Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir

by Vita Sackville-West

  Very blue it was too, and the Nereid, when she was not running before a fair wind on an even keel, lay over to the water, so low that now and then she shipped a gobbet of sea, only a thin little runnel that escaped at once through the open scuppers of the lee runner, in a hurry to get back to its element. Bellamy was bored by a fair wind; he hated the monotony of a day with the sheet out and the beautiful scooped shape of the spinnaker, and the crew asleep for’ard, since there was no handling of gear to keep them on the run. What he liked was a day with plenty of tacking, and then he would turn the mate or the captain off and take the wheel himself, and cry “Lee-o!” to the crew. And what pleased him even better was to catch the eye of the mate and give the order with only a nod of the head, so that his unwarned guests slithered across the deck as the ship went about, when he would laugh and apologise with perfect urbanity; but they noticed that next time he had the chance he did precisely the same thing again. “Bellamy likes teasing us,” said Lomax, with a good deal of meaning in his tone. Bellamy did, even by so slight an irritation. And once he brought off a Dutchman’s gybe, which nearly shot Lomax, who was lying asleep under the mizzen-boom, into the sea.

  One sleeps a great part of the time on a yacht. Artivale fished, and dissected the fish he caught, so that a section of the deck was strewn with little ribs and spines. Lomax surveyed these through his spectacles. Artivale had long slim fingers, and he took up and set down the little bones, fitting them together, with the dexterity of a lace-maker among her bobbins. Tailor-wise he sat, his hair lifted by the wind, and sometimes he looked up with a full smile into the disapproving face of Miss Whitaker. “Play spillikins, Miss Whitaker?” he asked, jumbling his fish bones all together into a heap.

  Very blue and white it all was. Soft, immense white clouds floated, and the sails were white, and Artivale’s tiny graveyard, but the scrubbed deck, which in Southampton Water had looked white, here appeared pale yellow by contrast. The sails threw blue shadows. The crew ran noiselessly on bare feet. “When shall we get there?” Lomax wondered, but since he did not know where “there” was, and since all the blueness and whiteness were to him overlaid as with the angry cloud of an impending storm, he was content to hammock himself passively in the amplitude of enveloping time. He was, indeed, in no hurry, for his land-life, now withdrawn, had been merely a thing to be got through; he had an idle curiosity to see what was going to happen in these changed aeons that stretched before him; nor did he know that Marion Vane’s husband was dead. So he lay in his deck-chair, speculating about Bellamy, watching Artivale, aware of the parallel proximity of Miss Whitaker – who was his wife – in her deck-chair, and occasionally, by way of refreshment, turning his eyes behind their owlish spectacles over the expanse of his lurid sea and sky.

  What of it, anyway? There were quite a number of other communities in the world beside this little community, microscopic on the Mediterranean. Lomax saw the blue as it was not, the others saw or thought they saw the blue as it was, but unless and until our means of communication become more subtle than they at present are, we cannot even be sure that our eyes see colours alike. How, then, should we know one another? Lomax lived alone with his secret, Bellamy with his; and as for Miss Whitaker, if Truth be indeed accustomed to dwell at the bottom of a well, at the bottom of Miss Whitaker’s heart she must surely have found a dwelling suited to her taste. Artivale, being a scientist intent upon a clue, probably knew more of the secrets of life than the seamen who begot their offspring in the rude old fashion, but it is to be doubted whether even Artivale knew much that was worth knowing. He claimed to have produced a tadpole by ectogenetic birth, but, having produced it, he was quite unable to tell that tadpole whither it was going when it inconsiderately died, and, moreover, as he himself observed, there were tadpoles enough in the world already.

