by A. J. Cronin
‘You’d ’ave to go to Hermosa village,’ she went on. ‘Up by Casa de los Cisnes. That’s the ’ouse where the bother started. And a rummy plyce, too. No one goes near it mucho, best of times. Tumbling to bits. She’s ’alf-cracked too – the old bird what ’angs out there.’
‘I will go,’ he thought again. ‘ Yes, I must go.’ The sudden impulse quickened within him and he repeated half to himself: ‘ Casa de los Cisnes.’
A silence fell, during which a blinking curiosity showed in her shiny red face.
‘You ’ave got guts,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ll say that for you.’ Hastily she corrected herself. ‘But, ’streuth! you’ll come a mucker if you do go up.’
He thrust back his chair. As though drawn by an invisible hand, he rose from the table and advanced to the door.
‘Sancta Maria,’ she cried, astonished. ‘You ain’t going pronto. You got to ’ ave a rest. And, blimey, you’d look the better for a shyve and a shine.’
‘I’m not going yet,’ he answered. ‘I want to see Corcoran. It’s time I looked at his arm.’
‘’Arf a chance, then. Don’t rush at me or I’m liable to ’ave a weakness. And don’t go without me or you’re liable to lose your way.’ She winked archly, crushed the end of her cigar upon a plate, and got upon her diminutive feet. Leading the way across the landing, she descended a short flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs and swept along a narrow corridor. A frowsy comfort filled the place. From below came a clatter of pans, a burst of high laughter, the sound of female voices raised in argument.
Then with an air the Hemmingway drew up and flung open the door of a large and dingy bedroom. In the middle of the bedroom stood a large gilt bed draped by a stained flamboyant quilt. And in the middle of the bed was Corcoran. Clad only in his blue and red striped day-shirt, he sat propped up against the musty pillow with a sort of placid unconcern. His arm was bandaged; upon his nose his steel-rimmed spectacles lay; and on his knees the tattered, dog-eared Plato. His lips moved silently; he did not hear them come in.
‘Wyke up, grandma,’ cried Mother Hemmingway loudly. ‘’Ere’s little Red Riding ’Ood come to see you. Cawn’t you smile and look ’appy? You that bled shockin’hover the best carpet in the’ouse.’
Jimmy raised his head and looked owlishly across his glasses at Harvey. Then he gave an exaggerated start of amazement and delight.
‘Well, well,’ he cried, ‘ if it isn’t the greatest pleasure of the mornin’. Respect me emotion if ye please, for, faith, I thought ye’d gone and left me widout one word of a good-bye. But tell me quick, now. Why aren’t ye on the boat?’
‘The ship’s gone. Sailed without me.’
‘Well, well,’ said Corcoran again, ‘if that isn’t the worst of black misthfortune.’
‘Be quiet,’ Harvey said. ‘You knew all the time it had gone.’
‘Did ye ever!’ Corcoran persisted with a blarneying grin towards Hemmingway. ‘And afther the throuble I got ’im out of, an’ all. For him to turn on me like that! But niver mind’ – he turned to Harvey – ‘it’s a treat to know ye’re still beside me. And a sight for sore eyes to see ye walkin’ on yer feet again.’
Harvey went up to the bed, began to unfasten the bandage.
‘How does it feel?’ he asked briefly; and, bending, he inspected the wound, which had pierced the triceps muscle superficially.
‘Sure, it feels nothing at all. To a man like meself that’s took hard knocks and gave them – why, this isn’t nothin’ but a pinprick. I only hope that one of thim days I’ll meet the yellow boy that done it.’
‘A few days’ rest and you’ll be all right,’ said Harvey. He replaced the dressing, rebound the bandage neatly, and stood up. Then his voice turned stiff, his manner constrained. ‘In the meantime I’m going to Laguna. Going to have a look at the epidemic up there.’
Caressing his bristling chin, Jimmy absorbed this information.
‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘that’s fine. But what about me? At the moment me business plans have fallen thru’. I’m uncertain in me outlook. Faith, I’d better come along wid ye.’
‘That’s quite absurd. You can’t possibly get up for a couple of days.’
‘Then I’ll come after ye when I do get up. Faith, ye’ll not lose me easy as that. I’ll be afther ye the minute I put foot upon the ground.’
