He looked about him in the half-light, searching the corners of the room.
"They can't scare me," he whispered. "Dead men don't harm the living. They're blotted out, like a candle... That's it, isn't it, Mary?"
She nodded, watching his eyes. He pulled himself to a chair and sat down, his hands outstretched on the table. He sighed heavily, and passed his tongue over his lips. "It's dreams," he said; "all dreams. The faces stand out like live things in the darkness, and I wake with the sweat pouring down my back. I'm thirsty, Mary; here's the key; go into the bar and fetch me some brandy." He fumbled in his pocket and produced a bunch of keys. She took them from him, her hand trembling, and slipped out of the room into the passage. She hesitated for a moment outside, wondering whether she should creep upstairs at once to her room, and lock the door, and leave him to rave alone in the kitchen. She began to tiptoe along the passage to the hall.
Suddenly he shouted to her from the kitchen. "Where are you going? I told you to fetch the brandy from the bar." She heard the chair scrape as he pushed it away from the table. She was too late. She opened the door of the bar, and felt in the cupboard among the bottles. When she returned to the kitchen he was sprawling at the table, his head in his hands. At first she thought he was asleep again, but at the sound of her footsteps he lifted his head, and stretched his arms, and leaned back in the chair. She put the bottle and a glass on the table in front of him. He filled the glass half full, and held it between his two hands, watching her all the while over the rim of it.
"You're a good girl," he said. "I'm fond of you, Mary; you've got sense, and you've got pluck; you'd make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy." He rolled the brandy around on his tongue, smiling foolishly, and then he winked at her, and pointed his finger.
"They pay gold for this up-country," he said; "the best that money can buy. King George himself hasn't better brandy than this in his cellar. And what do I pay? Not one damned bloody sixpence. We drink free at Jamaica Inn."
He laughed and put out his tongue. "It's a hard game, Mary, but it's a man's game, for all that. I've risked my neck ten, twenty times. I've had the fellows thundering at my heels, with a pistol-shot whistling through my hair. They can't catch me, Mary; I'm too cunning; I've been at the game too long. Before we came here I was at Padstow, working from the shore. We ran a lugger once a fortnight with the spring tides. There were five of us in it, besides myself. But there's no money working in a small way; you've got to do it big, and you've got to take your orders. There's over a hundred of us now, working inland to the border from the coast. By God, I've seen blood in my time, Mary, and I've seen men killed a score of times, but this game beats all of it--it's running side by side with death."
He beckoned her to his side, winking again, glancing first over his shoulder to the door. "Here," he whispered, "come close, down here by my side, where I can talk to you. You've got guts in you, I can see that; you're not scared like your aunt. We ought to be partners, you and I." He seized hold of Mary's arm, and pulled her on the floor beside his chair. "It's this cursed drink that makes a fool of me," he said. "I'm as weak as a rat when it has hold of me, you can see that. And I have dreams, nightmares; I see things that never scare me when I'm sober. Damn it, Mary, I've killed men with my own hands, trampled them under water, beaten them with rocks and stones; and I've never thought no more about it; I've slept in my bed like a child. But when I'm drunk I see them in my dreams; I see their white-green faces staring at me, with their eyes eaten by fish; and some of them are torn, with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons, and some of them have seaweed in their hair... There was a woman once, Mary; she was clinging to a raft, and she had a child in her arms; her hair was streaming down her back. The ship was close in on the rocks, you see, and the sea was as flat as your hand; they were all coming in alive, the whole bunch of 'em. Why, the water in places didn't come above your waist. She cried out to me to help her, Mary, and I smashed her face in with a stone; she fell back, her hands beating the raft. She let go of the child and I hit her again; I watched them drown in four feet of water. We were scared then; we were afraid some of them would reach the shore... For the first time we hadn't reckoned on the tide. In half an hour they'd be walking dry-shod on the sand. We had to pelt at 'em all with stones, Mary; we had to break their arms and legs; and they drowned there in front of us, like the woman and her child, with the water not up to their shoulders--they drowned because we smashed them with rocks and stones; they drowned because they couldn't stand..."
