by A. J. Cronin
‘Manuela, the señor will dine tonight with the Marquesa de Luego.’
Manuela’s look grew more sullen: she made a gesture of distrust.
‘But, marquesa, it is already upon the table, your supper.’
There was protest in the voice: but it fell upon the air. The marquesa was repeating to Harvey with a childish lift of gaiety to her voice:
‘You see, it is already upon the table. Assuredly you are expected. And the marquesa? Already she has made a toilet most elegant. Is it not good chance? Come, señor.’
She led the way through the hall into a long room panelled in dark encina wood and hung with faded portraits framed in tarnished gilt. For the rest the floor was bare, the ceiling painted with the figure of an enormous swan, one wall hidden by an enormous ebony aparador. And in the middle of the room upon the walnut refectory table was laid out a simple meal of fruit, cold fowl, cheese, and milk.
Sulkily Manuela set a second place, pushed forward another heavy hide-backed chair; darting a final covert glance at Harvey, she withdrew.
The marquesa seated herself with a little mincing air, poured out a glass of milk abstractedly, let it stand before her. Then she took a fig from the dish and began to slice it into green and scarlet pieces.
‘You must eat,’ she said, raising her head delicately like a bird. ‘He fasts enough who eats with reason. That cheese is good. It is made with cardo – from the wild artichoke. Little blue flowers. Yes, little blue flowers. I have picked them when I was a child. And that was not yesterday.’
Harvey took some cheese and rough, yellow bread, shook off his own strange sense of unreality. He wanted to hear more about the epidemic.
‘How did this trouble begin?’ he asked.
‘Trouble, señor? What is life but trouble. Out of the mire and into the swamp. It is a saying. There was a man José returning to his family. A sailor who came upon a ship. Then he died and others after him. It is like the old Modorra plague that came to Laguna when Ferdinand was King. You will find now sometimes little heaps of bones in the hill caves. That is where the Guanches wandered out to hide themselves and die. A long, long time ago.’
Touched almost by awe he said:
‘Your family has been here a long time.’
Her eyes looked beyond him contemplating the past.
‘But, señor, you do not understand. What is a long time? Not months, not years. Puneta, no señor. It is longer perhaps than that.’ She paused dreamily, and lifting her hand, directed his gaze through the narrow window to where in the darkening patio a most fantastic tree rose up, its smooth, tube branches uncouthly twisted, like some beast in mortal agony. ‘You see that tree, señor. It is the dragon-tree. Still young, that tree, and yet four hundred years old. No, no! I do not jest. It is four hundred years since Don Cortez Alonso de Luego, el Conquistador and Adelantado, came to this house. From here he made war with his levies from Castille. On the Guanches. At La Mantaza. At the Tower of Refuge. And was wounded at the Place of the Massacre. Since that time, señor, always the de Luegos have lived here. Always, always.’ She sighed and let her small hand fall upon her lap. ‘But now all is changed. My brother, rest to his soul, lost – lost all – years past – in the fall of cochinilla. Everything was then planted in cactus for the cochineal. But another tintura was found, you understand – all made from quimico. It is no good then for cochineal. My brother, alas, is ruined. And dead now ten years. Since then nothing but misfortune which comes by the yard and goes by the inch. Weeds are not hindered by the lack of water. No one to control but Don Balthasar. And he is dead. Dios mio, it is sad, señor, for Isabel de Luego. She is old in truth. But she still has love of life. The more of life the more of love of life. That is a proverb of Galicia. And here, too, the sun is warm on old bones. Take more milk, señor, if you please. It is sweet, like honey.’
Obediently he poured himself a measure of the warm goat’s milk which frothed into the tall, fluted glass. He saw it all: surviving an age when the authority of lineage was paramount, her brother ruined by the discovery of aniline dyes, she was here – old now, enfeebled and alone, victimised, perhaps, by an indolent peasantry, a dishonest overman, stricken even by a disastrous epidemic, the pitiful survival of a noble race.
‘Ah, señor,’ she exclaimed suddenly, ‘better had you known the true Casa de los Cisnes. Not fallen down like this; but the fountain playing in the patio and many happy, ordered peons all singing, singing in the groves.’ Moved by her own words to a strange excitement she rose quietly and stood upright, staring fixedly through the long window into the shadowed patio beyond. The room was almost dark now and her tiny shrunken figure bore a ghostly quality.