  Volcanic islands began, pitting the sea; white towns and golden temples clung to a violet coast. Bellamy suggested to them that they did not want to land, a suggestion in which they acquiesced. They shared a strange disinclination to cross Bellamy. They were sailing now within a stone’s throw of a wild, precipitous coast, their nights and their days boundaried by magnificent sunsets and splendid dawns. But for those, time did not exist. Geography did not exist either; Bellamy referred to Illyria, and they were content to leave it at that. It fitted in with the unreality of their voyage. There are paintings of ships setting sail into a haze of sunlight, ships full-rigged, broad-beamed, with tracery of rope, pushing off for the unknown, voyages to Cythera, misty and romantic; Lomax wore the amber spectacles, and saw a golden ship evanescent in golden air. Morning and evening flamed upon the sea; each day was a lagoon of blue. Islets and rocks stained the shield of water; mountains swept down and trod the sea; cities of Illyria rose upon the breast of the coastline; rose; drew near; and faded past. Venice and Byzantium in spire and cupola clashed the arms of peace for ever on the scene of their exploits. But towns were rare; they passed not more than one in every four-and-twenty hours. For the rest, they were alone with that piratical seaboard descending barbarously to the sea; never a hut, never a road, never a goat to hint at life, but caves and creeks running between the headlands, and sullen mountains like a barrier between the water and the inland tracts. The little ship sailed lonely beneath the peaks. Day after day she sailed, idly coasting Illyria, and Bellamy waited for the storm. “Treacherous waters,” he had observed on entering them. Indeed it seemed incongruous that the sea should be so calm and the shore so wild. Day after day unbroken, with that angry coast always on their right hand and the placid sea on their left; day after day of leisure, with a wall of disaster banking higher and higher against them.

  Those paintings of ships show the ship setting sail in fair weather; they never follow her into the turbulence of her adventure. Friends speed her with waving handkerchiefs, and turn away, and know nothing of her till a letter comes saying that she has arrived at her place of port. And, for the matter of that, the lives of friends touch here and there in the same fashion, and the gap over the interval is never bridged, knowledge being but a splintered mirror which shall never gather to a smooth and even surface.

  The Nereid, then, with her living freight, saw the serenity of Illyria broken up into a night of anger, but the wives of the crew, lighting their lamps in brick cottages at Brightlingsea, knew nothing of it, and the wife of the captain writing to her aunt said, “Joe has a nice job with a gentleman name of Bellamy on a yorl in the Meddingterranean”, and Marion Vane with an edging of white lawn to her mourning at neck and cuffs was vague to her trustee at dinner regarding the disposal of her country house, for she believed that this time next year she would be married to Lomax. The Nereid was not bread-beamed; she was slim as a hound, and it was not with a plebeian solidity but with an aristocratic mettle that she took the storm. Her canvas rapidly furled, she rode with bare masts crazily sawing the sky. Black ragged night enveloped her; the coast, although invisible, contributed to the tempest, throwing its boulders against the waves as the waves hurled themselves against its boulders. The little boat, a thing of naught, was battered at that meeting-place of enemies. Rain and spray drove together across the deck, as momently the storm increased and the wind tore howling through the naked spars. The men were black figures clinging to stays for support, going down with the ship when she swooped from the crest down into the trough, rising again with her, thankful to find the deck still there beneath their feet, lashed by the rain, blinded by the darkness, unable to see, able only to feel, whether with their hands that, wet and frozen, clung to rail and stanchion, or with their bodies that sank and rose, enduring the tremendous buffeting of the tossing ship, and the shock of water that, as it broke over the deck, knocked the breath from their lungs and all but swept them from their refuge into the hopeless broiling of the sea.

  Lomax was in the deck-house. There, he was dry, and could prop himself to resist the rearing and plunging; and could almost enjoy, moreover, the drench of water
flung against the little hutch, invisible, but mighty and audible, streaming away after sweeping the ship from end to end. A funny lot they would be to drown, he reflected; and he remembered their departure from Southampton, all a little shy and constrained, with Miss Whitaker sprightly but on the defensive. How long ago that was, he failed to calculate. They had drifted down to Calshot, anchoring there on a washed April evening, between a liquid sky and oily lagoon-like reaches, gulls and sea-planes skimming sea and heaven, in the immense primrose peace of sunset. And they had known nothing of one another, and Miss Whitaker had written letters after dinner in the saloon. Well, well! thought Lomax.

  There came a fumbling at the deck-house door, a sudden blast of wind, a shower of spray, and Bellamy, in glistening oilskins, scrambled into the shelter, slamming the door behind him. A pool began to gather immediately round him on the floor. Lomax thought that he looked strangely triumphant, – as though this were his hour. “Glad to have got us all into this mess,” he thought meanly. It aggravated him that he should never yet have found the key to Bellamy.

