The hairy slouching figure drew slowly nearer, and with him came an intensification of the dreadful smell, sweet and putrid and commingled. The animal skin was thick and wrinkled about his neck and almost covered his face, but Clarinda saw his huge nose and expressionless eyes. Then he was past, and the child had reappeared.
‘I ran all the way.’ Indeed it seemed as if she had been gone only an instant. You’re not to bother about changing because it’s too late anyway.’ Clearly she was repeating words spoken by an adult. ‘You’re to come at once, although of course you’ll have to be hidden. But if s all right,’ she added reassuringly. ‘There’ve been people before who’ve had to be hidden.’ She spoke as if the period covered by her words were at least a generation. ‘But you’d better be quick.’
Clarinda found that she could move once more. Rufo, moreover, had disappeared from sight.
‘Where do I hide?’
‘I’ll show you. I’ve often done it.’ Again she was showing off slightly. ‘Bind your hair.’
‘What?’
‘Bind your hair. Do be quick.’ The little girl was peremptory but not unsympathetic. She was like a mother addressing an unusually slow child she was none the less rather fond of. ‘Haven’t you got that thing you had before?’
‘It was raining then.’ But Clarinda in fact had replaced the black scarf in her mackintosh pocket after drying it before the Carstairs’ kitchen fire. Now, without knowing why, she drew it out.
‘Go on.’ Clarinda’s sluggishness was making the child frantic.
But Clarinda refused to be rattled. With careful grace she went through the moonlit ritual of twisting the scarf round her head and enveloping her abundant soft hair.
The child led her back half-way round the copse to where there was a tiny path between the bushes. This path also was exceedingly muddy; ploughed up, as Clarinda could plainly see, by innumerable hoofmarks.
‘I’d better go first,’ said the little girl; adding with her customary good manners, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather spiky.’
It was indeed. The little girl, being little, appeared to advance unscathed; but Clarinda, being tall, found that her clothes were torn to pieces, and her face and hands lacerated. The radiance of the moon had sufficed outside, but in here failed to give warning of the thick tangled briars and rank whipcord suckers. Everywhere was a vapour of ancient cobwebs, clinging and greasy, amid which strange night insects flapped and flopped.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said the little girl. ‘You’d better be rather quiet.’
It was impossible to be quiet, and Clarinda was almost in tears with discomfort.
‘Quieter,’ said the little girl; and Clarinda did not dare to answer back.
The slender muddy trail, matted with half-unearthed roots, wriggled on for another minute or two; and then the little girl whispered, ‘Under here.’
She was making a gap in the foliage of a tall round bush. Clarinda pushed in. ‘Ssh,’ said the little girl.
Inside it was like a small native hut. The foliage hung all round, but there was room to stand up and dry ground beneath the feet.
‘Stand on this,’ whispered the little girl, pointing to a round, sawn section of tree, about two feet high and four in diameter. ‘I call it my fairy dinner table.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m all right, thank you. I’m always here.’
Clarinda climbed on to the section of tree, and made a cautious aperture in the boscage before her.
The sight beyond was one which she would not easily forget.
Clearly, to begin with, this was the maze, although Clarinda had never seen or heard of such a maze before. It filled a clearing in the copse about twenty or thirty yards wide and consisted of a labyrinth of little ridges, all about nine inches high. The general pattern of the labyrinth was circular, with involved inner convolutions everywhere, and at some points flourishes curving beyond the main outer boundary, as if they had once erupted like boils or volcanic blow-holes. In the valleys between the ridges, grass grew, but the ridges themselves were trodden bare. At the centre of the maze was a hewn block of stone, which put Clarinda in mind of the Stone of Scone.
Little of this, however, had much immediate significance for Clarinda; because all over the maze, under the moon, writhed and slithered and sprawled the smooth white bodies of men and women. There were scores of them; all apparently well-shaped and comely; all (perhaps for that reason) weirdly impersonal; all recumbent and reptilian, as in a picture Clarinda remembered having seen; all completely and impossibly silent beneath the silent night. Clarinda saw that all round the maze were heaps of furry skins. She then noticed that the heads of all the women were bound in black fillets.
