The Doomsday Men

by J. B. Priestley

  It was dark when they shook and roused him, though there were lights coming from somewhere. He crawled out shakily into the delicious cool air of early night, saw deep indigo hills against the stars, and high in front many lighted windows; and he knew without being told that they had brought him to the very place at which he had stared from the plane about six hours before; for this could only be the secret headquarters of the Brotherhood, the home of the MacMichaels. Yes, dimly rising there, ghostly beneath the stars, was the white tower.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANDREA REVEALS THE SECRET

  Yes, it was Andrea. Malcolm rose and went slowly towards her. She was wearing a black sombrero, a coloured shirt, trousers and boots, as if for riding. She stepped back, staring, and he came slowly out, and they looked at one another, standing there in the sunlight. Her face was heavily shadowed under the broad brim, but he fancied it went suddenly white, and she certainly put up a hand, as if to stop her heart pounding. And it seemed quite a long time before they spoke.

  “I didn’t know until this morning,” she said, speaking with some difficulty, “and even then I couldn’t believe it was you.” She waited a moment. “Oh!—why did you come here?”

  “I came to see you again.”

  “Yes—but why, why?”

  “You see,” he explained carefully, “I managed to get that job—of seeing our client out in Hollywood—I think I told you about that—and then I felt I had to find out where you were and to try and see you again. As a matter of fact, that’s why I came to America at all. To see you again, and if possible to talk to you and to try and find out what’s the matter.”

  “Why should there be anything the matter?”

  He seemed to know a lot of reasons now, but this was not the moment to bring them out. He hesitated a moment, and lost the chance of replying.

  “I didn’t ask you to come here.” And she gave him a sombre reproachful look, out of eyes that now he saw he had not remembered properly at all.

  “No,” he replied, trying to keep a careful level tone, “you didn’t. In fact, you discouraged me from ever finding out anything more about you. In spite of that telegram.”

  “I shouldn’t have sent that,” she said quickly. “That was silly. I was sorry afterwards.”

  He waited a moment, still looking at her. “Probably you’re not interested now, but I might as well tell you that since that telegram, or since that night at Beaulieu, I don’t think I’ve spent three waking hours together without remembering you, thinking about you.”

  She swung away, and stared—or appeared to stare—down into the empty valley.

  “That’s why I came,” he went on, not pleading, not giving his tone any more warmth. “I’ve probably made a fool of myself, but that can’t be helped.”

  She did not reply to this, did not even turn to look at him for a moment or two, then said frowningly: “I still don’t understand. I—tore up—in such a hurry. You were with some other man, weren’t you, that my uncle wanted to see?”

  He explained, briefly, about Hooker, and pointed out, to bring her back to where they really left off, that Hooker had nothing to do with them. “We happened to meet at Barstow, that’s all,” he concluded.

  “You needn’t have gone on thinking about me,” she said, with a very feminine lightning dive into the very heart of the real topic. “Need you?”

  “No, and I tried not to. After all,” he added, so grandly that he suddenly realised he was simply being pompous, “I don’t particularly want to spend all my time thinking about mysterious young women from California.”

  “Oh—young women?”

  “Well,” stiffly, “one young woman then.”

  She regarded him calmly. “You’re very silly, and very British, and somehow rather sweet, when you’re like that,” she announced, to his astonishment. “I remember you like that—before.”

  “You haven’t been thinking about me too—by any chance—have you?”

  She nodded. “Once or twice.” She had a dimple in her cheek. Why had he never remembered that? Had he never seen her smile before? Was she going to be quite different, here among her deserts and mountains?

  But no sooner had he asked himself these questions than her face clouded again; all the fun died out of it; and she was the strange sombre girl he remembered so well.

  “I ought,” she said very slowly, “to tell you to go now—this very minute——” She stopped.

  “I ought to point out,” he put in lightly, “that last night I was very definitely prevented from going—by Pa and Ma Larrigan, who, I take it, besides being a couple of artful old ruffians, are also under the orders of your father and uncle—or uncles.”

  “You seem to know a lot about us.”

  “No, not much. But I’ve done my best.”

  She returned to her previous theme and tone. “You ought to go. I ought to send you away—now. It’s so useless.”

  She was back talking the sad stuff he had heard from her that night at Beaulieu. Everything useless indeed! And here she was, and here he was, and the sun smiling down on them.

  It was as if she caught his unspoken thought, “It’s a lovely day,” she remarked, rather wistfully, as if there might not be many more of them.

  “It’s a glorious day,” he told her enthusiastically. “And I’ll tell you another thing. I wouldn’t be anywhere else in it but here for the world. I’m sorry to say so, but you still seem to me as puzzling and wrong-headed and mysterious and miserable and idiotic as when you left me in front of the Bristol Hotel that night, but you’re here—at last you’re here—I’m not just thinking and wondering about you—you’re really here, a solid girl——”

  “Solid is right,” she murmured. “And if I didn’t take plenty of exercise, I’d soon be an awful lump.”

  He looked at her appreciatively. “You’re just right,” he exclaimed, “that is, so far as your appearance is concerned—these new things, new to me, I mean this Western outfit of yours, suit you too—but as far as behaviour is concerned, with one or two staggering exceptions, you’re all wrong.”

  He smiled at her, but she did not return his smile. She was very serious again now, but rather hesitant, indecisive, as if she couldn’t make up her mind what to do or to say next, but knew that something important must be done or said quite quickly.

  “If you knew that everything was coming to an end for—for you,” she corrected herself hastily, then hesitated a moment, “what would you do?”

  Was she serious? Yes, she appeared to be, and was looking at him quite solemnly.

  “Would you do—something—you wanted to do?”

  “It would be easy for me,” said Malcolm, smiling at her. “I’d go wandering round here with you, all day, and try to shake that moodiness out of you. By jingo!—I’d do it too.”

  And now the surprising girl was suddenly alight, all decision, energy, fire, a magnificent creature. “Can you ride a horse?” she asked quickly.

  “Yes, after a fashion.”

  “Wait, while I telephone,” and away she flew down to the Larrigans’ house, leaving him staring. What a girl! What a frightening, bewildering, quick-changing, entrancing girl! And if she drove him away, he would never look at another.

  He fell into a reverie, and was only startled out of it by the sudden appearance of Ma Larrigan, who looked searchingly at him as he had remembered her doing once or twice the previous evening.

  “I wondered last night if it might be the same,” she began at once, “and said so to Paw. ‘Now why should it be?’ he said. ‘Well, why shouldn’t it?’ I said. ‘Because it’s not likely,’ he said. ‘Just let everything run natural, Maw, and stop fancyin’ things,’ he said. But now I said ‘Well, Paw, look at the way she’s tearin’ round now—an’ don’t tell me it’s not the same feller
she told me of—she met in France or England or one of them countries last winter—because I know better. Use your eyes, Paw,’ I said. ‘I used mine last night,’ I said. An’ that left him no answer—him an’ his running natural!”

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Larrigan,” said Malcolm. “Do you mean she—Miss MacMichael—said something to you about me? That is, before to-day.”

  “D’you think she’s nothing better to do than talk about a feller like you?” demanded Maw, grimly, as if disgusted by his impudence.

  “Well, from what you said——”

  “What I said’s nothing to do with your conceit an’ impudence,” cried the unscrupulous Maw. “Gracious sakes! A straight nose an’ a bit of wave in your hair, an’ you think girls has nothing better to do than be gassing an’ gabbing about you. An’ specially one like that—not one of your little blonde fly-by-nights—why—she wouldn’t look twice at you.”

  “All right, Mrs. Larrigan,” said Malcolm, “you’ve won. She’s a grand girl, though, isn’t she? I suppose you know her very well.”

  But this didn’t work. “Yes, young man,” she snapped, “very well.” And away she stumped.