His face was close to Mary, his red-flecked eyes staring into hers, and his breath on her cheek. "Did you never hear of wreckers before?" he whispered.
Outside in the passage the clock struck one o'clock, and the single note rang in the air like a summons. Neither of them moved. The room was very cold, for the fire had sunk away to nothing and a little current of air blew in from the open door. The yellow flame of the candle bowed and flickered. He reached out to her and took her hand; it lay limp in his, like a dead hand. Perhaps he saw something of the frozen horror in her face, for he let her go, and turned away his eyes. He stared straight before him at the empty glass, and he began to drum with his fingers on the table. Crouched on the ground beside him, Mary watched a fly crawl across his hand. She watched it pass through the short black hairs, and over the thick veins to the knuckles, and it ran to the tips of the long slim fingers. She remembered the swift and sudden grace of those fingers when they cut bread for her that first evening, and how if they chose they could be delicate and light; she watched them drumming now on the table, and in her fancy she saw them curl round a block of jagged stone, and fasten upon it; she saw the stone fly through the air...
Once more he turned to her, his whisper hoarse, and he jerked his head towards the ticking of the clock. "The sound of it rings in my head sometimes," he said, "and when it struck one just now, it was like the tolling of a bell-buoy in a bay. I've heard it come traveling down the air on the westerly wind: one-two-one-two, backwards and forwards the clapper goes against the bell, as though it tolled for dead men. I've heard it in my dreams. I heard it tonight. A mournful, weary sound, Mary, is a bell-buoy out in the bay. It rubs on your nerves and you want to scream. When you work on the coast you have to pull out to them in a boat and muffle them; wrap the tongue in flannel. That deadens them. There's silence then. Maybe it's a misty night, with patches of white fog on the water, and outside the bay there'll be a ship casting for scent like a hound. She listens for the buoy, and no sound comes to her. And she comes in then, driving through the fog--she comes straight in to us who are waiting for her, Mary--and we see her shudder suddenly, and strike, and then the surf has her."
He reached for the bottle of brandy, and let a little liquid trickle slowly into the glass. He smelt it, and rolled it on his tongue.
"Have you ever seen flies caught in a jar of treacle?" he said. "I've seen men like that; stuck in the rigging like a swarm of flies. They cling there for safety, shouting in terror at the sight of the surf. Just like flies they are, spread out on the yards, little black dots of men. I've seen the ship break up beneath them, and the masts and yards snap like thread, and there they'll be flung into the sea, to swim for their lives. But when they reach the shore they're dead men, Mary."
He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and stared at her. "Dead men tell no tales, Mary," he said.
His face nodded at her, and narrowed suddenly, and was blotted out. No longer was she kneeling on the kitchen floor, her hands gripping the table; she was a child again, running beside her father on the cliffs beyond St. Kevern. He swung her up onto his shoulder, and there were other men running with them, who shouted and cried. Somebody pointed to the distant sea, and, clinging to her father's head, she saw a great white ship like a bird rolling helplessly in the through of the sea, her masts broken short and her sails trailing in the water beside her. "What are they doing?" asked the child that had been herself; and nobody answered her; th
ey stood where they were, staring in horror at the ship that rolled and plunged. "God have mercy upon them," said her father; and the child Mary began to cry, calling for her mother, who came at once from among the crowd and took her in her arms, and walked away with her out of sight of the sea. There all memory snapped, and vanished, and there was no ending to the story; but when she grew to understanding, and was no longer a child, her mother would talk of the day they had gone to St. Kevern, when a great barque had sunk with all on board, her back broken on the dreaded Manacles. Mary shivered and sighed, and once more her uncle's face loomed before her in its frame of matted hair, and she was kneeling beside him again in the kitchen at Jamaica Inn. She felt deadly sick, and her hands and feet were icy-cold. She longed only to stumble to her bed and bury her head in her hands, pulling the blanket and pillow over her for greater darkness. Perhaps if she pressed her hands against her eyes she would blot out his face, and the pictures he had painted for her. Perhaps if she thrust her fingers in her ears she would muffle the sound of his voice, and the thunder of the surf upon the shore. Here she could see the pale faces of drowned men, their arms above their heads; she could hear the scream of terror, and the cries; she could hear the mournful clamor of the bell-buoy as it swayed backwards and forwards in the sea. Mary shivered again.
