The Man from the Sea (7 page)

“Do you think you’re being comforting?”

“I certainly hope so.” The man from the sea sounded genuinely surprised. “It’s the first stage with a problem – isn’t it? – to get the terms of it clear. And yours is not a very complex problem, you know. Ten minutes has served to see it as it is. Now you work out the solution. I wish my own conundrum were as simple.”

“You talk as if it was all science.”

“Of course it’s all science. Anything in which the mind can establish causality is science – and nothing but science. And the solution of your problem is simple – as simple as a right-about turn.”

“I just have to try again – and on some convenient future occasion tell Sally that once upon a time I was an ass?”

“In essence – yes.” The man from the sea was still confident. “Of course, I’m not discounting emotional complications in what is itself an emotional matter. You must work out how to deal with them. Particularly the magical side.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The really primitive response in your situation, I imagine, is a kind of taboo response. You are inclined to imagine an absolute inhibition. The idea of first the mother–”

“For God’s sake shut up!” Cranston found that he had been crouched on a wicker chair, and that now he had sprung up and was pacing the summerhouse. A faint grey light was seeping into it, and he could distinguish the few pieces of neglected furniture scattered about. “Didn’t Sally say there were cigarettes?” He fumbled at a table. “You can say that a feeling like that is magical, primitive, pagan, uncivilised. It’s probably unchristian too, for all I know.”

“It’s certainly that.” The man from the sea spoke with undisturbed authority. “Although there other and difficult concepts come in. Repentance, penance, expiation–”

“But that’s not how my mind works.”

“Isn’t it? It’s not always easy to be sure. But I think I know the ideas your mind does feed on. Cheapness, humiliation, disgrace.”

“Nothing of the sort.” Cranston was impatient. He had found the cigarettes and was about to light one. But before he could strike a match, something further burst from him. “The dishonour!”

The man from the sea had been fumbling for the cigarette packet in his turn. But at this he stopped and was strangely still. “Dishonour?” he asked unemotionally. “It’s the same as disgrace, isn’t it?”

“No.”

The man from the sea laughed – but his laughter had no effect upon an indefinable sense of crisis that had built itself up in the summerhouse. “I should have thought that it was only in rather deeper waters that one learned that.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Didn’t I come from them – before your eyes? Let me have the matches, will you?”

Cranston pushed the box across the table. “It’s dishonour when you have to say
never
. Never, never, never.”

“When I was stripping for that swim, I lost my watch. I took it from a pocket, meaning to transfer it to this belt. But I was at the rail, and my hand slipped.” The man from the sea paused. “It’s a habit it has.”

“Your hand?” Cranston was puzzled.

“Never mind. That’s another story. My hand slipped, I say – and the watch had vanished in an instant. Honour – dishonour: is that how you see them?”

“Yes. Never, never, never… You are going to say one can dive.”

“I am. But – my dear boy – it has to be to the very bottom of the deep… My eyes are still smarting like the devil, but I don’t see that I need deny myself a cigarette.”

There was a moment’s silence in the summerhouse, and somewhere in the distance Cranston heard a cock crow. Sally had been longer than she reckoned. He tried to remember the time of the single early-morning train down the branch line. Then, at the spurt of the match, he glanced at his companion. The small intense flame lit up the face of the man from the sea. It was evident that he could see nothing. But his attitude was of one glancing downward. Once already – but less clearly – Cranston had glimpsed him in that pose, and had felt his memory obscurely stir. It stirred again now – and to such an effect that he cried out.

The man from the sea raised his head. His eyes, horribly bloodshot and almost closed, were directed for a moment sightlessly before him. And then he blew out the match. “Did you speak?” he said.

“I know you.” Cranston took a deep breath. “You’re Day.”

“Yes – I’m Day.” The man from the sea struck another match and lit his cigarette. “But we never met before tonight?”

“Photographs. There were no end of photographs when – when it happened. No wonder you know about Alex Blair – and remembered meeting his wife at some grand scientific do.”

“If you recognise me from a photograph, other people will be capable of doing the same thing. It’s part of my problem, as you can guess.”

“No doubt.” Cranston had gone to the door of the summerhouse and was peering into the garden, the nearer outlines of which were becoming faintly visible. “As I now know that you’re John Day I’d better say that my name is Richard Cranston. But it’s not a very equal exchange of information.” He swung round. “What made you do it?”

“Go – or come back?” The man called John Day got to his feet, and as he did so put both hands across his eyes. “Curse this stuff! Has something gone wrong, do you think? The girl ought to be back by now.”

“I think she ought. But we can give her a few more minutes before worrying.”

“And go on talking? Now, what was it about? Honour and dishonour, I think – and diving to the very bottom of the deep. That’s why I’ve come back. It’s my dive. As for why I went – well, I believe people have written books about it.”

Cranston was silent. The dimensions of what he was involved with were coming home to him. When John Day had taken a holiday in Switzerland, vanished, been glimpsed in Vienna and vanished again, Cranston had still been at school. He remembered hysterical stuff in newspapers. And he remembered his senior physics master, uncommunicative but grim. Two years later there had been a particular sort of explosion in the heart of the Asiatic land-mass. Instruments in North Africa, in California, in New South Wales had recorded it. One man’s deciding to differ from his immediate fellows could mean that – could even sway the balance, perhaps, in which hung the fate of nations. And now here was John Day in the Blairs’ summerhouse. He had just conducted a good-humoured inquisition into the momentous matter of a young man’s having developed a morbid sense of guilt in consequence of mucking a love-affair.

Day had found his way across the summerhouse and was fingering – like the blind man that he momentarily was – the heap of clothes which Sally had left on a bench. “Let me be quite plain,” he said, “that what I called a moment ago my problem is a purely practical one. The larger issues, you see, I have got entirely clear.”

“Was the solution as simple as you say mine is – as simple as a right-about turn? Is that what you’re doing – turning?”

“Turning my coat again, I think you mean? I suppose it might be put that way.”

“You have plans?”

“I have a very simple plan.”

“But not so simple that you don’t require help?”

“It’s possible that I need only a bowl of water – in addition, that is, to what are clearly these admirable clothes. If I can get rid of this sand and reasonably see–” Day broke off – and a moment later uttered in a strange voice a single word. “Harris!”

“What’s that?” Cranston was startled.

“This jacket – or whatever it is. Harris tweed. I suddenly got the smell of it – and smell’s a damned queer thing. It’s four years since I’ve had decent – since I’ve had western clothes in my hands. Clothes are damned queer too, by the way.”

Cranston made no reply. Sally’s delay was disturbing, but nevertheless he hoped now that it would last a little longer. If he said nothing Day might fall silent – and then he could think. He desperately needed to. He was aware that some great responsibility had descended upon him, and that he must put himself the right questions and find himself the right answers. When Day – as a mere unknown – had come a fugitive from the sea Cranston had prided himself on finding one right answer at once. In his own private affairs he had guessed very badly – had behaved very badly. He had been becoming aware of it. And the ability suddenly to decide rightly about the fugitive – to acknowledge that he must be given simple human solidarity until he had a chance to declare and explain himself: this ability had brought him its odd comfort for a time. But how was he to act now – suddenly caught up by the necessity not for some merely private decision but for a decision very conceivably involving vast public issues?

His first duty was to remember his years. He saw this at once – and felt a faint flicker of intellectual satisfaction, of intellectual pride, in so seeing it. At least he still had a clear head. There was a sense in which he had the largest confidence in himself, and of this not even his having so mucked things could substantially rob him. But at the same time he knew that here was something which he ought not to be taking on alone. He paused on this. Where did such an acknowledgement lead? Ought he to leave the summerhouse, affecting perhaps to search for Sally, and go straight to the house and rouse Alex Blair? And, if he turned this suggestion down, ought he not to be very sure that his reason for doing so had nothing to do with the privately disastrous disclosures that would almost certainly follow?

For a moment it seemed to him that here was the obvious course. Blair was the nearest person of standing and of mature judgment. More than this, he was himself an eminent scientist, already knowing something of Day both as a man and as a physicist.

Cranston extinguished his cigarette and walked out to the verandah. Day did nothing to stop him. The sky was faintly luminous and there was a bar of orange in the east. He fancied that he heard peewits crying very far away. He couldn’t go to the house. Abruptly he knew this absolutely. But he was unable to find the reason. Only he thought it wasn’t funk about Caryl. He turned back into the summerhouse and found that there was at least a line of enquiry in his head. “The police,” he said boldly. “This must mean the police for you, sooner or later. Why not now?”

“The police? No. They’re no part of my plan.”

“I don’t understand you. You’ve come back as the only way of – of recovering your watch. You can’t expect a reception by the Lord Mayor of London. And if you really believe that the fellow off the ship will presently be raising a whole hunt against you – well, I’d have thought you might as well get yourself safely locked up sooner rather than later.”

“You’d like me safely locked up?”

“I can’t be sure about you. Suppose your eyes clear up with a little bathing, and you are able to get along by yourself. Ought I just to let you disappear? Oughtn’t I to be more – more suspicious of you than that? You left this country meaning mischief to it, and it seems very possible that you’ve come back to it meaning more. If it isn’t your intention to contact the authorities, oughtn’t I to be very suspicious of your story indeed? If you can be said to have produced a story at all.”

“You’d like to listen to the confessions of a penitent traitor? My Life of Disillusionment behind the Iron Curtain – that sort of thing?”

“Not that. But you mayn’t be at all as you represent yourself. For instance, it seems very queer that you should just arrive like this. I don’t see how you can have done it. You must have been quite tremendously a marked man – watched and guarded right round the clock. How on earth could you have smuggled yourself on a ship due to skirt the Scottish coast?”

“I couldn’t – and I didn’t. I wasn’t any sort of a stowaway, my dear chap. I was the star turn on board. We were on a little scientific cruise.”

“Scientific?” Cranston reached for another cigarette. “You mean some sort of devilry?”

“Just that. You can guess the sort of thing.” Day was ironic. “Call it doing something sinister to the Gulf Stream. Or perhaps the Sargasso Sea.”

“Rubbish.”

“Quite so. Still, the motive of our cruise was simple enough. Forty years ago its equivalent would have been, say, charting the other fellow’s minefields. Nowadays one noses out other things, and the job requires far higher technical skill. Not that I didn’t have the deuce of a time getting the assignment.”

“Because you were any number of cuts above it?”

“Just that. But I persuaded them that I had a valuable and intimate knowledge of the terrain. So they sent me. And then they let me slip. You are still sceptical?”

“I don’t know that I can be – just about that. What I came in on didn’t look like a put-up show. But wasn’t it pretty feeble of them?”

“Perhaps so. But it was outside their expectations, outside their very comprehensive system of suspicions. An act of sudden individual initiative, proceeding from an entirely private and personal – what shall we call it? – movement of the spirit. It’s what sometimes takes people their way, you may say. But they’re slow to realise that it can be a two-way traffic.”

“What did your movement of the spirit prompt you to stuff in that belt?” Cranston paused – and thought that he sensed Day stiffen. “The inner secrets of the Kremlin? Chats on nuclear physics?”

“Money – dollars and francs and pounds sterling.” Day’s familiar laugh was at its easiest. “In quite astonishingly large amounts – which I had the devil of a job getting together. If you care to hit me on the head and bury me in the garden, you can set yourself up on the proceeds handsomely.”

For a moment Cranston said nothing, and the ugly little joke hung in air. “Money?” he asked presently. “Do your simple plans need such a lot of it? You’ll have free keep in Pentonville or Brixton.” There was a further silence, and he realised that this, too, had been ugly enough. “I just want to make sense of you,” he said.

“I hadn’t much idea, you see, where my break-away might happen. Or who might have to be bribed to do what. I envisaged a great many possibilities. Science, you know, trains one to that sort of thinking ahead.”

“It doesn’t seem to have trained you to think sufficiently ahead in the first instance.”