Up at the house, however, everyone was comforted that the men had gone down, and many of them big and strong. Mabel Armstrong who had destroyed her diary that evening, remembered a ship’s officer she had been in love with for the voyage. She half-enjoyed, half-trembled at the anarchy of the evening, the rank bodies gathered on the lawns of the house, as she went amongst the crowd of spectators and was jolly with them. Nobody was particularly grateful; the spectacle was staged as much for them as for the owners of the house. Some women had already made themselves at home in chairs. Children had fallen asleep in heaps on the crisp lawns, or else were staring at the house, as if they could have broken a piece off and sucked it. Mabel Armstrong, whose rather shallow blue eyes had grown deeper in the darkness, began to feel ashamed of a tapestry, on which huntsmen blew interminable horns and ladies in farthingales stood holding fans, pomanders, and other agreeable things of no obvious justification. Mabel Armstrong turned her back on the lit window, to which the alternative was the fire. It seemed to be roaring now, and against it the black specks of men with charred branches at the ends of their arms merely looked ridiculous. Mabel Armstrong, who was by this time quite alone in the crowd, would have liked to kiss. She would have held her lover’s head and drained him to the dregs. But at this period she was not in love, though half-engaged to the English title, not then present.
How far the fire had advanced could be seen by the size of the black men, who had grown big and distinct against the flame. Their grave actions could now be followed in detail, and frequent stillnesses wondered at.
The fact was, the fighters had become not only exhausted but fascinated by the fire. They stared into it, into the golden caverns that yawned and tunnelled through the framework of the bush. Some were by now so apathetic and hollow they could have entered, to add their bones. There were very few who did not succumb to the spell of the fire. They were swayed by it, instead of it by them.
So they withdrew always, and it looked as if their arms were opening to receive it, when Stan Parker, who was on the left wing, looked along his unprotected shoulder and shouted, ‘Hi! It’s coming up from Barrel Creek!’
The spidery figures of caught men looked down to the left, and there it was certainly, a second hand of fire. As it advanced, and it must with that wind, you could see they would be held in a little pocket below Glastonbury, and ringed round, and roasted in those shapes in which their writhing consciousness had left them.
So everybody naturally began to scramble back, until they were standing on the lawns of the garden, in the smoke that they had brought with them, and the questions asked. Nobody could answer questions, nobody really wanted them answered, but to ask them was to assert themselves. The fire rolled along. Many of the spectators were now standing sideways, and would soon begin to trail back towards their own homes, to rescue the mattresses.
Up the gravel drive a few volunteers were dragging a reel on which was wound a hose. The hose was fastened to a tap of poor pressure, from which emerged first ribald noises and a frog, then a slack stream of water. But it was comforting, as the fire, down the hill, went from tree to tree, and won them over, and the reinforcement of fire from Barrel Creek climbed the gully, hand over hand, of flame and smoke.
It was by this time pretty murky at the big house, round which the butcher and his wife still hovered. Mrs Armstrong had dropped her jewel case somewhere, but had forgotten, in remembering she had left unpaid several debts to God. She parted the smoke with diamond hands and whimpered at so much shapelessness.
‘Perhaps the wind will turn,’ said a calm young woman who was standing there, ‘or a storm break, madam. It is that close, and thundery.’
‘It will never happen that way,’ sighed Mrs Armstrong. ‘It is not intended to. I know now.’
It was obvious she did. So that the younger woman looked at her closely in the smoky darkness.
‘Only I would like to bring out a comfortable chair I had for sitting in,’ said the butcher’s wife. ‘Louis This and Louis That is all very well. But a comfortable chair is something you cannot buy with money. I had one there I could spend whole hours in, it could have been my own body. But where,’ she said suddenly, rousing herself from her nostalgia, ‘where is Madeleine? I don’t remember seeing her all night.’
‘Madeleine?’ said Amy Parker, who was the young woman standing there.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Armstrong. ‘A girl who is my son’s fiancée. She has been staying with us for several weeks.’