She looked up at her uncle and she saw that he had sloped forward in his chair, and his head had fallen on his chest. His mouth was wide open, and he snorted and spluttered as he slept. His long dark lashes swept his cheeks like a fringe. His arms rested on the table before him, and his hands were clasped as though in prayer.
9
On Christmas Eve the sky was overcast and threatened rain. It had turned mild, too, in the night, and the mud in the yard was churned where the cows had trodden. The walls of Mary's bedroom felt damp to her hand, and there was a great yellow patch in one corner caused by the shrinking plaster.
Mary leaned out of the window, and the soft wet wind blew upon her face. In an hour's time Jem Merlyn would be waiting for her on the moor, to take her to Launceston fair. Whether she met him or not depended upon herself, and she could not make up her mind. She had grown older in four days, and the face that looked back at her from the spotted, cracked mirror was drawn and tired.
There were dark rings beneath her eyes, and little hollows in her cheeks. Sleep came late to her at night, and she had no appetite for food. For the first time in her life she saw a resemblance between herself and her Aunt Patience. They had the same pucker of the forehead, and the same mouth. If she pursed up her lips and worked them, biting the edges, it might be Aunt Patience who stood there, with the lank brown hair framing her face. The trick was an easy one to catch, as was the nervous twisting of the hands, and Mary turned away from the tell-tale mirror and began to pace up and down her cramped room. During the past few days she had kept as much as possible to the privacy of her own room, excusing herself on the score of a chill. Mary could not trust herself to speak to her aunt at present--not for any length of time. Her eyes would have betrayed her. They would look at one another with the same dumb horror, the same hidden anguish; and Aunt Patience would have understood. They shared a secret now, a secret that must never be spoken between them. Mary wondered how many years Aunt Patience had kept that knowledge to herself in an agony of silence. No one would ever know how greatly she had suffered. Wherever she should go in the future, the pain of that knowledge would go with her. It could never leave her alone. At last Mary was able to understand the pale, twitching face, the hands that plucked at the dress, the wide, staring eyes. The evidence screamed at her now that she knew.
At first she had felt sick, deadly sick; she had lain on her bed that night, praying for the mercy of sleep, and it had been denied her. There were faces in the darkness that she had not known; the worn and weary faces of drowned people. There was a child with broken wrists; and a woman whose long wet hair clung to her face; and the screaming, frightened faces of men who had never learned to swim. Sometimes it seemed to her that her own mother and father were among them; they looked up at her with wide eyes and pallid lips and they stretched out their hands. Perhaps this was what Aunt Patience suffered, alone in her room at night; the faces came to her too, and pleaded, and she pushed them away. She would not give them release. In her own way Aunt Patience was a murderer too. She had killed them by her silence. Her guilt was as great as Joss Merlyn's himself, for she was a woman and he was a monster. He was bound to her flesh and she let him remain.
Now that it was the third day, and the first horror had passed, Mary felt indifferent, rather old, and very tired. Most of the feeling had gone from her. It seemed to her that she had always known now; that at the back of her mind she had been prepared. The first sight of Joss Merlyn, standing beneath the porch with a lantern in his hands, had been a warning; while the sound of the coach rattling away down the high road and out of her hearing had rung like a farewell.
In the old days at Helford, there had been whispers of these things: little snatches of gossip overheard in the village lanes, a fragment of story, a denial, a shake of the head, but men did not talk much, and the stories were discouraged. Twenty, fifty years ago, perhaps, when her father had been young; but not now, not in the light of the new century. Once more she saw her uncle's face pressed close to hers, and she heard his whisper in her ear, "Did you never hear of wreckers before?" These were words that she had never heard breathed, but Aunt Patience had lived among them for ten years... Mary did not consider her uncle anymore. She had lost her fear of him. There was only loathing left in her heart, loathing and disgust. He had lost all hold on humanity. He was a beast that walked by night. Now that she had seen him drunk, and she knew him for what he was, he could not frighten her. Neither he, nor the rest of his company. They were things of evil, rotting the countryside, and she would never rest until they were trodden underfoot, and cleared, and blotted out. Sentiment would not save them again.
