The Man Within (26 page)

Then Andrews remembered that Carlyon had lost his ship. It was not to a friend that he was riding but to a man whom he had robbed not only of livelihood and sole mistress but of his only dream, a foolish sentimental blind dream of adventure. It had not needed the loss of a ship to break the dream. Betrayal had done that. The loss only made the waking irrevocable. One of us will be dead tonight, he thought, and the horse as though in alliance with the shrinking body slowed its pace. ‘Faster, old boy, faster.’ Oh, to be there before his courage again departed. He must not think of the future, but the advice was an impossible one. ‘O God,’ he prayed, ‘let it not be me. He’s broken and finished. He will not mind death, but I’m only just beginning.’

The cottage light. It was less than a week since, fleeing over the down, he had seen it first. Now as then he was afraid, but with what a difference. A gulf of more than time separated the two figures. One had approached with shrinking caution. The other, leaving the horse untied to stray at will, ran with a desperate carelessness to outstrip fear and flung open the cottage door. Out of a gale fashioned of the roaring passage of time and his own tumultuous thoughts and fears he stepped into a quiet so deep that it formed a
frozen
block which kept him pressed against the door, unable to move or speak or for a moment feel.

At the table Carlyon sat facing him, eyes open, breathing, seeing, knowing, yet neither speaking nor moving nor showing hatred or surprise. Elizabeth’s back was turned, where she sat, but Andrews did not need to see her face, for her hunched shoulders and fallen head told him that she was dead. Told him but conveyed for a little no meaning of death, spoke, as it were, in images too hackneyed or conventional to stir the mind. He stared and stared at the extreme decrepitude of the dead body, which now had no more grace or beauty than a sawdust doll. His eyes passed on in a puzzled and still uncomprehending inquiry to Carlyon, who sat watching him without speech or movement. On the table out of Carlyon’s reach lay a pistol, trigger raised.

Pushing painfully against the cold barrier of silence Andrews approached. As feeling returns with agony to a frozen limb, so a small dull pain began to throb in his forehead, with a regular and maddening rhythm. With a kind of caution he stretched out his fingers and touched the body on the shoulder. The warm answer of the flesh smote its way to his brain, cleared his stunned mind and flung it into a passionate rebellion.

She could not be dead. It was impossible, too unfair, too final. The flesh had made to his fingers an exactly similar response to that of life. There was but one difference. The face had not turned to him. He was afraid to touch the face. She is only hurt, asleep, he thought. As long as he did not touch the face so she would remain. ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth,’ he implored but under his breath not loud enough to wake her if indeed she slept. He shut out the knowledge which lay deep in his mind like an internal sore and clung with passionate persistency to hope. He began to pray out loud in a low voice, ignoring Carlyon’s presence. ‘Oh God, let her be asleep,’ he whispered, ‘let her be asleep.’ He felt that he
could
stand there immovable not for hours merely, but for days, weeks, years, never making a sound loud enough to wake her, believing that there was a chance she slept.

Carlyon said across the table, ‘What’s the use? She’s dead.’ The suddenness of the words made Andrews’ heart leap, and for the moment he felt that it would never begin to beat again. He gasped, robbed of air he hoped for ever. But his heart started again its regular, hateful rhythm of life, and Andrews jerked himself unwillingly into motion. He seized the pistol which lay upon the table and raised it. ‘Be quiet,’ was all he said, however, in a low trembling voice.

‘What’s the use?’ Carlyon repeated with an unfeeling voice which dropped the words slowly and heavily into the air like small pellets of lead. ‘She’s dead.’

‘You are lying,’ Andrews whispered, but then the suspense became too great and he turned and took the body in his arms. The face fell back against his shoulder and the eyes which he had thought were faultless stared into his with an unwinking and imbecile lack of expression. ‘My own knife,’ he said slowly, tracing the red stain on her clothes to its source.