As if others did not know.
‘Madeleine!’ called Mrs Armstrong, tottering on swollen ankles, and asking here and there.
But nobody could tell.
‘No,’ said Mabel Armstrong. ‘I cannot remember where I saw her last. She had a headache. She was going into the garden, she said, I think, for air. But I saw her standing in her room, reading some letters. That could have been before. Or was it afterwards? I couldn’t say exactly,’ Mabel Armstrong said.
She felt guilty, although there was no reason why she should. As the fire swept closer and the thick smoke filled her nose, choking and making it swollen, there were many sensations that she could not have explained, nor impulses controlled, if she had wanted to. She had torn her dress on something, and water from the hose that men were aiming at the house had soaked her breast, till she was naked. There was no real reason to regret Madeleine now, alive or dead, or even walking downstairs, which was an act of hers that people used to watch, only starting to talk again when she had reached the bottom.
But Amy Parker, who had dreamed of Madeleine, and spoken to her often in the more inspired moments of sleep, knew that she was in the house. Lying on a bed with her eyes closed, or watching the fire from a window in a state of indecision, her long hair hanging down.
‘Ahhhh!’ they cried. ‘Did you see it? Nothing will turn it from the house. Those old pines were made to burn.’
The pines had been waiting, dedicated to fire. The fire reared up out of the gully, and after executing several complicated figures pressed itself against the huddled pines. Such a passionate torch was lit by this embrace that every face was illuminated in its most secret visions, and Mabel Armstrong covered her breasts with her arms.
Then Mrs Armstrong, who was gulping and reeling in the stench of resin, began to call for a sacrifice.
‘I must find the girl,’ she said. ‘Tom will never believe. He bought the ring only the other Wednesday.’
Of diamonds, Amy Parker saw, ringed with fire.
‘Stan,’ she said, touching her husband, who had come up when the pines caught, to be beside her in the chaos, ‘Stan,’ she said, ‘you go into the house and fetch the lady out. You know, the one that rides along our road. With reddish hair.’
Just then Stan Parker was not prepared to do everything his wife asked. In the presence of such brilliance he was a dull man, he knew, and passive. He was waiting, not to give, but to receive. His feet were rooted in a wonderment. His veins almost ran resin. So that his wife had to touch him again, which she did with authority, knowing his body off by heart. But the worshipping man would not have moved even then if he had not also been touched by fire. Is it, possibly, better to burn? He shook his clods of feet, on which he had never got very far. Curtains, blowing outward, were restrained only by their rings. The gentler jewels of lamplight, with which some windows were set, flickered nostalgically against the barbaric blaze of fire. All that he had never done, all that he had never seen, appeared to be contained in this house, and it was opening to him. Till his head began to reel with fiery splendours of its own, and he was prepared to accept the invitation, and follow the passages of the house, or fire, to any possible conclusion.
‘I’ll have a go,’ he said and began to walk across the tingling grass, while Mrs Armstrong called directions that he did not listen to.
Amy Parker felt she was losing control of her husband, and had perhaps done something foolish, for which his bravery would be the only consolation.
; Everyone was already very glad that Stan Parker was committed to something positive. A weight was lifted from them. They could now enjoy the spectacle without a conscience. So they sighed and settled themselves, and even those men who were training the feeble hose on the house, as a prelude to its other baptism, let the water spray more aimlessly as they watched Stan Parker, who was going in.
There was a stillness in the house, of which the fate was withheld as the fire wrestled with the willing pines. It was an uneasy stillness, though, with some slight movement in it. A cat had dragged a ball of wool down from the lap of a tapestry chair and was playing with it in a quiet room, drawing out the long grey threads of wool to tangle in. The air was woolly too, with a grey woolliness of first smoke. Threads of it were wound about a chandelier. One long yarn, unravelling from beneath a door, attracted the steely cat, who slashed at it and passed through.
Now that he was there, Stan Parker had no doubts that he should have come. Lamplight made him bigger than he was, from the one lamp lit and left beside a book. His shadow, as he walked, became involved with the dormant chandelier, which tinkled faintly. He smiled in the gloom of this musical cave in which he had found himself, and remembered a play of Hamlet that he had read in a book of his mother’s, the teacher, and forgotten, till walking through a houseful of poetry, of which he only had to touch the doors and they would open.
He went from that room, brushing a tapestry that shivered at his shoulder, and rippled, and regained eternity. All things in the house were eternal on that night, if you could forget the fire. Time was becalmed in the passages, and especially at their ends, in the depths of which brooms stood, and possessive winter coats, and scarred garments in old leather. There was a horse that rocked at a touch, with something rattling in his belly. A woman’s scratchy straw hat hung from a hook, still smelling of roses and sun. So close was that protective darkness, which the smoke had not yet entered, it was not possible to be afraid. You listened for voices the other side of the wall, of people who had not died.
So that he had to tear himself from the passages and return to a desperate situation. Flinging open a door, he was in a long room of quivering mirrors and impassive chairs. His cloddish boots were quite shameful here. Not that it mattered now. If time had clotted in the stuffy cupboards of the passages, here it flowed again. Outside the window of the room a cedar stood, of which the bark was visible to its last knot and crack, as fire rolled the darkness up, and red clouds of smoke drifted in the branches, hanging and drifting, and entered the room. So the man, like the tree, was set adrift, and his botched reflections tried to remember their mission. He had come, of course, to look for someone, who was sitting somewhere in one of the rooms of the house, in silk and diamonds. If she would not expect him to speak, he would carry her quickly down, holding her sideways like a stook of oats. But he was afraid of the introduction in words that she would wait for. And touch. He was already nervous of her soft skin.
Outside, the fire had gained a fresh foothold. Something crashed a bough, even a whole tree, and whole sheets of shattering light shot into the room, where the man, who had, in fact, only been dreaming there an instant, was again all energy and intention, and trod back against a harp that nobody had ever played. The shocking melancholy of the harp at once propelled him out of the room, in search.
Now the dark was lighter in the bosom of the house through which Stan Parker ran, in which he found the staircase, stumbled, mounted, paying the banister out through his burning hand, feeling his swift shirt sail against his ribs as he mounted on a misson of some mystery into the pure air of upper rooms. Here too the glare had entered. Huge furniture loomed, bursting its mahogany almost in that light, and the common iron bed that the butcher had chosen to do his penance on was gilded with a sharp importance.
Approaching some climax, the breath of the saviour or sacrifice, it was not clear which, came quicker; he hurtled in his heavy boots, flinging behind him the leaves of doors, kicking the furniture even. Similar haste was evident in some of these rooms, from which the occupants had run, leaving drawers dangling, cupboards gaping, secrets revealed. The prettiness had shrivelled up. It had died in the vases, and at the dressing tables, which were now without reflections. Someone had left her hair on the carpet, and there it lay, duller when confessed, waiting to shriek as the fire reached into the room and licked it up.
But not yet. Stan Parker, in a wind, broke his way to the heart of the house, it seemed, and saw that she was standing there, her back towards him, because the fire was of first importance.
Madeleine was wearing some kind of loose gown that shone in the firelight with many other lights. Above this sheath and on to it her hair flowed, for she had loosened it that afternoon in the heat, so that when she turned to him, because she could not very well avoid it, he had never seen anything glowing and flowing like this woman in her shining dress. He stood there feeling the lumps of possible words he might bring out, and almost hoping for some disaster to consume them both. If the ceiling would cave in.
But Madeleine said, ‘I was watching the fire. It has got into the schoolroom down there. There’s an old papiermaché globe that the girls used to learn the capitals from, that seemed to go up in a puff. It was horrible.’