There remained Aunt Patience--and Jem Merlyn. He broke into her thoughts against her will, and she did not want him. There was enough on her mind without reckoning with Jem. He was too like his brother. His eyes, and his mouth, and his smile. That was the danger of it. She could see her uncle in his walk, in the turn of his head; and she knew why Aunt Patience had made a fool of herself ten years ago. It would be easy enough to fall in love with Jem Merlyn. Men had not counted for much in her life up to the present; there had been too much to do on the farm at Helford to worry about them. There had been lads who had smiled at her in church and gone with her to picnics harvest-time; once a neighbor had kissed her behind a hayrick after a glass of cider. It was all very foolish, and she had avoided the man ever since; a harmless enough fellow too, who forgot the incident five minutes later. Anyway, she would never marry; it was a long while since she had decided that. She would save money in some way, and do a man's work on a farm. Once she got away from Jamaica Inn and could put it behind her, and make some sort of a home for Aunt Patience, she was not likely to have time on her hands to think of men. And there, in spite of herself, came Jem's face again, with the growth of beard like a tramp, and his dirty shirt, and his bold offensive stare. He lacked tenderness; he was rude; and he had more than a streak of cruelty in him; he was a thief and a liar. He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him. Nature cared nothing for prejudice. Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law of attraction for all living things, some similarity of skin or touch, and they would go to one another. This was no choice made with the mind. Animals did not reason, neither did the birds in the air. Mary was no hypocrite; she was bred to the soil, and she had lived too long with birds and beasts, had watched them mate, and bear their young, and die. There was precious little romance in nature, and she would not look for it in her own life. She had seen the girls at home walk with the village lads; and there would be a holding of hands, and blushing and confusion, and long-drawn sigh
s, and a gazing at the moonlight on the water. Mary would see them wander down the grass lane at the back of the farm--Lovers' Lane they called it, though the older men had a better word for it than that--and the lad would have his arm round the waist of his girl, and she with her head on his shoulder. They would look at the stars and the moon, or the flaming sunset if it was summer weather, and Mary, coming out of the cow-shed, wiped the sweat from her face with dripping hands, and thought of the new-born calf she had left beside its mother. She looked after the departing couple, and smiled, and shrugged her shoulders, and, going into the kitchen, she told her mother there would be a wedding in Helford before the month was past. And then the bells would ring, and the cake be cut, and the lad in his Sunday clothes would stand on the steps of the church with shining face and shuffling feet with his bride beside him dressed in muslin, her straight hair curled for the occasion; but before the year was out the moon and the stars could shine all night for all they cared, when the lad came home at evening tired from his work in the fields, and calling sharply that his supper was burned, not fit for a dog, while the girl snapped back at him from the bedroom overhead, her figure sagging and her curls gone, pacing backward and forward with a bundle in her arms that mewed like a cat and would not sleep. There was no talk then of the moonlight on the water. No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be. She knew she would have to see him again.
Once more she looked up at the gray sky and the low-flying clouds. If she were going to Launceston, then it was time to make ready and be away. There would be no excuses to make; she had grown hard in the last four days. Aunt Patience could think what she liked. If she had any intuition, she must guess that Mary did not want to see her. And she would look at her husband, with his bloodshot eyes and his shaking hands, and she would understand. Once more, perhaps for the last time, the drink had loosened his tongue. His secret was spilt; and Mary held his future in her hands. She had not yet determined what use to make of her knowledge, but she would not save him again. Today she would go to Launceston with Jem Merlyn, and this time it was he who would answer her questions; he would show some humility too when he realized she was no longer afraid of them, but could destroy them when she chose. And tomorrow--well, tomorrow could take care of itself. There was always Francis Davey and his promise; there would be peace and shelter for her at the house in Altarnun.
Jamaica Inn Page 14