‘Never did you hear such singing,’ she declared in a high-pitched tone; her lip twitched slightly; a patch of colour mounted her withered cheek. ‘Never, never. Singing in the carob grove. Often I can hear it when the darkness falls.’ Her face quivered, lit by the glory of the past, and, to Harvey’s acute distress, in a voice which leaped and wavered she began to sing:
‘Al acabarse el trabajo,
Y a la puesta del sol,
Nos juntamos en la alameda:
Brillan las luciernagas como estrellas,
La luna en el cielo está.’
A singular silence followed. The marquesa made no movement to resume her seat but, still standing, with eyes sunk in that dimensionless stare, she began remotely to eat her fruit, to drink some milk. Moments passed, then suddenly her head slipped down and she caught Harvey’s troubled gaze upon her. Slowly the trance dissolved, and, back in reality, she gave a fragile laugh. And lighting two candles that stood upon the table she sat down as quietly as she had risen, clasping her mottled hands upon her lap, breathing a sigh that made her shrunken bosom fill.
He looked down at his plate and began awkwardly to crumble his bread.
‘I am sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Sorry that such a great misfortune has taken you.’ He paused. ‘And now, if you will forgive me, I must go.’
‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘you must go.’ Then seeming to scrutinise him afresh, ‘You are English, and you come at sunset. Dios mio, it is strange. Not for years has an Englishman placed foot in Los Cisnes. And then assuredly it was not you.’ A singular smile trembled upon her face. ‘How indeed could it be you? For that too is old history, señor, when your English Nelson made battery on Santa Cruz. He was defeated, as you will know. Ay, ay, ay – but the Spanish garrison was brave. And thereafter, the fighting being done, an Englishman came here at nightfall. No, no, it was not you!’ The smile ran to a trickle of laughter, childish yet somehow secret. ‘It is all written down in a book. I have read it many times within the libreria. Some day I will show you. It is so sad and strange. He came with his beloved to seek sanctuary. She was sister to an English captain. Here he left her, and here returned. Pobre de mi, but life is cruel. When he returned she was not there. Gone away, gone away.’ Watching him, she let her voice tail to a thin whisper that was almost of lamentation. Then again there was silence. The candle flames above the table flickered gently, sending shadows swaying around the panelled walls. And Harvey’s thoughts swayed with the shadows. Caught suddenly in his throat by an emotion quite unknown, he felt as though, in this strange place all peopled with the shadows of the past, a spell were binding him.
The House of the Swans. His mind raced for an instant in the mazes of a haunting labyrinth; then tremblingly withdrew. Thoughts darted hither, thither – strange, frightening thoughts – like scared fishes in a pool. He was hostile to these thoughts and yet they shoaled about, unreasonably, tormenting him. His whole identity seemed slipping from him, merging with the thin shades which floated round the panelled walls.
He started, with an effort composed himself. He saw that she had finished. He pushed back his chair, and got up.
‘I must go,’ he said again. ‘If you will allow me, I will go to the village.’
‘Yes, yes. You will go if you must go. Who am I to interfe
re with fate? It is not far. Manuela will show you the path.’ She rose, and with her shadowy smile and that queer immobile bearing of her body, preceded him from the room.
‘Manuela,’ she cried, clapping her hands in the hall. ‘ Manuela, Manuela.’
They waited without speech until the woman came, gliding noiselessly from the shadows in her felt-soled shoes.
‘You will take lantern, and guide the señor to the village, Manuela.’
The serving woman’s lowering face drew instantly to a look of fear, and, with her head, she made a violent spasm of negation.
‘No, no,’ she cried. ‘No so. I have borne plenty. There is sickness in the night air.’
‘Tell me the way,’ said Harvey quickly. ‘That is enough.’
‘Yes, I will tell. And there is a great moon to light you. No need of lanterns or of me.’
The marquesa gave a little gesture of impotence.
‘Pobre de mi,’ she sighed. ‘Manuela will not go. Will not, will not, will not. How often is that heard. But she is all that now remains to me. Listen, senor, and she will tell you. Then return, I beg you, to this house of meagre hospitality. You, too, have known misfortune. It is in your face, señor. Love and grief – they cannot be concealed. But God draws straight with crooked lines. Who knows but there is fortune in your coming. For you, perhaps; and me. And now – adios.’
She turned, with naive dignity, and began slowly to ascend the stairs. The tap-tap of her heels upon the wooden steps came sounding back, and then the upper darkness of the gallery engulfed her.
At the door Manuela awaited him, and, when he had taken her surly directions in silence, he set out. The night was clear, the garden lit by a moon now all but full. Across his nostrils the perfume of the freesia came up in lazy drifts. Nothing stirred. Even the fireflies hung motionless upon the granadilla leaves. They shone like small, unwinking eyes.
The path ran eastwards and uphill, luminous as a river in that ethereal light. Wading this visionary rivulet he passed an orange grove in fruit, a patch of old banana-trees all rank with undergrowth, some empty packing sheds, a roofless forge, an empty wagon side-tilted from its broken wheel. Everywhere was life; and everywhere decay.
When he had gone about a quarter of a mile, he crossed a low, stone wall and saw above him a dim cluster of lights. Three minutes later he was in the village street, conscious instantly of the blight which lay upon it like a pall. The place seemed deserted of all but some skulking dogs when suddenly, across the way, the black doors of the church swung open and from the dim interior a slow procession wound: censer-bearers, acolyte, and priest. And then the mourners, linked by thin cords to the bier. Harvey stood still, and, as the small white coffin passed, he bared his head. No one took any notice of him. A child, he thought instinctively; and as the funeral train turned into the graveyard his narrowed eyes observed the mounds of fresh-covered earth. He moved forward. Further up he made out a group of soldiers standing around a wagon beneath a naphtha flare. Packing cases littered the road around them. Two nuns, walking swiftly, came towards the soldiers.
‘At last I am here,’ he thought. ‘At last I can do something.’
He did not wait. The door of the first house stood open and impulsively he plunged into the lighted room. As he entered, a woman straightened up from the corner bed where she had been tending a peasant girl. She turned and confronted him; then a little gasp broke from her lips. The woman was Susan Tranter.
Chapter Eighteen
Two days before, when the Aureola pounded out of Orotava Bay, Mary Fielding watched her go. Standing upon the balcony of the San Jorge, wind and rain beating across her eyes, she saw the ship fade into the scattered mist. The masts were last to go; but they, too, vanished coldly from her sight; and she was left alone with sadness. With the sound of the throbbing engines still running in her head she stood motionless for a long time; then she turned, passed through the wide French windows to her bedroom. It was a charming room: spacious, immaculate, the furniture in taste, the caoba-wood bed hung by a crisp mosquito-net. She sat down in a wicker chair beside her neatly piled luggage, conscious of a frightful sinking in her heart. She ought to ring for the maid to unpack, to go in and see Elissa, to look at her mail – an enormous pile of letters lay upon the topmost trunk. She ought not to sit like this, weakly, with hands drooping upon her lap. But she could not shake her listlessness away. Something was hurting in her side, a pain – it was hurting intolerably.
She bit her lip. Don’t be a fool, she thought, a hopeless idiotic fooL Nervously she jumped up, pressed the bell, and waited.
The maid entered, a short mulatto girl whose cuffs and collar matched the glistening whiteness of her eyes. Then, at a word, she went over to the trunks, began to work her small, coffee-coloured fingers amongst the fastenings. Mary gazed at her in silence, moved restlessly to the window. With hands pressed together she stared at the shifting drizzle.
‘When will it stop raining?’
The mulatto girl looked up, exposing cheerfully a row of dazzling teeth.
‘Please, madama, nice weather all the time come good. So Rosita say.’ Her tone was husky, with a sort of comic rhythm. The old Mary would have loved that funny voice. But now she could not even smile.
‘Soon it will be fine?’
‘Yes, please, madama, tomorrow. Come fine, mañana.’ Rosita repeated the favourite word, rolling it from out her lips as though she savoured it.
Tomorrow! The thought struck Mary with a fresh pang: tomorrow and tomorrow; the next day, and the next – all those empty days stretching blankly, endlessly away from her. Again her eyes were mournful with tears; she pressed her cheek against the cold window-glass; and then she sighed as though her heart must break.
But the day marched forward ruthlessly. Her unpacking was completed; the maid smiled and curtseyed herself out; and now the gong drummed out for luncheon.
She descended slowly to the dining-room, joined Dibs and Elissa at a corner table. They were in excellent humour, Elissa delighted by the sophistication of the place, Dibs by the unexpected promise of the cuisine. But their laughter met her like a blow.
Everything was delightful: the service quiet, the food good, the room lofty and serene with cool, branched shrubs. Yet she had no appetite. She touched but did not taste the mullet cooked in white wine which sent Dibs into ecstasies. Her conversation likewise was a sheer pretence. All the time she was hiding that pain which burned in her side.
After lunch they went into the lounge. The rain still dripped from the smoky sky, and Elissa, inspecting the outlook with a dubious eye, proposed a game of bridge.
Bridge! Mary opened her lips to refuse. Then she checked herself. She hated bridge, but no matter, she must make an effort, really she must – so her thoughts ran on – an effort to be less self-centred, more companionable to the others. She took hold of herself, nodded her agreement.
Chairs were brought, and cards. They settled down to bridge. The fourth was a correct little oldish man with a cropped moustache, long jacket, riding breeches, and an army manner, who from the first had angled for the invitation to join them. In a well-bred fashion he had angled; for he was a well-bred little man. It was not long before this emerged with just the casual inconsequence which made it right. He knew, of course, their names and antecedents – each morning it was his practice diligently to scan the register – and was swift to discover mutual acquaintances of rank. He wintered abroad for his ‘little woman’s’ sake, did sketches, organised excursions, spluttered slightly when he spoke, and thanked God he was an English gentleman. His name, Forbes-Smith, inevitably, was hyphenated.
The game wore on interminably: shuffle, cut, deal, call, the laboured business of playing out the hand. No sooner ended than the tedious cycle recommenced. To Mary it seemed so strange and aimless. Why was she sitting here, holding these shiny coloured cards, forcing herself to speak, to smile? Her head was muddled. Forbes-Smith’s flattery immeasurably distressed her. She longed to
be alone, to be at peace with her own thoughts.
But it was after five before the final rubber ended. Then came the reckoning, a silly argument between Dibs and Elissa about the score, a determined effort by Forbes-Smith to introduce her to some ‘charmin’ people’ in the lounge.
It was almost the hour of dinner before she could get away. Upstairs she bathed her throbbing temples, changed into the first frock which took her hand, and again descended to go through the semblance of a meal. Then, making a plea of tiredness, she was free at last to seek the sanctuary of her room. She shut the door, leaned her side against it wearily, then, with a gesture of abandon, threw the windows open.
The rain had ceased, and from behind a bank of cloud the hidden moon diffused a tender radiance. The night was hazy but luminous. The light, lace curtains swayed gently in the rain-washed air. Faintly came the croaking of frogs mingling with the muffled rhythm of the surf. Beneath the balcony a bank of lilies gleamed. The scent – so like the scent of freesias – rising in heavy, intoxicating waves, caught her breast with a sudden pang. It was too hard – too hard to bear.
Slowly she undressed, letting her dress slip from her to the floor. The damp air cooled her hot body. Now she was in bed, lying upon her back, staring with wide eyes into darkness. She had no sense of time. The croaking frogs went on; the booming surf went on; around her the night sounds of the hotel rose up in sudden starts, uneasily defeating sleep. The mosquito-net, which draped her bed with all the stark whiteness of a shroud, seemed now to stifle her.
Was she ill, that she should feel like this? The thought never entered her head. But for all that she was fevered. And in her blood there had begun to stir insidiously the toxins of infection.
Of this she knew nothing; she only knew that she could not rest. Three hours dragged past before a wavering slumber closed her stinging eyes. Down, down she sank through fathoms of forgetfulness. And then she dreamed.
Never before had her dream so vividly possessed her. It began, as usual, by the courtyard fountain: the old cracked fountain with the metal swan which seemed to swim absurdly in the waterless basin. Little green lizards basked lazily upon its rim, blinking kind eyes when she came near. The paving stones were friendly to her feet; the dragon-tree held up its old stupendous limbs; the lovely scent of freesias was in the air. But of course she could not linger. She fled to the garden, and, as she ran, two great white swans rose from the pomegranate-trees and soared trumpeting towards the mountains. The beating of their wings was glorious. She clapped her hands and darted towards the orange grove. Then all at once a new emotion struck her. She paused, transfigured by a marvellous surprise. He was there, again, within that grove which was her own special playground. As she had seen him there so often. But his face was no longer vague, his figure no longer shadowy. She could see quite plainly. It was he. Oh, it was true – after all – she hadn’t been wrong. This time he could make no denial. Her heart turned and leaped, unutterable joy rushed over her. She stretched her arms and ran towards him, laughing and crying in the same breath.