‘It’s no use,’ Harvey insisted. ‘I don’t want you.’
‘So much the bether,’ answered Jimmy, with his grin. ‘I’ll come just to annoy ye.’
And, using his free hand, he fumbled beneath the pillow and solemnly took snuff.
Chapter Seventeen
In the late afternoon, as the sun drew down to the western shoulder of the Peak, Harvey set out to walk to Hermosa – the village below Laguna. The distance was considerable and the ascent steep – free of the town the road rose sharply in short vertiginous slants – but he had a grim, unreasonable determination to make the journey on foot. Somehow it eased the tumult of his mind to inflict this rigour upon his body; and as he climbed higher into the vibrating air, coating his shoes with dust and his brow with sweat, a sense of calmness came to him. He was walking directly towards the sunset, a dark mote in that glittering river of light which poured over the jagged lava cliffs of Telde. Above the volcanic lip a tiny shining cloud lay like a puff of steam. The sky sang with colour which the earth re-echoed. On either side the dark green leaves of the banana-trees hung low, their wind-torn fleshy fronds adroop in the pellucid calm. Round reservoirs of brackish water, yellow and precious as gold, lay listless, glinting obscurely through the plantation foliage. At one pool three mountain goats were drinking. He climbed higher, traversing a grove of eucalyptus-trees, tall as cedars and gracious with their aromatic attar. Then the road opened out, the trees fell back, and beneath him the bay was spread tranquil and remote, dotted with toys of ships and tiny pointed sails. Around the bay the town lay flattened, its miradors foreshortened, its balconies set out like little mouths to catch the air, its mass of huddled roofs gashed by the silver brightness of the Barranca Almeida. But another turn of the road dissolved this vision of the town and instead a range of bare basaltic hills reared themselves coldly. Great lava slags with huge embedded boulders absorbed his gaze.
Now he had been walking for about an hour. A moment later he passed through the hamlet of La Cuesta: a handful of houses, a glass-cased shrine with its flickering light, a white-walled church. It seemed deserted or asleep. He left the village and mounted higher on the narrowing road. Presently, about a mile further on at a steep-angled bend, he saw before him the small, slowly moving figure of a girl carrying a water-jar. He quickened his pace, made up to her.
‘Señorita,’ he asked in his slow Spanish. ‘ Is this the way to Hermosa? The village beneath Laguna.’
Still walking, she studied him obliquely without moving, her head burdened by the heavy jar. Her eyes were darkly lustrous above the weathered scarlet of her torn blouse. Her body was erect, her hips swayed forward with unstudied easy grace. From the thin dirty fingers of her left hand a yellow blossom trailed. She was not more than fifteen.
‘San Cristóbal de la Laguna,’ she said at length; and then, ‘La Laguna.’
‘Yes. Am I on the proper road?’
‘The road? It is the King’s road.’
‘The King’s road?’
‘Carretera reãl. The old road. Assuredly it is a proper road.’
‘But is it a proper road for Laguna?’
This seemed to amuse her; her smile was dazzlingly white; but for fear of upsetting her jar she might have laughed.
‘Ay de mi,’ she cried. ‘How tired am I of ever fetching water.’ Then she seemed to forget all about him. They walked together in silence around another loop of the interminable road. She waited till they swung past a clump of cork-trees, then indolently she raised the yellow flower and pointed.
He lifted his head. There, quite close, above its range of grass-topped walls, rose the sombre t
owers of an old citadel.
‘De la Laguna,’ she repeated. ‘San Cristóbal de la Laguna.’
The words had a queer melodious sound.
‘There is sickness in the town?’ he asked.
‘Si, señor.’
‘Much sickness?’
‘Si, señor.’ She put the flower in her mouth and began indifferently to chew the stem.
‘I wish to find Hermosa. The Casa de los Cisnes. Can you tell me where that lies?’
Again her oblique lustrous eyes considered him. She removed the flower between two stiff fingers as though it were a cigarette.
‘That is where there is much sickness. At Laguna it is finished. At Hermosa not so much finished.’
‘I want to go there.’
‘Not so much finished,’ she said again; and with a precocious air, ‘Jesu-Maria. There is a curse.’