  It was several minutes before Andrea returned, looking defiant now, not defying him but defying the whole scheme of things in order to protect the little happiness she had decided to enjoy; and it gave her a deeply feminine, almost maternal air, as if Malcolm and the bright day and that happiness were her helpless cubs and she herself a dark bristling lioness. She was almost curt with him, giving him orders; but he did not object because he understood vaguely that this very manner admitted him into a closer intimacy than he had known before. He felt he was nearer to her than when she had so suddenly and dramatically kissed him at Beaulieu, for that had only been a recognition of what-might-have-been, a kind of despairing hail-and-farewell in the dark, whereas this was conspiring comradeship under the sun. Her car was waiting outside the Larrigans’; the gate was open; and she took him over the hill and then slowly part of the way down the steep road into Lost Lake, so that he could see a white tower, some tiled roofs, and the yellow-greens of cottonwoods and Joshua trees. Then she turned sharply to the left, crossing by a very rough track at the back of the buildings and continuing until they were at the other side of the head of the valley, where there was no pass or fence or gateway, only this rough track circling round the hill-side and now joining another that came sharply up from the floor of the valley. Here, awaiting them, were two horses and a Mexican in a faded pink shirt and blue jeans.

  “Did they give you some lunch for us, Joe?” she asked. And he nodded and pointed to a saddle-bag on one of the horses, her own evidently, for it stirred when it saw her and then nuzzled against her caressing hand. “Take the car down then,” she told him. “But wait until we’ve gone.”

  Following her example, Malcolm hoisted himself into the unfamiliar deep Western saddle with its great pommel. His own horse was a rough-looking bay, too small by English standards for a man of his height; but Joe, after inspecting him critically, adjusted the stirrups; and Malcolm realised that he was expected to ride with a long stirrup, not gripping the horse but merely balancing himself. Andrea turned to have a look at him too, and seemed satisfied by what she saw. “That’s Beany,” she told him. “He’s a bit lazy, but he’ll do. And don’t imagine these Western ponies will slip on the rocks or be afraid of the steep slopes—they’re not like your English horses, and they’re as sure-footed as cats. Thanks, Joe. And if they ask where I’ve gone, tell ’em you don’t know.”

  At a walking pace, with Andrea leading, they followed the track, which was stony and twisted, for ever avoiding boulders and menacing clumps of spiky bushes and stunted cactus, until it left the valley altogether. They were now on the other side of Lost Lake, facing a high wilderness of peaks, the nearer ones multi-coloured in their fantastic rock strata and those far away tinted violet or deep amethyst. Again Malcolm noticed how clear and light the air was, as if newly created. Nobody, it seemed, had ever breathed this air before. It had not been thickened and corrupted by man and his melancholy histories. It belonged to the time previous to man’s appearance, to some golden age of sun and rock and winds whistling over an empty world. The sky was a silken blue, and there were one or two small clouds in it, their shadows wandering delicately over the faces of rock. The trail, very faint now but obviously familiar to Andrea, dipped into another valley, not as deep as that of Lost Lake but sprinkled with the dusty green of greasewood and creosote bushes and here and there glimmering with mirage water. No sound at all except what their horses made, ringing the rock with their hooves or occasionally grunting. Andrea led the way in silence. But when a pair of miraculous birds, bright-blue when the sun caught them, flashed out of a bush, to Malcolm’s astonishment and delight, she turned and said: “Mountain jays. Aren’t they marvellous?”

  They were. But so was everything else. It was to Malcolm a journey in sunlight through an Arabian Night. Even the very rocks, so curiously veined in crimson and black and bronze, sometimes glittering as if they were crammed with precious stones, often so shaped that they looked like giants and monsters petrified at a stroke, were rocks in a fairy-tale journey to or from some enchanted castle. He told Andrea so, and she turned to nod and smile. Then, the trail being easier towards the end of the dip, she broke into a canter, he followed, and together they thundered nearly half-way up the opposite slope, where the trail became steeper and stony again. They climbed to the top at an easy walk, and then suddenly Andrea, who was then some fifteen yards ahead, turned and seemed to disappear into a tall black face of rock, as if she had cried “Open Sesame!” to it. He came up bewildered, then saw that the trail turned sharply through a cleft so narrow that one of his legs rubbed against the side of it. Night still haunted this tiny narrow gorge; the air was chilly; there was a trickle of water among the shadowy mosses; the horses rumbled and grumbled as they slipped upon the loose stones or were forced to scramble up or climb over barricades of small boulders; and they seemed to wind their way for a long time through this cavernous gloom, lost to the bright world above, like ponderous lizards moving through the rock. Andrea kept calling back, telling him to be careful in this place, to avoid that, and though her voice echoed strangely there, sometimes arriving as a shout, at others creeping along as a dying whisper, he thought he detected in it a gaiety he had never heard before. This, so far away from those crowded tennis courts, the Bristol Hotel, the hard lights strung along the Riviera, it appeared, was her own place: she was now at home. And he followed, not dissatisfied, but still wondering.

  At last they came out into the open again, a whole dazzling world of sun and bright air and blue distance, and now what remained of the trail, for Malcolm could see few signs of one, went down at an easy slope on the top of a long ridge, a glistening spur of rock. Nothing moved in the whole wide scene; even the cloud shadows had vanished; and the solitude, the vastness, the silence, were immense, and had a quality of their own, were not accidental and immediate, but seemed to have endured there since the beginning of time. Or it might have been that time was not known to them, had not even begun because it could not make a beginning there, or lay along a dimension of things that either they could not recognise at all or saw in its entirety, with yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow spread out and flattened before them. But Malcolm did not lose himself in this calm and timeless immensity. To his own surprise, he found his outlook narrowing to a single glowing point of passion, his feeling for Andrea. It was as if here, where man was not known, his humanity must assert itself, but all that it could express at this moment was his passionate need for this girl, which claimed him now with astonishing force. As they went ambling down, with Andrea still in front, leading the way it seemed into blue air, he babbled silently but madly at her back, bombarding the space between them with extravagances of desire and devotion that surprised himself. In this state of mind, far removed from the dreamy cons
ideration he had given her during these past six months, he remained until they halted, on a little platform of gravel at the very end of the spur, a look-out point sheltered on two sides by overhanging faces of iron-grey rock.

  No sooner had they dismounted than he put his arms about her, feeling her warm and trembling within the thin shirt she wore; and though she cried out against it, he persisted and held her closer, and at last she relaxed within his grasp, and the kisses they exchanged had both passion and tenderness. When at last he released her, she looked at him a moment glowingly, then turned and attended to the horses, handing him the saddle-bag that contained their food. Then, still in silence, she led the way a little farther down to a still smaller sheltered platform, where she had clearly been many times before, put one hand on his shoulder, half leaning against him, and pointed with the other. “That’s the beginning of Death Valley,” she told him.

  The ridges below them, running in fold after fold, were bare as a bone, but in their elaboration of light and shadow and varied rock formation they wore a thousand subtly-graded hues; far away, as before, were shining naked summits of rock and violet- or amethyst-tinted peaks; but now far below, quivering and glimmering, were the first reaches of the deepest valley in the continent, waterless miles crusted with salt, the sullen hot floor of the world. But now it seemed to lie there smiling in beauty. There was life, not death, in its vast quivering distances, its prismatic colours trembling and melting in the windless bright air, its antique stillness and silence. It was—or so it seemed to him, standing there with his love—expectant, part of a planet newly made, warm from the oven of God, eager not for more death but for life, ready to welcome eager, struggling, dreaming, foolish, love-haunted humanity. If no fruit or flowers bloomed, light itself did, light blossomed there, creating a million semi-transparent and dissolving roses, violets, daffodils, between salt-sand and the miraculous sun; yes, light itself, the first great creative principle, the beginning of all things, flowered there triumphantly. Malcolm stared down in happiness and wonder.