At the point where the coils of the maze surged out beyond the main perimeter were other, different figures. Still wrapped in furs, which distorted and made horrible the outlines of their bodies, they clung together as if locked in death. Down to the maze the ground fell away a few feet from Clarinda’s hiding place. Immediately below her was one of these groups, silent as all the rest. By one of the shapeless figures she noticed a long thick staff. Then the figure soundlessly shifted, and the white moonlight fell upon the face of the equally shapeless figure in its arms. The eyes were blank and staring, the nostrils stretched like a running deer, and the red lips not so much parted as drawn back to the gums: but Clarinda recognised the face of Mrs. Pagani.
Suddenly there was a rustling in the hiding-place. Though soft, it was the first sound of any kind since Clarinda had looked out on the maze.
‘Go away, you silly little boy,’ muttered the little girl.
Clarinda looked over her shoulder.
Inside the bower, the moonlight, filtered through the veil of foliage, was dim and deceitful; but she could see the big eyes and bird-of-prey mien of the other child. He was still wearing his bright blue hooded garment; but now the idea occurred to Clarinda that he might not be a child at all, but a well-proportioned dwarf. She looked at the black ground before stepping down from the tree trunk; and instantly he leapt at her. She felt a sharp, indefinite pain in her ankle and saw one of the creature’s hands yellow and clawlike where a moonbeam through the hole above fell on the pale wood of the cut tree. Then in the murk the little girl did something which Clarinda could not see at all, and the hand jerked into passivity. The little girl was crying.
Clarinda touched her torn ankle, and stretched her hand into the beam of light. There was duly a mess of blood.
The little girl clutched at Clarinda’s wrist. ‘Don’t let them see,’ she whispered beseechingly through her tears. ‘Oh please don’t let them see,’ Then she added with passionate fury, ‘He always spoils everything. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.’
Clarinda’s ankle hurt badly, and there was palpable danger of blood poisoning, but otherwise the injury was not severe.
‘Shall I be all right if I go?’
‘Yes. But I think you’d better run.’
‘That may not be so easy.’
The little girl seemed desolated with grief.
‘Never mind,’ said Clarinda. ‘And thank you.’
The little girl stopped sobbing for a moment. ‘You will come back?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Clarinda.
The sobbing recommenced. It was very quiet and despairing.
‘Well,’ said Clarinda, ‘I’ll see.’
‘Punctually? That makes all the difference, you know.’
‘Of course,’ said Clarinda.
The child smiled at her in the faint moonlight. She was being brave. She was remembering her manners.
‘Shall I come with you?’
‘No need,’ said Clarinda rather hastily.
‘I mean to the end of the little path.’
‘Still no need,’ said Clarinda. ‘Thank you again, though. Goodbye.
‘Goodbye,’ said the little girl. ‘Don’t forget. Punctual.’
Clarinda crept along the involved muddy
path: then she sped across the soft wet sward, which she spotted with her blood; through the gate where she had seen Rufo and down the hill where she had seen the pigs; past the ill-spelled notice; and home. As she fumbled with the patent catch, the church clock which kept ward over Mrs. Pagani’s abode struck three. The mist was rising again everywhere; but, in what remained of the moonlight, Clarinda, before entering the house, unwound the black scarf from her head and shook her soft abundant locks.
The question of Mrs. Pagani’s unusual dwelling-place arose, of course, the next morning, as they hurriedly ate the generously over-large breakfast which Mrs. Carstairs, convinced that London meant starvation, pressed upon them.
‘Please not,’ said Clarinda, her mouth full of golden syrup. She was wearing ankle socks to conceal her careful bandage. ‘I just don’t want to go.’
The family looked at her; but only Dudley spoke. ‘Whatever you wish, darling.’