On they went again in silence, then, about a quarter of a mile from the town, abruptly she drew up, pointed to a side path with the languid yellow flower.
‘Behold!’ she said flatly. ‘It is that way, señor, if you must go.’
The side path which she indicated drew back from the highway through a grove of pines, and, when briefly he had thanked her, he swung towards it. As he stepped into the shadow of the trees he felt that she was watching him, and instinctively he spun round. It was so. There she stood, watching; and, under his eyes, she shifted her jar, crossed herself, moved hurriedly away. And then, quite suddenly the sun went down beyond the far serrated sky-line. All at once the air was colder, as though touched by clammy fingers.
The wood was gloomy, the path narrow, scored by deep ruts and dry as bone. The massed trees hung low – dark with whispering conspiracy. A loose stone, on which he stumbled, went clattering down into a dry ravine. At that the trees drew closer, affrighted; and then a queer light air went through them, murmuring: ‘Hush – oh, hush – oh, hush.’
The sinister stillness of the copse sank into Harvey and keyed him to an answering melancholy. Like some symbolic figure he might have waded through the shadows, further – and further still, into the core of a last obliterating obscurity. But suddenly, a hundred paces further on, the trees thinned out; he crossed a wooden bridge and came again to open land, on which a house stood girt by its estate. It was a small estate but he judged it to be the place he sought – a valley of red prolific earth fed by a precious trickle, burdened beneath the tangled richness of its vegetation. So fertile the soil, so luxuriant the growth, the whole plantation throbbed with a note of wildness: a garden rank, untended, but massed with savage beauty – all fecund with a glorious primeval loveliness.
Staring through the huge wrought-iron gates Harvey caught an awed breath: flowers – such flowers! A surge of untended blossom shimmered madly across the dwindling light. Masses of wild azalea stabbed his eyes with crimson that was like pain; pale irises floated in an opal sea; a purple convolvulus twined its trumpets amongst the banks of granadilla; the crane-flowers darted, blue- and yellow-winged, poised in a still perpetual flight; and, over all, the freesia flowed in waves, white and perfumed, delicate as foam.
With a start he collected himself. He lifted the brass-ringed handle of the gate, twisted and rattled it, pushed with his shoulder upon the rusty bars. But without avail: the gate was locked. No matter – the retama hedge which encircled the domain was raddled with a dozen gaps. That was in keeping with the place. He made to move, when, suddenly, his eye, uplifted towards those massy gates, was taken by an emblem wrought upon the arch above. It was a swan, in beating flight. A swan – in beating flight!
Fascinated, he stared at the emblem of the swan, which seemed imbued with meaning and with life. Casa de los Cisnes. Of course. He caught his breath, his whole body rigid. Why hadn’t it dawned on him before? Casa de los Cisnes – the House of the Swans.
He stood a long time there, his head thrown back, his being flooded by wonder and a strange excitement. The House of the Swans. Then he sighed and turned away. It was nothing; it could be nothing but mere coincidence.
Shaking the thought aside, he took three paces to the right, stepped through the hedge gap, and gained the weed-infested drive. Two little adobe houses stood on either side, and at the first of these he paused, knocked loudly upon the narrow door, then knocked again. There was no answer. Nothing but the empty echoes of his hammering. The door was fastened, the windows shuttered, the house deserted and strangely desolate.
Quickly he turned to the other hut. Here the door lay wide, the dim interior of the single room flung open to his sight. It was empty of life. But on the earthen floor a blanket formed an ochre square and on the blanket a dead man lay, his dull eyes blankly staring, his mouth dropped open as though surprised. Two candles guttered at the pallet’s foot, washing the dead face with a fitful light. And the scent of the freesias filled the air like some sweet unguent.
There was nothing to be done. Harvey turned away, closing the door behind him. He began to walk up the drive which swung southwards in a gentle curve leading him towards the casa, looming whitely against the slope of hill and the sombre background of the trees. It was a noble dwelling fashioned of creamy stone, low yet stately, but fallen to sad disorder: the portico sunk down, the balcony adrift, the shutters rotted and awry, the walls all stained with damp and lichen. Two great urns that flanked the door were tumbled on their sides.