  “I want to talk to you,” cried Bellamy, rocking on his feet as he stood.

  He wanted to talk. External danger, then, gave him internal courage.

  “Come into my cabin,” he cried to Lomax over his shoulder as he began to make his way down the companion.

  But Lomax, really, knew nothing of all this. The storm, really, had not entered his consciousness at all; Bellamy, and Bellamy alone, had occupied it all the while. All that he knew, really, was that he found himself in Bellamy’s cabin.

  In Bellamy’s cabin, everything loose had been stowed away, so that it was bare of personal possessions; the narrow bunk, the swinging lamp, the closed cupboards alone remained untouched in the cabin that had sheltered the privacy of Bellamy’s midnight hours. Lomax, as he lurched in through the door and was violently thrown against the bunk, reflected that he had never before set foot in the owner’s quarters. They were small, low, and seamanlike; no luxury of chintz softened the plain wooden fittings; Lomax forgot the delicate yacht, and saw himself only in the presence of a sailor aboard his vessel, for Bellamy in his sou’wester and streaming oilskins, straddling in sea-boots beneath the lamp, had more the aspect of a captain newly descended from the bridge than of the millionaire owner of a pleasure yawl. He kept his feet, too, in spite of the violent motion, while Lomax, clinging to the side of the bunk, could barely save himself from being flung again across the cabin. But Bellamy stood there full of triumph, fully alive for the first time since Lomax had known him; his courteous languor dropped from him, he looked like a happy man. “This weather suits you,” Lomax shouted above the din.

  The yacht strained and creaked; now she lifted high on a wave, now fell sickeningly down into the trough. Water dashed against the closed port-hole and streamed past as the ship rose again to take the wave. Cast about in all directions, now dipping with her bows, now rolling heavily from furrow to furrow, she floundered with no direction and with no purpose other than to keep afloat; govern herself she could not, but maintain her hold on life she would. Lomax, who in the cabin down below could see nothing of the action of the sea, felt only the ship shaken in an angry hand, and heard the crash of tumult as the seas struck down upon the deck. “Will she live through it?” he screamed.

  “If she isn’t driven ashore,” cried Bellamy with perfect indifference. “Come nearer; we can’t make ourselves heard in this infernal noise.”

  It did not occur to him to move nearer to Lomax; perhaps he took pride in standing in the middle of the cabin, under the lamp now madly swaying in its gimbals, with the water still dripping from his oilskins into a pool on the floor. Lomax staggered towards him, clinging on to the edge of the bunk. It crossed his mind that this was a strange occasion to choose for conversation, but his standard of strangeness being now somewhat high he did not pause for long to consider that.

  “I want to have a talk with you,” said Bellamy again.

  An enormous shock of water struck the ship overhead, and for a moment she quivered through all her timbers, – a moment of stillness almost, while she ceased to roll, and nothing but that shudder ran through her. “Stood that well,” said Bellamy, listening. Then she plunged; plunged as though never to rise any more, falling down as though a trap in the waters had opened to receive her; but she came up, lifted as rapidly as she had fallen, with a tremendous list over on to her side; righted herself, and took again to her rolling. The mate appeared in the doorway.

  “Dinghy’s gone, sir.”

  The man poured with water; in his black oilskins, his black sou’wester, he was a part of the black, wet night made tangible. Bellamy turned to Lomax. “So we’re isolated. Not that a boat could have lived in a sea like this.”

  “What are you really thinking of?” cried Lomax. “Not of the dinghy, or the sea, but something you’ve had in your mind all these weeks. And why tell it to me? You don’t know me,” but he remembered that he did not know Miss Whitaker, yet he had married her.

  “Know you! Know you!” said Bellamy impatiently. “What’s knowing, at best? I want you to do me a favour. I want a promise from you. I know you enough to know you won’t refuse it.”

  “Why do you wear those glasses here?” cried Bellamy, staring at his guest.

  Lomax, contriving to seat himself on the edge of the bunk, and holding on to the rod, shouted back, “If I took them off I might refuse any promise.”