There was a pause; after which Mr. Carstairs remarked that he supposed the good lady would still be in bed anyway.
But here, most unusually, Mr. Carstairs was wrong. As Dudley and Clarinda drove away, they saw the back of Mrs. Pagani walking towards the church and not a couple of hundred yards from their own gate. She wore high stout boots, caked with country mud, and an enveloping fur coat against the sharpness of the morning. Her step was springy, and her thick black hair flew in the wind like a dusky gonfalon.
As they overtook her, Dudley slowed. ‘Good morning,’ he shouted. ‘Back to the grindstone.’
Mrs. Pagani smiled affectionately.
‘Don’t be late,’ she cried, and kissed her hand to them.
THE STAINS
After Elizabeth ultimately died, it was inevitable that many people should come forward with counsel, and doubtless equally inevitable that the counsel be so totally diverse.
There were two broad and opposed schools.
The first considered that Stephen should ‘treasure the memory’ (though it was not always put like that) for an indefinite period, which, it was implied, might conveniently last him out to the end of his own life. These people attached great importance to Stephen ‘not rushing anything.’ The second school urged that Stephen marry again as soon as he possibly could. They said that, above all, he must not just fall into apathy and let his life slide. They said he was a man made for marriage and all it meant.
Of course, both parties were absolutely right in every way. Stephen could see that perfectly well.
It made little difference. Planning, he considered, would be absurd in any case. Until further notice, the matter would have to be left to fate. The trouble was, of course, that fate’s possible options were narrowing and dissolving almost weekly, as they had already been doing throughout Elizabeth’s lengthy illness. For example (the obvious and most pressing example): how many women would want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would want to marry. Not after Elizabeth. That in particular.
They told him he should take a holiday, and he took one. They told him he should see his doctor, and he saw him. The man who had looked after Elizabeth had wanted to emigrate, had generously held back while Elizabeth had remained alive, and had then shot off at once. The new man was half-Sudanese, and Stephen found him difficult to communicate with, at least upon a first encounter, at least on immediate topics.
In the end, Stephen applied for and obtained a spell of compassionate leave, and went, as he usually did, to stay with his elder brother, Harewood, in the north. Harewood was in orders: the Reverend Harewood Hooper, B.D., M.A. Their father and grandfather had been in orders too, and had been incumbents of the same small church in that same small parish for thirty-nine years and forty-two years respectively. So far, Harewood had served for only twenty-three years. The patron of the living, a private individual, conscientious and very long lived, was relieved to be able to rely upon a succession of such dedicated men. Unfortunately, Harewood’s own son, his one child, had dropped out, and was now believed to have disappeared into Nepal. Harewood himself cared more for rock growths than for controversies about South Africa or for other such fashionable Church preoccupations. He had published two important books on lichens. People often came to see him on the subject. He was modestly famous.
He fostered lichens on the flagstones leading up to the rectory front door; on the splendidly living stone walls, here grey stone, there yellow; even in the seldom used larders and pantries; assuredly on the roof, which, happily, was of stone slabs also.
As always when he visited his brother, Stephen found that he was spending much of his time out of doors; mainly, being the man he was, in long, solitary walks across the heathered uplands. This had nothing to do with Harewood’s speciality. Harewood suffered badly from bronchitis and catarrh, and nowadays went out as little as possible. The domestic lichens, once introduced, required little attention – only observation.
Rather it was on account of Harewood’s wife, Harriet, that Stephen roamed; a lady in whose company Stephen had never been at ease. She had always seemed to him a restless woman; jumpy and puzzling, the very reverse of all that had seemed best about Elizabeth. A doubtful asset, Stephen would have thought, in a diminishing rural parish; but Stephen himself, in a quiet and unobtruding way, had long been something of a sceptic. Be that as it might, he always found that Harriet seemed to be baiting and fussing him, not least when her husband was present; even, unforgivably, when Elizabeth, down in London, had been battling through her last dreadful years. On every visit, therefore, Stephen wandered about for long hours in the open, even when ice was in the air and snow on the tenuous tracks.
But Stephen did not see it as a particular hardship. Elizabeth, who might have done – though, for his sake, she could have been depended upon to conceal the fact – had seldom come on these visits at any time. She had never been a country girl, though fond of the sea. Stephen positively liked wandering unaccompanied on the moors, though he had little detailed knowledge of their flora and fauna, or even of their archaeology, largely industrial and fragmentary. By now he was familiar with most of the moorland routes from the rectory and the village, and, as commonly happens, there was one that he preferred to all the others, and nowadays found himself taking almost without having to make a decision. Sometimes even, asleep in his London flat that until just now had been their London flat, he found himself actually dreaming of that particular soaring trail, though he would have found it difficult to define what properties of beauty or poetry or convenience it had of which the other tracks had less. According to the map, it led to a spot named Burton’s Clough.
There was a vague valley or extended hollow more or less in the place which the map indicated, but to Stephen it every time seemed too indefinite to be marked out for record. Every time he wondered whether this was indeed the place; whether there was not some more decisive declivity that he had never discovered. Or possibly the name derived from some event in local history. It was the upwards walk to the place that appealed to Stephen, and, to only slightly lesser extent, the first part of the slow descent homewards, supposing that the rectory could in any sense be called home: never the easily attainable but inconclusive supposed goal, the Clough. Of course there was always R. L. Stevenson’s travelling hopefully to be inwardly quoted; and on most occasions hitherto Stephen had inwardly quoted it.
Never had there been any human being at, near, or visible from the terrain around Burton’s Clough, let alone in the presumptive clough itself. There was no apparent reason why there should be. Stephen seldom met anyone at all on the moors. Only organisations go any distance afoot nowadays, and this was not an approved didactic district. All the work of agriculture is for a period being done by machines. Most of the cottages are peopled by transients. Everyone is supposed to have a car.
But that morning, Stephen’s first in the field since his bereavement six weeks before, there was someone, and down at the bottom of the shallow clough itself. The person was dressed so as to be almost lost in t
he hues of autumn, plainly neither tripper nor trifler. The person was engaged in some task.
Stephen was in no state for company, but that very condition, and a certain particular reluctance that morning to return to the rectory before he had to, led him to advance further, not descending into the clough but skirting along the ridge to the west of it, where, indeed, his track continued.
If he had been in the Alps, his shadow might have fallen in the early-autumn sun across the figure below, but in the circumstances that idea would have been fanciful, because, at the moment, the sun was no more than a misty bag of gleams in a confused sky. None the less, as Stephen’s figure passed, comparatively high above, the figure below glanced up at him. Stephen could see that it was the figure of a girl. She was wearing a fawn shirt and pale green trousers, but the nature of her activity remained uncertain.
Stephen glanced away, then glanced back.
She seemed still to be looking up at him, and suddenly he waved to her, though it was not altogether a kind of thing he normally did. She waved back at him. Stephen even fancied she smiled at him. It seemed quite likely. She resumed her task.
He waited for an instant, but she looked up no more. He continued on his way more slowly, and feeling more alive, even if only for moments. For these moments, it had been as if he still belonged to the human race, to the mass of mankind.
Only once or twice previously had he continued beyond the top of Burton’s Clough, and never for any great distance. On the map (it had been his father’s map), the track wavered on across a vast area of nothing very much, merely contour lines and occasional habitations with odd, possibly evocative, names: habitations which, as Stephen knew from experience, regularly proved, when approached, to be littered ruins or not to be detectable at all. He would not necessarily have been averse to the twelve or fourteen miles’ solitary walk involved, at least while Elizabeth had been secure and alive, and at home in London; but conditions at the rectory had never permitted so long an absence. Harriet often made clear that she expected her guests to be present punctually at all meals and punctually at such other particular turning points of a particular day as the day itself might define.
The Unsettled Dust Page 22