by Sarban
Escape complexity! Never! Here it was again, in the woodland foliage, in these patterns and marvellously intricate ferns that she was trying to reproduce on paper. She could have wished for the gifts of the artist who carved the white stone from the temple of Myaldaung. His gifts, without his subservience or spontaneous interest in fear and pain—if ever an artist’s technique can be separated from his inspiration. Is not style the whole man in stone or paint as well as in words? How distinguish the carving from the carver? Ultimately there can be no dissimulation in art: what the artist believes must come out at his finger tips and tell the whole tale in his work. The sculptor’s hands will always betray the secrets of his heart.
That thought, fermented in the back of her mind while she worked all morning with her brush, sprang confidently and convincingly forward when, in the afternoon, she dashed the drops from her eyes, tossed back her hair, and, treading water in the middle of the pond, gazed on the bronze boy.
Argosino had expressed what was in his heart, though he was killed for it. She could understand so well that kind of compulsion: the absolute imperative that is heard when genius finds its subject and the artist knows that the task for which he has so long laboured to perfect his art is at hand. Destiny had brought the Venetian sculptor and that lovely boy together at the remote ends of India, and Argosino could not chose but serve his god in his own way. He had triumphed. But the boy?
Frances swam on her back, slowly, to and fro, beneath the figure, feeling a strange luxury to be buoyed up so by the cool, caressing water. Oh to be surrounded by the loveliness of summer woods, moving gently and without effort in unbroken peace and light and warmth and to contemplate, without haste, with a sense even of ownership, a triumphant work of human art.
She felt that she could float lazily there through the entire still, hot afternoon, finding ever new delights in that exquisite body poised above her, in that laughing, vital male beauty that lacked of life only the consciousness that would have forbade her to look at it with such unmixed, unhurried enjoyment as she did now. If she had loved a real youth she would have wanted him sometimes to lack consciousness and to be a possession of her eyes like this bronze boy. Unashamed, she smiled and confessed: ‘I am in love with him.’
They had killed the real boy, three centuries ago, and the little figures writhing on the base-stone told what modes of death were studied in Myaldaung three hundred years ago.
Frances shivered a little and approached the bank to climb out by the statue. She took it into her head to climb up, not onto the grass, but onto the base-stone of the statue itself; it seemed suddenly an amusing, an exciting thing to do, to clamber up and stand there close beside the smooth and naked boy, to touch the cool, taut limbs, to feel the hard young muscles so subtly moulded in the metal and to look straight into that laughing face.
From the water she could just get her hands on the upper edge of the carved stone, and with a long, strong pull she raised herself and, finding a hold for her toes in a cranny of the masonry below, managed to rest her weight on the stone, leaning forward and bearing down with rigid arms. When she had got her breath again she lifted up a knee to scramble onto the broad plinth, at the same time putting her hand behind the statue’s leg for more purchase.
But her fingers had scarcely tightened on the bronze when her heart leapt in alarm; she snatched her hand away, thrust at the stone wildly with her feet and threw herself backwards with a great splash out into the pond. She swerved in the water and struck a few yards aside before looking up again. The figure stood seemingly as firmly fixed as ever, but she was certain that she had felt it rock when she had grasped its leg.
Naturally, she should have thought of the possibility that it might not be firmly enough fixed to the stone to stand her heaving at it with all her weight. It was not like a broad-based piece of work. Its greatest weight was above the waist and, poised on tiptoe as it was, it could be secured to the stone only by two pins passing up through the balls of the feet. It was lucky her reactions were quick: otherwise the bronze boy might well be at the bottom of the pond.
At tea that evening Frances bluntly asked one of the questions that seemed to her still to be in need of answer.
‘Who looks after the statue?’
Miss Dorfray gave a start and then looked for a long moment at Frances, with her brown eyes uneasy and a dim flush darkening her sallow cheeks.
‘It’s so hard to get anybody to do anything,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, I suppose it does look dreadfully neglected. I know you’re right. It ought to be properly looked after, but what can we do? The place is so big, and—and—’
‘But it is looked after,’ exclaimed Frances. ‘That’s what I mean. Somebody keeps the grass and stuff tidy round about it.’
Miss Dorfray looked as if she did not understand.
‘I thought,’ added Frances a little lamely and wondering if the matter were so important after all, ‘I thought—your niece, you know, you said—’
‘Oh no!’ said Miss Dorfray quickly. ‘It couldn’t be Jamar. Jamar can’t do anything.’
The words had come a shade too quickly, Frances thought. Either Miss Dorfray, who had admitted that she hadn’t been near the pond for years, knew nothing about it or she chose for some reason to hide what her niece did. In any case she had a perfect right not to answer. She had not snubbed Frances, but Frances mentally snubbed herself for poking her nose into the Dorfrays’ business. A simple explanation did occur to her: Jamar, the niece, might well do what she could to keep the statue and the stone from being entirely overgrown, since the Dorfrays could clearly not afford a man to do any jobs about the place, but if it was in defiance of the doctor’s orders she would, obviously, not tell her aunts. Frances felt she would have liked Jamar. She veered away from that little mystery with another question:
‘Tell me, when you were in Myaldaung, did you ever go into the Balikh temple, before it was burnt?’
‘No,’ said Miss Dorfray. ‘Oh no! Women were not allowed in it at all, ever. That is, except the temple women—girls, rather. There were many girls attached to the temple permanently, like nuns. When a Balikh girl reached fifteen if she was not married she was dedicated to the god. But married women were not admitted to the temple.’
‘Not even to worship?’
‘No, I believe not. I think they had their own part, separate from the real temple. Why?’
‘Oh—I asked if you’d been inside the temple because I wondered how that statue—image of the god—how it was set up, I mean how it looked in its original setting. I mean, for instance, that stone that it’s set up on now, is it the original base?’
‘Oh yes, I think so,’ replied Miss Dorfray. ‘David knew about that. The temple was a little way out of the town, surrounded by jungle. It was an enormous place: a huge court, I’ve heard David say, and in the middle was a very big tank, more like a small lake, I suppose. The water was held to be holy. The image of the god stood upon the edge and the rites were performed beneath, in the water. The word ‘Balikh’ means something to do with water, I think; or some kind of fish or water animal or something like that.’
‘And I suppose that your father must have seen it often enough in its original place?’
‘The statue? Oh yes.’
***
Swimming in the pond the next day, Frances felt her curiosity satisfied. That rescuing of the defeated god and giving him a home as nearly like his own as possible though so many thousand miles away, was confirmation of something she had at first suspected in old Major Dorfray’s character: a sense of justice or a passion for the completion of contracts carried close to eccentricity. Here the eccentricity was charming and wholly satisfying.
Frances laughed as she hauled herself out on the bank beside the plinth, and sat dripping down to laze in the sun and feast her eyes on the boy poised above her in his eternal moment of exultant action: the movement of action that would endure forever because it was not yet complete.
‘An
d here come I,’ she addressed the boy aloud, ‘the last of your adorers. A poor substitute for the scores of maidens you once had to serve you. I wonder what service you exacted; or what sacrifice?’
She knelt upright, her eyes on the figure but the mind busy with a vein of serious thought that her playing fancy had accidentally opened.
‘I suppose there’s no devotion without a sacrifice,’ she said. ‘I do love you. If you could tell me what sacrifice to make I think I’d make it.’
Her visits to the statue seemed indeed to become something of a ritual. Her days at Chevrel were long and busy and happy and the climax of each was the plunge in the pool, the rising up from the watery green dusk and the beholding of the god, darkly gleaming, triumphing above the waters.
She did not miss a single day. When it was fine and hot she would spend several hours of the afternoon or evening at the pond, bathing and basking in the sun. If it were dull she would plunge in and swim vigorously about for a few minutes, kicking and splashing below the boy, throwing an evanescent mantle of spray over his bronze nakedness. Even on the two days when it rained all day she did not miss her visit. She undressed in her room and in her sandals with only a mackintosh about her ran down the path through the woods, the recent, broader path to the place where she had first surprised the heron at his frogging.
She had never attempted to mount the stone and stand beside the statue again. The nearest she came to satisfying that impulse was lightly with her finger tips to trace the moulded muscles and even stroke the cold and perfect curves wherever she could reach from where she stood on the grass beside the base.
So the days passed until she had only two more left to stay at Chevrel House. Miss Dorfray’s sister and niece were to return from London on the Monday and Frances intended to leave Chevrel early that morning. She did not yet know where she would go next: for the past fortnight she had put off all thinking about what to do with the rest of the holiday. Now she felt so sad at the numbering of her pleasant days in a place she had come to know and love so well that she began to wonder whether Miss Dorfray would not let her stay another fortnight, even though the others were returning. There was room in the house and Miss Dorfray was used to her looking after herself now.
The Saturday showed early signs of being the hottest day of the summer so far. After their dawn chorus the birds were silent; the heavy chestnut leaves hung unstirring; the sparrows were seeking patches of shade, sitting with little beaks agape; a high, thin drone of insects filled the air. Before ten o’clock Frances put down her brushes. It was too hot to work, indoors or out.
The deep water under the shade of the thick-crowding trees had never looked so inviting; the bronze boy had never seemed so ardently alive or the rigid metal so near to yielding to imagination’s desire for the completion of the gesture. The one hand upraised in the light already seemed to curve half about the unimaginable object of divine desire. Could the other now join it, what fabulous bud might they not both cup, like the bracts of a flower, uplifted for revelation and fulfillment?
It was midday before Frances plunged for the last time. She swam slowly down the pond on her back, slanting gradually to the bank and saw the god little by little withdraw behind his curtain of leaves.
She dried herself slowly, standing on the lip of the bank with her back to the trees. There was no wind to rustle the leaves, but something rustled behind her. She wheeled and saw a woman there, a woman who was stretching out a bare arm towards her and beginning to back away with wide staring eyes and mouth open in wordless horror.
Frances herself could neither move nor speak for a moment, but she recovered from the surprise before the other. The woman was somewhat over thirty, with long black hair that fell loosely down her back and over her shoulders. She was dressed in a kind of wrapper of green and silver brocade that left one arm and shoulder bare. Her feet, too, were bare, and arm, feet and face were of one even, very pale brown hue. Her face was thin with high cheek-bones and prominent nose and eyes that, in their fixed, shocked stare, looked unnaturally large and dark. Her Indian blood was unmistakable. Awkwardly, Frances moved sideways towards her clothes laying on the grass and, to cover up her embarrassment, began to speak, saying the first things that came into her head—the heat of the day, how refreshing the water was. . . .
Jamar appeared not to hear her. She stared still, but gradually her face lost its expression of horror; she retreated no further, but to Frances’s bewilderment and distress, folded her arms about her body and bent a little forward, rocking as if in pain and moaning and murmuring unintelligible things. Keeping her eyes on the woman, and with a dawning comprehension beginning to make her heart sink, Frances sidled nearer to her things.
Jamar suddenly flung up her head, and with frightening swiftness darted forward to stop her. Her thin brown hand clawed as though she would snatch the towel Frances held to her breast, but the fierce impulse left Jamar as suddenly as it had entered her. Her hand dropped, her eyes shifted and she turned her head, looking in a vacant, wandering way up and down the pond; her parted lips trembled as though trying to force words which the wandering mind could not supply. Frances stood stock still, afraid to provoke her by another movement.
More than a minute passed, then Jamar turned again, not fiercely, but with such haggard pain in her thin face as frightened Frances more. Very slowly Jamar brought her face close to Frances’s, studying her, searching all her features, seeming to read there something that filled her with inconceivable distress. So worn and ill and old she looked under the influence of that incomprehensible grief that Frances’s fear began to turn to pity and she would have spoken if she could have found any words to comfort a sorrow the cause of which she could not begin to guess.
Jamar herself spoke.
‘You are young!’
She whispered the words as though she dared scarcely admit to herself their dreadful import.
‘You are younger than me!’ she repeated. Then she suddenly fell on her knees, bent forward her head, spreading her long hair round her like a veil and covering her face with her hands burst into heart-stricken weeping.
Pitying and yet frightened and at a loss what to do in her first experience of dealing with someone so afflicted, Frances stooped and tried to speak soothingly. She dared not touch the quivering, heaving shoulders. She looked down and slowly realised that there was nothing she, or anyone not equipped to explore the dark passages of a deranged mind, could do to console that grief. Quickly and quietly she put on her clothes and hurried back to the house to find Miss Dorfray.
She had time for reflection before she arrived there, and she saw that the thing was shocking and frightening only to her in her inexperience. An older woman who had seen more of the world might easily have guessed the nature of the niece’s illness from Miss Dorfray’s reticence. However, the reason why she could not stay at Chevrel when the niece was at home was now made plain and Frances decided that she had better leave that afternoon.
She found Miss Dorfray with her sister, both in a subdued and apathetic mood, and the sister looked as if she had been crying. Emily was five or six years younger than her sister, taller, even thinner and with the lines of worry and ill health more deeply marked on her features. She said little to Frances, leaving it to Miss Dorfray to explain that their niece had fretted to come home before the three weeks in London were over, that the specialist had said that he could not do anything more for her this time and perhaps it was better to bring her back. . . .
Frances thought it kinder to interrupt and say at once that she had met Jamar by the pond. Miss Dorfray looked hard at her then slowly lowered her eyes. Emily went quietly on with preparing lunch.
‘I think I shall leave this afternoon,’ Francis said. ‘It’s not far to Lodersham. I shall get there in good time if I set off at half-past two or three.’
Neither of the sisters replied and Frances automatically began helping to carry the things into the dining-room.
Suddenly Emily
said:
‘There’s no need to go before you want.’
And as if emboldened by this Miss Dorfray, in something of a flutter, began to protest: it was too hot for walking in the afternoon, and—with a blush—they had agreed until Monday. Not knowing whether to go or stay would be more embarrassing, and not really looking forward to the sweltering walk to Lodersham, Frances wavered. In the end she said she would go on the Sunday morning; it would be cooler for walking then, and that appeared to satisfy the sisters.
Not another word was said about Jamar. When lunch was ready the three of them sat down and ate it without any suggestion from either of the sisters that they should wait for their niece. Frances saw Emily put aside a plate of the cold meat, however, and guessed that they were used to her absenting herself from the regular meals. While they sat with their tea afterwards, from time to time one of the sisters would look out through the open door and listen attentively, but that was all the anxiety that they expressed. Frances fell in with what they so clearly wished and said nothing further about her meeting with Jamar.
Later, both to escape from the closeness of the house and to leave the sisters free to discuss whatever discouraging report she supposed the specialist had given, Frances went out into the woods. She avoided her well-known path to the pond, and walked a little way along the lane to the hamlet. There, finding a thin place among the nut-bushes, she pushed through and wandered slowly through the beech woods. She came at length to the lower fringes of the wood in the Chevrel valley, somewhere between the hamlet and the grounds of Chevrel House; and finding a deeply-shaded bank where she could catch a glimpse of the bourne glinting through the rushes and the tall meadow-sweet and just hear its chuckling among the pebbles, she sat down. It would be as well to consider where to go and what to do in the rest of her holidays, now, she told herself, but she could not keep her mind on any sort of planning; her thoughts slid away into musing over the past fortnight and to re-creating over and over again, like the rehearsal of a scene that will not go right, the meeting with Jamar by the pond.