He let the body down again into the seat and stood with hands pressed to his forehead. Despair and a kind of terror were advancing towards him down a long tunnel, but as yet he defended himself from the realization that Elizabeth would never speak to him again, that he would never feel her in his arms, though he lived for another fifty years. And then he would die and enter a blank eternity. He stared across the table at Carlyon, but his eyes were glazed and he saw him only through a shaking, hovering veil. He still held the pistol, but he felt no anger against Carlyon. Before this complete destruction of a life which had given a meaning and a possibility to holiness and divinity hatred seemed a child’s game. It was in any case, he felt dimly, not an act of the living which had crumbled life but of the dead, a victory
for
the old man who had preceded him in this cottage and for his father. There had been no struggle with Carlyon but only with his father. His father had made him a betrayer and his father had slain Elizabeth and his father was dead and out of reach. Out of reach. But was he? His father’s was not a roaming spirit. It had housed itself in the son he had created. I am my father, he thought, and I have killed her.

At the thought the dry, strained despair in which he dwelt gave way before a kind of blessed grief. He flung himself upon his knees beside the body and began to fondle it but without tears and over and over again he kissed the hands but not the face, for he feared to meet the imbecility of the eyes. If I had not run away – the thought doubled him with pain. ‘It was my father made me,’ he said aloud. But how could he prove it, kill that damaging spirit and show a self remaining?

Carlyon’s voice steadied him and brought him back to his feet. ‘Francis, I didn’t do this.’ It seemed in no way unnatural that his enemy should speak to him as Francis, for it was not his enemy. His enemy was his father and lay within himself, confusing him till he had struck his friend.

‘Joe came here first,’ Carlyon said. ‘I wasn’t here. She wouldn’t tell him, seemed to be waiting for someone. That made him nervous, he tried to find out where you were. He began to hurt her. She stabbed herself. He’s gone.’

‘Do you hate me, Carlyon?’ Andrews asked. A plan had entered his head for dealing with his father, and it was as though in fear his father’s spirit had shrunk into a small space leaving Andrews’ own brain more clear and simple than he had ever known it.

‘No,’ Carlyon said. ‘You must hate me. You can shoot if you like. If not I’ll wait for the officers. They are coming?’

Andrews nodded his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘for what I did against you.’ Across the table their hands met. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ Andrews said, ‘we’ve been sleeping. She’s
woken
us.’ His voice broke and he dropped his hand, for his words had brought up a piercingly clear vision of what seemed to him a perfect holiness which he would never meet again. ‘Carlyon,’ he said, ‘will you go – now before the officers come?’

‘What’s the use?’ Carlyon said dully, watching the dead face opposite him. They’ll find me. I shall be almost glad to hang for this. What a stupid business. She was finer than any of us.’

‘Go,’ Andrews repeated. ‘Don’t you understand I want to be alone with her.’ He clenched his hands in a spasm of fear, fear of the grief which must come when there was no voice to distract him, and yet, if his father were to be slain, he must be alone.

Carlyon rose and Andrews handed him the pistol. ‘You may need this,’ he said. ‘Listen. Will you promise never to interfere with me again.’

‘I promise,’ Carlyon said. ‘We’ve been fools. That’s all done with.’

‘I didn’t mean the past,’ Andrews said. ‘Promise.’

‘I promise.’ They did not shake hands again for Andrews suddenly turned and stood with his back to the door fighting the impulse to cry out to Carlyon, ‘Don’t go. I’m afraid to be alone.’ His hands over his eyes he felt the touch of tears for the first time. Yet none of them was because his friend had gone and he would not see him again. As his enmity for Carlyon seemed now only a child’s foolish and dangerous game with fire, so also his love. It was like a dream recalled after many hours – without reality. The two musics had fought for final mastery – one alluring, unreal, touched with a thin romance and poetry, the other clear-cut, ringing, sane, a voice carved out of white marble. One had gone out from him into a vague world, the other was silent in death, but silence had conquered.

He was alone with the body of his love and he dared not loose his hands from his face. If he had lived with her a
little
longer he might have come to believe in an immortality and a resurrection, but now both heart and brain denied the possibility. Spring and summer and winter might come and go through the centuries, but their individual bodies would never meet. He had hardly begun to hear her voice and he had scarcely touched her body, and now he would neither hear nor touch ever again. He knew now how a second could crawl, and he could not bear the thought of the passage of empty years.

