in the nuptial flight. Like a shower of blossoms they had settled upon deck and spar and rigging, their colours palpitating on the ship's unlovely surface like a scatter of jewels. For two days they had remained with the boat; on the third day they were gone, drowned in sea or air, all but a dying, discolouring few, fluttering their faint wings in corners, trailing underfoot in alley-ways, stamped out in a few hours to powder and a film of death. So, on him, at his setting out, had his hopes clustered; and now were gone.

While his body recovered slowly round the wreck of his mind he lingered, exasperated and grateful, saying to himself, Once I am up, once I can trust my legs to carry me out of eyeshot, I will go. Conveyed in the car with the calico lilies he had winced under the taunt of that wasted speed and mileage, asking himself why in heaven's name he had volunteered for the excursion. Then, sitting alone in the car outside the church, he had known that at last, if he sat very still, still as a biddable child that sits with mouth open and eyes shut to see what somebody will send it, his sorrow would be vouchsafed to him.

The rain fell, churning the soft road to mud, sliding over the willow-trees and trickling through the roof of the car. Its gentle insistence seemed to subdue everything to the level of earth, weighing down the houses, the trees, the ramshackle warehouses and sheds. Only the church resisted it and stood up, enlarged to a greater stature by the low horizon-line. A baroque building, festooned with stone, solemnly ornate, it looked like a ship. A windjammer with all her canvas spread, it seemed to sail upon the plain, slowly advancing upon him, bearing down on him, growing momently taller and more imposing, its enormous weight yielding smoothly to the light pressure of the following airs. It had been a shock when Angustias emerged from it, recalling it again to rooted stone. But he was not angry with her. For, sitting very quietly, his will at last unclenched, his thoughts extinguished by the falling rain, he had found himself invested in his sorrow, and had known in that absolving moment, the space of time wherein a drop of rain might hang on a willow twig, round itself into perfection and fall, how well it fitted and became him.

It was not happiness, he repeated to himself. Nor was it peace; since peace must flower like the rainbow out of a storm, and never, since leaving the island, had his unhappiness broken its weight of immobility. If this which he now felt had been peace, the rainbow, it must have revoked the old grief, have said, as a rainbow does, Never again shall the waters cover the earth. But his grief had not receded an inch, he was not one blade of grass comforted. Whatever part of his mind was capable of happiness or comforting worked no longer. A spring had snapped. No, he told himself, walking about day after day, what I feel now is perhaps some emotion I could never have felt while I was still capable of any hope. For by the law of a man's mind he cannot feel an emotion that is not balanced against an opposite, whose white or black is not paired with a black or white. But this is a single thing, irrelevant and complete; and being complete, as complete as death, it is sterile. Nothing will come of it, good or bad. It will not better my days, or shorten them. But it enlightens me as the light in the kingdom of Limbo enlightens the souls there—a light that knows neither rising nor setting, timeless, dim, and equable, casting no shadow.

For more and more the sense of time left him, and the real sun, bestriding the faintly undulating, even-coloured landscape, scarcely indented his consciousness with the scalloped pattern of days. Time stretched unmeasured, monotonously embroidered with the wax and wane of daylight. Very slowly it was becoming colder, very slowly the pampas changed colour as the days shrank. The great thistles were empty of seed now and clanked together hollowly in a more determined wind. The birds had a different, scantier note, the sheep moved under a heavier fleece. He had been at the Salutation for two months and more, so much an accepted part of the household that Angustias troubled herself no longer to find employments for him that he might feel at home.

“Ah,” she had said on an admiring sigh, one evening as they sat together. “I see you are business-like. I suppose all the English are so.”

He looked about him, at a loss to discover what act of his had prompted this conclusion.

“You even roll up string,” she added. And following the direction of her gaze he saw, lying beside him, neatly twisted into a wreath, a length of string that he had been playing with unknowing.

“I have a great quantity of string, all in tangles,” she continued, her voice warm with hospitality. “Would you like some more?” And without awaiting his answer she rose and made off with her slow easy gait, limberly unrolling, a heavy woman and idle, but light on her feet as a girl, and returning with a boxful of twine, set it down before him as though, from the recesses of her experience, her intuition, her deep female resources of cupboard, she had fetched exactly the right toy to please a child.

The ham
soufflé
, to be served in the arbour by Rosa wearing a light blue straw hat, had eluded the moment of performance, and now it was too late in the year for such gaieties, it must be postponed till next summer—for she hoped he would stay on till then, perhaps for ever, there seemed no reason why not; meanwhile, the string proving so successful, her ambition was whetted to produce other congenial entertainments. Rummaging at leisure through her imagination she hit upon the clocks. The House of the Salutation was almost as rich in clocks as in string; and by now the clocks were as much in need of attention. Harry, enforcing his punctuality upon a continent of
mañana
, and with a passion for timepieces, had bought clocks with a double impetus of duty and pleasure—alarm clocks, travelling clocks, chiming clocks, clocks combined with barometers or showing the phases of the moon; he had also bought, when such came his way, clocks with any peculiarity to commend them—clocks with one hand only, clocks with painted dials, and a clock whose weights had been founded out of a church bell possessed by the devil.

“I have got all their keys,” she said. “For I do not lose things. I put them away.”

The truth of this was deepeningly revealed to him when, with the ripening of his authority as a power for order, he began to accompany Angustias on her raids through cupboard, box-room, and storehouse for the things she had not lost. All his life he had lived slenderly; the abundance through which he now waded did nothing to quicken in him a desire for possessions. Indeed, at first he felt a slight moral pain that such abundance should be possible. But realising that nothing could be done about it, he fell to accepting it as a matter of course, as though it were one of the gaudier manifestations of nature, like tropical scenery. The remains of two races and two civilisations were mingled here, lying pell-mell. Lacquer fans, stirrup irons, baby-clothes, spice-boxes filled with scentless shreds and dusts, old books of devotion, advertisements from hardware manufacturers, swords, sewing-machines, flintlocks, rosaries, dog-collars, quilted petticoats, charms, and a model steam-engine were packed away with spirit-lamps, mandolines, and mouldy furs. Stuffed into the crannies of the great chests and domed travelling-trunks were packets of old letters, deeds, invoices, crumpled fiddle-music, daguerrotypes, astronomical charts, pedigrees of horses and dogs. Into this humus Angustias would dive in unflustered search, bringing to the surface whatever she felt a whim to unearth. Her memory never failed her. She would pick up a nut and say from what machine it was lacking. The recognition sufficed her, she felt no need to rescue or restore. Everything was there and everything was in her memory; as she had said, she lost nothing, she put things away. “Look,” she exclaimed, extricating a crumpled platter of green chiffon and rusty wires from a wicker bassinet filled with spurs and medicine bottles. “This is the hat I wore on my honeymoon. It looks odd now, doesn't it?” And balancing it upon her damasked hair she looked at him serenely.

These things have been living to her, he thought. That is why she now accepts their decay so naturally. They have fulfilled themselves and are dead. And he understood why this accumulation left his conscience untroubled. It was an accumulation, not a hoard; she raided among it as though she were stirring up dead vegetation heaped for leaf-mould. Angustias too would die. She would be put into a graveyard and labelled, a human distinction which her belongings did not claim. How did she feel about it?—that discarded from the uses of life she would be put away but not lost? The women of her race were said to be pious, and Angustias went to mass, and carried calico lilies to the Virgin. Upon this follows immortality. Yet she did not convey the aroma of religion, and it seemed to him that the immortality she looked for would be the measured earthly immortality of something put away that might be come upon at hazard, and for a moment greeted, and then securely forgotten again.

On the heels of this reflection it occurred to him to wonder if in this country there was such a thing as valuing for probate. If there were, the House of the Salutation would be a tough nut to crack, one day. Later, seeing Angustias bent, sighing and rather inky, over a number of bills and an account book, the thought brushed his mind again. And this time it led him to think that she might be glad of a little help.

“Yes. You will do it properly, with red ink and those lines. I will find you everything.”

Returning with inks, a ruler, and a leather-bound folio, musty with age but blank except for one entry dated 1857, she explained that twice a year her son-in-law liked to oversee the estate accounts—a great nuisance, since he, being a town-dweller, understood nothing of country management, and continually boggled at the pliability which country management demanded.

“But if you do it there will be nothing to distress him. I shall leave it all in your hands.”

After the account, the fruit of many evenings' inquisition and comparison, had been dispatched she told him that her son-in-law was so much struck by it that he had written to congratulate and inquire.

“I have told him all about you. He will be delighted, no doubt. He has told my daughter, many times, that what this place needs is a man. And now, thank heaven, we need do nothing more for six months.”

Her words pleased him. His audit had shown him that the estate was flourishing enough, that there was no call for his conscience to awake. He would have been sorry to recommend any departure from the easy abundant festoonings of Angustias' method. He would much rather go on tinkering with the clocks, since they seemed none the worse for his ministrations, and if they were not conspicuously the better, that was a matter of small consequence. He was glad to help; but he had no desire to find himself found useful.

For having come to this place, unknowing what he should find there, or at what prompting he made the journey, only knowing that it must be made, a further knowledge, equally mysterious and irrefutable, became his. He knew what he must do. Sitting in the rain and watching the church borne towards him by the intensity of his gaze as a majestic ship moves on the wind, he became aware that what he must do now was to be still, as still as possible. For this sorrow that he had brought with him like some splendid garment closed and crumpled in a chest became, in that moment of wearing, more than a garment. It became alive, as though he had been given to wear some vast trailing-winged butterfly whose wings, still crumpled and discoloured from the chrysalis in which they had slept, were only just beginning to quiver and expand. Here, then, he must sit, mute, anonymous, dwindled to a speck, to a shrivelled cradle, while perched on him his sorrow might sun itself, quiver and expand and deepen the sombre magnificence of its colours. Sometimes, when he walked alone on the pampas, he could feel it tranquilly stirring its wings about him. It had room there, the elbow-room he had promised it; it could stretch and preen and spread itself on either side, till with one wing it could touch the snow of the invisible mountains and dip the other in the Atlantic. Out of him it had come, this darkly-dyed splendour. Sullenly he had enfolded it, as the cerement of the chrysalis enwinds the butterfly. And then, at the ripened hour, gently and fatally splitting, his heart had given way, and it had come out.