But it might not have been. The words welled out of her in slow waves, of disgust or pleasure, rippling in her throat before they were released, or it might have been the light that made her suppler. Her mouth was rather thin, that remained open after its disclosure. Madeleine did not like her mouth and wished it could have been fuller, though as it was nobody considered it a blemish. Her appearance as a whole defied detail to detract from it.
Stan Parker did not listen to what she said, because this too was unnecessary. Bursts of sparks flew up and past the window, together with tufts of purplish smoke. These were a relief, for he did not need to look any longer at Madeleine. He could say, ‘They sent me to bring you out. And we oughtn’t to waste any time. It’ll be on the stairs if we’re not sharp. Follow me, please, and I’ll take you down.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘They sent you.’
She came towards him over some old letters that she had been reading and let fall. She came, but was not yet obedient.
‘Of course it is ridiculous of me to be here. And I don’t quite know why I am. You must think I’m mad.’
All this was what he most dreaded. But she was not yet close. So he shuffled his feet and longed to substitute action for any need to touch.
‘There are moments of madness’, she said, ‘in anyone.’
Then she was beside him, and he saw that the skin round her eyes had only just dried, which made him all the more mistrustful, to be handed an unhappiness.
‘I hope I shan’t be a liability after all this,’ Madeleine said.
She was ready to follow him but doubtful that he could save her. All the practical and faithful acts he might perform she could receive only with irony. And in spite of herself it made her sad.
It made him wonder if out of his own, different experience, he might produce a clue, but this possibility passed like a shadow through the doorway.
‘If we go along here,’ he said to her gently, ‘I think we’ll find a way down through the back.’
‘I should be showing you,’ she said. ‘This is the first time you’ve come to the house.’ Whether this was so or not, her arrogance claimed it. ‘If we go through the baize door we shall come’ – not to the servants’ staircase, she softened it – ‘to the back stairs.’
She was gentler too, doing him this kindness, and flinging open with her own hands the stuffy door that divided the classes.
But the fire was there too. It was snapping at the common wood of the servants’ stairs. It was writhing upward to make fresh finds. The woman and her rescuer stood there looking down, their eyeballs large and gilded. They were a bit deformed by this fresh development, and drew closer to each other for strength and encouragement.
‘Looks like it will have
to be the other way,’Stan Parker said.
Because here only the dead ends were left. They turned back past the small boxes in which the maids had been contained, to change their caps, to wash their bodies, and to dream of what the tea leaves had told. The royalty and the saints they had stuck on the walls had lost their power. Only the paper remained, drained of its mysticism, and spotted by flies.
Madeleine moved quickly. She had taken him by the hand and was showing him things.
‘When I was a child, quite small, in arms, I believe, I was in a fire,’ she said, in what had become a loud voice, willing to share with him everything her thought conceived. ‘I have just begun to remember. It is the light of fire on these high white walls. I can remember a birdcage, but not what happened. Not yet. I think it was too horrible. And now I am in a second fire,’ she laughed, tossing the dark, reddish hair back from her shoulders, as fire is flung out. ‘It looks as though I am condemned. But you —’ She paused.
They had come to the head of the front stairs, on which smoke still disguised the intentions of the fire.
‘And I know nothing about you. You haven’t been able to tell. You won’t now.’
‘There isn’t anything to tell,’ Stan Parker said.
She had turned sallow, almost ugly, he was close enough to see, and it made him comfortable. On one side of her nose, that was very beautiful and fragile, there was a little mark, like a pockmark. And suddenly he wished he could sink his face in her flesh, to smell it, that he could part her breasts and put his face between.
She saw this. They were burning together at the head of the smoking staircase. She had now to admit, without repugnance, that the sweat of his body was drugging her, and that she would have entered his eyes, if she could have, and not returned.
Instead they had begun the last stage of a journey, groping down the soft stairs, moving in the grey and yellow smoke, confusing hands with banisters and banisters with hands. Once their eyes swam together and retreated before admission could be made. Because that between-world of smoke and shapes was more tender.
The Tree of Man Page 22