  “I like you,” said Bellamy. “I want you to come to me any day I should send for you – in England.”

  “So we are going back to England, are we?” said Lomax. He remembered their speculations about Bellamy. And so accustomed had he grown to the close limitation of the yacht and their four selves inhabiting it, that the prospect of disintegration was not only unconvincing, but positively distasteful. “We had,” he said, “an idea that you wouldn’t allow us to go back,” but he wondered as he said it why men should take pleasure in bringing pain upon one another.

  “Was I so sinister a figure?” said Bellamy. He took off his helmet, shining from the wet, and the lamp over his head gleamed upon his thick white hair and carved the shadows of weariness on his face, shadows that moved and shifted with the swinging of the lamp. “I was inconsiderate, doubtless, – exasperating, – wouldn’t make plans, – I owe you all an apology. I am an egoist, you see, Lomax. I was thinking of myself. There were certain things I wanted to allow myself the luxury of forgetting.”

  It was intolerable that Bellamy should heap this blame upon himself.

  “You teased us,” muttered Lomax in shamed justification.

  “Yes, I teased you,” said Bellamy. “I apologise again, I disturbed your comfort. But knowing myself to be a dying man, I indulged myself in that mischief. I had moods, I confess, when the sight of your comfort and your security irritated me even into the desire to drown you all. It’s bad thinking, of a very elementary sort, and the foundation of most cynicism. I accept your rebuke.”

  “Damn you,” said Lomax, twisting his hands.

  “Nevertheless,” Bellamy continued, “I shan’t scruple to ask of you the favour I was going to ask. I am a coward, Lomax. I am afraid of pain. I am afraid of disease, – of long, slow, disgusting disease – you understand me? And I have long been looking for some one who, when the moment came, would put me out of it.”

  “You can count on me,” said Lomax. At the same time he could not help hoping that the moment had not come there and then. Procastination and a carefully chosen pair of spectacles would make him a very giant of decision.

  Lomax went up on deck; he wanted a storm outside his head as well as a storm within it. The rain had ceased, and the tall spars swayed across a cloudy sky, rent between the clouds to show the moon. The sea was very rough and beautiful beneath the moon. It was good to see the storm at last, to see as well as to feel. Stars appeared, among the rack of
the clouds, and vaguely astronomical phrases came into Lomax’s mind: Nebulae, Inter-planetary space, Asteroids, Eighty thousand miles a second; he supposed that there were men to whom trillions were a workable reality, just as there were men who could diagnose Bellamy’s disease and give him his sentence of death for the sum of two guineas. Two guineas was a contemptible sum to Bellamy, who was so rich a man. To Artivale, what did two guineas mean? A new retort? A supply of chemical? And to Lomax himself, – a new pair of glasses? Tossed on Illyrian billows, he saw a lunar rainbow standing suddenly upon the waves, amazingly coloured in the night of black and silver. Life jumbled madly in his brain. There was Marion, too, lost to him from the moment he had stepped out of that system in which existence was simply a thing to be got through as inconspicuously as possible; and leaning against the deck-house for support he came nearer to tears than he had ever been in his life.

  Of course it was to be expected that the death of so wealthy a man as Bellamy should create a certain sensation. There were headlines in the papers, and Arthur Lomax, who had dined with him that evening and had been the last person to see him alive, spent tiresome days evading reports. Veronal it was; no question or doubt about that; the tumbler containing the dregs of poison and the dregs of whisky and soda was found quite frankly standing on the table beside him. Lomax’s evidence at the inquest threw no light on the suicide; no, Mr. Bellamy had not appeared depressed; yes, Mr. Bellamy had mixed a whisky and soda and drunk it off in his, Lomax’s, presence. He had not seen Mr. Bellamy add anything to the contents of the tumbler. He was unable to say whether Mr. Bellamy had mixed a second whisky and soda after he, Lomax, had left the house. What time had he left? Late; about one in the morning. They had sat up talking. No, he had not known Mr. Bellamy very long, but they had been for a yachting cruise together, lasting some weeks. He would not say that they had become intimate. He knew nothing of Mr. Bellamy’s private affairs. He had been very much shocked to read of the death next morning in the papers. Thank you, Mr. Lomax, that will do.