Dropping his hands but with eyes lowered so that he should not see her face he knelt beside Elizabeth’s chair. ‘Do you know,’ he asked in a whisper, ‘that it was I that killed you?’ For was there anything of himself that was not his father? His father was his lust, and his cowardice had been fashioned by his father. He would find out. He had a plan, but he dared not think of it too closely, lest his father fearing defeat and death should make a last struggle and gain ascendency.

His own knife. He had left it to guard her and with it she had taken her life. What depth of terror and disillusionment must have led her to that sacrifice. He thought of her frightened, despairing, afraid of betraying him. She had whispered ‘soon’ in unbelief, but she must have hoped, until it was too late for hope and she knew that he would not return.

He lifted her hand and put it on his mouth. ‘Why were you so wise?’ he whispered. ‘My love, my love, if you had waited Carlyon would have come.’ Spring, summer, autumn, winter. ‘Did you think I loved you so little that I could go on for ever and ever without you?’ He began to weep not freely but with dry, lacerating, interrupted sobs which left him breathless and exhausted. His brain felt wearied out and yet he could not rest. Sights and sounds, disconnected, many of them meaningless, trod on each other’s heels, trampled across his brain till it felt aching and bleeding. A sprig of blackberries in a muddy lane, a shrill voice talking,
talking
in a crowded bar, a man with scrubby beard, a wheel that turned endlessly with gathering speed, a shock of stars that plunged across a great dark gap of space, voices raised in shouts, the whistle of wind in spars, the sound of water, a red face plunged at him shrieking questions, and then silence, a white face lit by candles, and darkness and an aching heart.

The fourth time. The fourth time he would find peace. He needed it now more than ever in his life before. Even extinction was not so dread as the continuance of this aching nightmare. He put his head upon Elizabeth’s knees and said aloud between ungainly efforts to retrieve his breath, ‘I’ll try.’

Very faint through the sound of his own hard breathing he heard the gravel of the path grate beneath a number of feet. For the second time he raised his eyes to Elizabeth’s face. The vacant eyes no longer horrified him. He saw them as hope, a faint hope that might be a stirring of belief. Something had gone out of them to leave them thus, and how could a tangible knife have struck so intangible a something. If there is anything of you in this room, he thought, you shall see. Again he kissed her hands and again the sound of the shifting gravel came to him.

He realized then that his time with Elizabeth was a matter of minutes only, and that he would not even be allowed to see her into the grave. Taking the body in his arms he held it to him with a greater passion than he had ever shown in life. Although he thought that he was spilling his words vainly into an unhearing silence he whispered into her ear the first proud words he had ever said, ‘I shall succeed.’ Then he closed her eyes, for he did not want so beautiful a body shamed by their imbecility before strangers, and laid her back in the chair. His hands clenched he waited for the door to open, waited but with no apprehension, clear in a double duty of salvation, of his friend from pursuit and of himself from his father.

The many feet had come to a standstill outside the door and their owners were hesitating. It was clear that they feared resistance. Presently a familiar voice shouted for it to be opened. Half sitting upon the table facing the dead girl Andrews remained silent. After another pause the handle was turned with a sudden rough resolution and the door was flung open.

There entered first with slow caution, gun at the ready, the man who had mocked Andrews when they waited together in the witnesses’ room. Some other men followed him with equal caution and ranged themselves against the wall, where they stood ready to shoot, their eyes turning nervously hither and thither, as though they dreaded some sudden attack.

‘So it’s you, Andrews, again,’ their leader said, with a grin intended for mockery. Andrews smiled back. He felt at last clear and certain of himself, happy in his decision.

‘Where are your friends?’

‘They’ve gone,’ he said and smiling at the association he caught a friendly echo of Carlyon’s voice. ‘They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.’ Into what a harsh light had they passed and in what a refreshing darkness did he stay. It touched his hot brain with cool fingers like the fingers of a woman and the ache and restless longing and despair were at an end. And the darkness soon would grow deeper and in that darkness who knew but that there was a hope to find something which no knife could injure? It was no longer despair but a whimsical reproach with which he thought – if you had waited one month more, one week more, I might have believed. Now I hope.