He climbed the worn steps, between the crevices of which a vivid scarlet fungus lay like blood, and rang the bell. Minutes passed with dragging slowness. Again he rang the silly, echoing bell. Then a middle-aged servant woman in a dress of spotted calico opened the door. She stared at him through the grudging aperture as though he were an apparition until he said:
‘I want to see your mistress.’
Then her face, enclosed by the tight-drawn inky hair and a red and yellow scarf, grew suddenly evasive and afraid.
‘It is late, señor,’ she answered. ‘The day is ending.’
‘It is not yet ended.’
‘Before God, señor, the sun is past the Peak. Tomorrow would be a better day.’
He shook his head.
‘I must see her.’
‘But, señor, the marquesa is old. And she has trouble. She does not receive.’
He took two steps forward, causing her to retreat before him into the hall.
‘Tell her I am here.’
She stood, her eyes searching his face, her hands moving indecisively about her apron, then, muttering, she turned and went slowly up the stairs.
He looked round. The hall was lofty, reaching darkly to the arabesque-encrusted roof, echoing to the voice like an old church nave. The faint light had a sombre quality issuing from a single, deep-set window stained with a faded emblem of the Swan. Upon the plaster walls curved swords were swung in patterns. As they had swung for years. Striking the silent emptiness, formidable and grotesque. Beneath the scimitars a shell of armour stood like a shrunken figure of a warrior knight, palsied of arm and bent of knee, but still intimidating – the spear advanced, the visor parted with a grim pugnacity. The figure bore down on Harvey. The whole place affected him strangely, made him almost afraid to stir a foot. And he felt empty – weak. I’m tired, he thought defensively. I’ve walked too far.
Suddenly arose the sound of footsteps upon the wooden staircase. Abruptly he lifted his head. A little old woman was descending from the gallery above. She came slowly, one aged claw clutching the heavy polished banister, one slurred foot dragging upon the other. Yet for all her slowness she bore her small thin figure upright with the dignity of race. She was dressed entirely in black even to the band around her pompadour frizzed hair, and the fashion of her dress was of a bygone age: the skirt trailing, the sleeves puffed, the neck-band ruffled and high. As she drew nearer, Harvey saw plainly the marks of her senility. Her skin was parchment yellow, scored with a maze of wrinkles, the tendons of her neck taut as the leg-strings of a fowl. She had a little tight-drawn aquiline beak and a tiny pouting mouth
. Her dark eyes were pouched and glazed. She wore a score of bangles on her wrists, and on her fingers a galaxy of ancient rings. Immediately Harvey saluted her; announced himself directly.
‘I am an English doctor,’ he said. ‘My name is Leith. I know you’ve got fever on your estate and in the village near. Very bad fever. I’ve come to give you my assistance, if you’ll have it.’
Like a little black-clothed statuette she stood, with all the stillness of great age, seeming to look right through him with her opaque yet living eyes.
‘No one comes here,’ she said at last, and her voice held a curious sing-song cadence. ‘No one comes now to the Marquesa de Luego. She is very old. All day she sits in her room, descending only when she is summoned. What else is there to do, I pray you, señor? Prayers have great virtue, have they not? So Don Balthasar said. He, too, is dead. Not so is Isabel de Luego. So she sits in her room and waits till she is summoned. Assuredly it is a kindness for you to visit her.’
Yes, she is queer, he thought, she is talking about herself. But there was about that oddity a pathos which struck straight into his heart.
‘It was scarcely kindness,’ he said. ‘I was in Santa Cruz. I heard of the sickness you have here – and in Hermosa. The plain fact is that I had nothing else to do. So I came.’
‘It was an act of grace, señor – which grows by the denial. Have they taken your horse? What was it you required? It is forgotten. Pobre de mi. So much is forgotten. And so many have gone away. But you must dine. Good advice comes from the aged. Assuredly you must dine.’
‘There is no need,’ he said quickly. ‘ Let me see first where the sickness is.’
‘In the village. There, so many sick. And now so many are dead. Here on the fiunca they are all dead or run away. All but Manuela and me. Pablo – he was the last. Pablo, the gate-keeper. He died at noon. After, you shall see.’ She gave a little ghostly laugh, and, turning to the woman who stood in the background listening with a sullen face, she exclaimed: