Uncertain Voyage

by Dorothy Gilman

  “Hi,” said the Carmer boy, grinning.

  “Good morning,” said Marc West stiffly.

  She nodded, and amused herself by glancing over the brochure in her lap. She saw that they would visit the Caves of Drach, a pearl factory in Manacor, the Caves de Arta, and if they wished they might swim in the Mediterranean during the tour’s mid-afternoon siesta. It sounded pleasant but for her its major contribution was the filling of eleven hours and the cancellation of another day on her calendar. For there were to be no magic rescues on this strange odyssey of hers, she understood this now with a certain grimness. She had begun her trip alone, and must end it alone, with a few interesting memories but nothing more. Understanding this, that the trip was not to solve any problems at all, it held very little interest for her any longer, she was only impatient to end it. “Only two and a half more days,” she remembered, “and then I can go home knowing that I followed the itinerary to the bitter end.”

  Presently the bus moved on to another hotel, and then it left the town behind and moved out across a countryside almost Biblical in texture with warm dusty earth, groves of olive trees, narrow winding roads, and sleepy vineyards. After an hour of patient, leaden observing, Melissa dozed. She awoke with a start to see that they were entering the plaza of a small town. Marc West turned and said politely, “You have been asleep.”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “We are about to visit the Caves of Drach.”

  “Oh—thank you,” she said, but he had already turned back to his cameras, which he was loading with film.

  The bus stopped and the driver sprang from his seat, a round jovial little man with sparkling eyes. “But now we are here,” he said happily, “and you will see—the Caves of the Dragon! Explored and opened up by the French, as you will discover from many of the names given the points of interest. The Majorcan people are quite bored by their caves—after all, they have them! It is you outsiders who discover them to be—beautiful! Unique! Entirely enchanting! Where nothing, nothing at all, is what it appears to be! Shall we go, ladies and gentlemen?”

  Melissa felt a quickening of interest. Perhaps here, perhaps today, she would find the capacity to enjoy again. Marc West stepped back to let her precede him, and as they moved out into the sunshine, she realized that he had subtly maneuvered her into joining him and the Carmer boy. Did he so badly need reassurance after her rude behavior last night? she wondered. Knowing that she disliked him, as she did, was he now going to insist upon charming her into liking him? It was a dismal thought. They moved in a group down pebbled paths toward the caves’ entrance. Melissa said to Peter with a smile, “Excited?”

  He grinned. “Oh, well—you know.” He was looking at the postcards and souvenirs inside the tent at the entrance. “Hey, Marc, there are things for sale!”

  “Buy anything you’d like,” said Marc West but he remained, perversely, beside Melissa. “Did your phone call from Paris come through all right?” he inquired suspiciously.

  “Yes, it did, thank you,” she lied. In turn she was tempted to ask if he thought they traveled with a good group today—her edginess felt very near to hostility. Instead she moved a little away from him.

  Their guide was summoning them. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Enough postcards have been sold to you now by my relatives so that we may begin the tour. Shall we go?”

  On this small joke they entered the cave by means of a ramp that took them down into the underground. As they left daylight behind to wind their way into the first well-lighted chamber, their guide began a recitation of facts in a mock-serious voice.

  “The entire cave,” he was saying, “is a grotto of some 2200 yards of total length and divided into four branches, the White Cave, the Black Cave, the Cave of Louis-Salvatore, and the Cave of the French. The incomparable beauty of its formations, the greatness of the Lake of Miramar, and the number and clearness of the other lakes, make the Drach one of the most beautiful caves in Europe.” More casually he added, “Now we go through a grove of palm trees, eh? You Americans can pretend you are in your state of Florida.”

  They had entered a world of surrealistic shapes and fantasies, where illusion had become reality. Yet it was not frightening: Melissa felt like Gretel walking into her gingerbread cottage. The palm trees were perfectly formed, but formed entirely of rock, and now they were passing among giant mushrooms. In a corner along one wall stood a waterfall, frozen in the act of descent, and overhead the ceiling dripped with stalactitic lace. It was a madness so harlequinesque that it struck an answering cloud in Melissa and filled her with laughter. For nothing here was as it appeared to be; everything was almost but not quite real, so that it had the effect of making her feel irrepressibly sane.

  “Presently,” continued the guide, “you will see our first lake, the water of which is slightly salt. The water in the lake undergoes a slight fall or rise of a few inches according to the level of the Mediterranean, its winds, its storms. You may observe the sediment marking the highest level of the waters. This is, as you see, a marine grotto but of an exceptional extension.”

  They moved through exquisitely wrought pillars to pass into a broad amphitheater, and there was the lake—except that it couldn’t possibly be a lake, thought Melissa, it could not be anything but a mirror for it was utterly still and mute, like glass. She paused to watch it disbelievingly. It did not move; nothing moved. In its transparent depths the reflection of the cave’s ceiling eerily mingled with the rocks and reefs lying on the floor of the cave, and their mingling created dizzying and baffling illusions of space and content. She lifted her eyes. Across the still lake a scarlet light illuminated a cove, and in the twilight just beyond the light Melissa saw the silhouette of a devil frenziedly dancing on a rock. In another corner a great, sinister finger pointed to the sky. She shivered at the stillness of so much vitality frozen into rock. Realizing that she was becoming a straggler she began to walk quickly toward the others.

  Marc West was kneeling on the path ahead of her taking another photograph—his flashbulbs had already grown tiresome—and as she drew near him he stood up slowly, his bulk blocking the narrow path. “Mrs. Aubrey—”

  She glanced ahead. The others were just disappearing in the next chamber. She said, “The tour—”

  “Mrs. Aubrey, I’d like to speak to you a minute.”

  “I’m certainly here,” she reminded him pointedly but he did not take the hint and move. They were now quite alone in the amphitheater, on the path that rimmed the lake. It was curious how empty, how devoid of human life these stone walls felt suddenly. “What is it?” she asked impatiently. “We’re losing the others.”

  “I seem to have been very clumsy,” he said. “There wasn’t any telephone call for you from Paris last night. You didn’t even expect one, did you?”

  Jarred, Melissa said breathlessly, “I don’t see what business it can possibly be of yours, Mr. West,” and then, aware that she was alone with this man who was blocking her path she added quickly, “Please. Surely we can talk about this as we walk along, Mr. West. We’re losing the tour!”

  “You’re frightened,” he said. “I don’t understand why I’ve frightened you.”

  “How can it matter?” she demanded fiercely.

  He said heavily, “It matters because you knew Stearns.”

  The name came as a blow. She recoiled, shocked beyond comprehension at hearing Stearns’ name spoken here, and by this man. Stearns again. It was unbelievable.

  “Here,” he said, slipping a card from his camera case. “I’m a United States agent, Central Intelligence.”

  Her gaze obediently fell to the card but once she had seen it she was only the more wary and shaken. He could not know that only a few days earlier a similar card had been dropped in front of her beside a tray of croissants in a dining alcove in Paris. Her artist’s eye had retained the impression of what she had seen then, and
now it noted the differences in this card of spacing, print, and composition—the card was the crudest of forgeries. “Who are you?” she gasped, one hand going to her throat. He only pushed the card close to her face, blinding her with it until it became an instrument of menace.

  “Didn’t you?” he demanded. “Didn’t you know Stearns?”

  “No,” she whispered, and the silence following her whisper was more deafening than the panic screaming inside of her. Now there was menace even in the rocks surrounding her for they were dead, inert, centuries old, and oppressive. The lake beyond Marc West remained still and dead, lacking current or movement, and out beyond the lights the devil still danced, suspended forever in his doomed and mirthless pose. In this silent world of distortion where rocks masqueraded as trees and devils and flowers, it struck her that Marc West was the most grotesque masquerade of all. She had believed him harmless, even a bore, and now she was sick with horror at what he must be.

  He was saying, “You traveled on the same ship with him, you sat at the same table with him, you can’t have forgotten him. Stearns, a man with blue eyes—”

  “No,” she cried desperately, and, absurdly, there slipped into her mind a phrase from the Bible, The cock shall not crow til thou hast denied me thrice. She bit her lip. “There was a man by that name aboard ship, but I didn’t know him. Now please—”

  He moved closer as if he must forcibly wring from her something more. His eyes frightened her and she edged back among the rocks until she met a wall of stone and there was no further retreat for her. “You fool,” he said furiously, “don’t you understand this is no tea party you’re mixed up with? Don’t you know what the stakes are? This is government business. You must have more to tell me, admit it—you did know him!”

  His hands came up to seize her shoulders—was he going to shake her or to strangle her? She screamed, and ducking her head she slipped under his lifted arms. He spun and grabbed her, catching one shoulder. With a little sob she fell to her hands and knees, loosening his hold until she had escaped his hands. Then she was on her feet and running—back and away, in the direction in which the tour had begun. Behind her Marc West shouted, “Trust me! You must trust me!”

  Up steps and down she raced, frantic now to get out, to reach the entrance of the caves. For a little while she heard Marc West behind her, heard him swear once as he slipped on a stair. She only continued her blind rush to the sunlight, longing for release from this hideous fairyland of rocks under the earth.

  The sunlight nearly blinded her. She stopped and put a hand to her eyes and the man at the postcard stand said, “But madam, you must go back, this is not the exit!” She gave him a blank look and began to run again. It was like emerging from a dark nightmare. Her toes churned up the pebbled path as she raced toward the plaza. There was a taxi there.

  Running across the square she reached the driver to say breathlessly, “Please—can you take me to Palma?”

  He looked at her drowsily. “Palma! But this is—” He shrugged helplessly, making a sign of long miles.

  She tore open the door of his car and sat down. “I’ll pay you,” she said. “Whatever it comes to, what does it matter? I can pay you.” She brought out travelers’ checks and flashed them in his face. “Palma,” she said flatly. “Palma, please.”

  He shrugged and turned back to his wheel. “Okay, Palma,” he said, and with a grinding of gears they moved off.

  14

  She huddled in the rear seat of the taxi, unspeakably drained and tired. It seemed to her that she had been running for a long, long time, that she had been running forever, until the disease had spread to her spirit. “That man was frightening, terrible,” she thought, but the fact that she had escaped him seemed of small importance at the moment. She thought wearily, “It’s like a hall of mirrors, and into every mirror I look I find Stearns.”

  She realized that she must get out of Majorca—at once, even today. A plane for Paris left Palma each afternoon at four, and she could see no reason why today’s flight would not have room for one more person. It was the incoming flights that were difficult, because of the Conference.

  The Conference…she shivered. “It’s I they’re looking for,” and then, “Did Stearns really expect me to deliver his book?”

  The thought had slipped unbidden into her mind and she recoiled violently from it. “Preposterous—madness,” she thought, and then, tentatively, “He had no right…” and then, “Dear God, I can’t.”

  Beyond the glass window the sky was a glorious shade of blue and when they met another car on the narrow winding road there was a joyous exchange of horns blowing and voices shouting, but Melissa remained walled off from the world, literally shielded behind glass. Her panic had left her but as it receded it only uncovered the deeper undercurrent of defeat with which she had begun her day. Now Marc West had badly frightened her, adding exhaustion.

  She knew that some decision was necessary now, that she must no longer drift with the tide of her rigidly defined itinerary, yet any course that she might take implied decision and action, and she felt capable of neither. The thought of remaining in Majorca for two more days was as intolerable as the thought of leaving it today. She could not decide whether to go or to stay. She could only whisper over and over again, “I didn’t ask for this, why has it happened to me? Why?”

  It seemed to her at this moment that she had reached the end, and that in reaching the end she had, paradoxically, returned to the beginning, for she was once again incapacitated by conflict. She had never escaped her doom, she thought bitterly, her odyssey had been only one more blind and compulsive flight from reality. She could not change. She had never been anything but a mechanical toy that Dr. Szym had wound up and directed upon its way, but now the momentum had spent itself and the winding mechanism was running down. She had succeeded neither in finding herself nor in losing herself. All her past hopes appeared to her now as totally meaningless and monstrously pathetic.

  “One rose,” Adam had said. “It will stay fresh until you too leave Copenhagen…”

  “It’s an extremely valuable package,” Stearns had said. “Quite small. It’s a book.”

  They were entering the environs of Palma now, and suddenly Melissa could no longer bear her thoughts, she must walk the rest of the way. It was barely noon, there was still time to think. To the driver she said, “Stop at that bank over there, will you?” She held up the travelers’ checks as explanation and he pulled in beside the curb. She went in and cashed several checks and returned to stuff pesetas into the man’s fist. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. Gracias.”

  He drove away smiling. Across the street she saw a familiar man in a black suit step out of a car and she thought wearily, “Oh damn, now it begins again.” They would have telephoned from the caves, of course, and the others would have begun watching the roads into Palma. She felt stifled and confined, and she began to walk very quickly, aware of her wasted day, aware of the eleven carefully planned hours which she had destroyed by flight. She realized that her edginess had been deepened by the long ride back to Palma but it was more than a succession of small defeats that troubled her.

  “I’m a coward,” she thought, naming it. “But I’ve always been a coward and now I’m tired to death of pretending I’m not. All I want is to go home.”

  Yet even the thought of home did not unburden her. The weight of restlessness persisted, the feeling of something undone, something lost that prevented rest. She felt that if only she could discover what it was then she might discover joy again, and be at peace with herself. Marc West had frightened her but she knew that he was not the source of her defeat: this same feeling had been a companion when she climbed aboard the tour bus that morning.

  “Silly, childish Melissa,” she whispered, her anger returning. “You’re in flight again—but damn it, from whom are you running?”

  Sh
e increased her pace, as if by walking very quickly she might gain the illusion of going somewhere—her whole being demanded haste to dissipate the rising tide of anger at herself. She walked up and down streets aimlessly until, tiring, she resorted to dreary wandering. She saw nothing and heard nothing and this too was waste. Deep inside of her the dialogue continued: “You left the ship in a state of trauma, Melissa, and then you left Copenhagen numb with fear at your first plane flight, and in Paris you were so terrified that you did nothing but creep about…is this living?”

  “That’s unfair,” retorted her other self. “For see how brave you’ve been to come this far—and alone, too—and it is absolutely no fault of yours, Melissa. This trip would have been delightful if that horrid man Stearns had never intruded.”

  “Oh come now, you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Are you really that heroic? Blame it on Stearns if you must, but on the subject of Stearns why should he bother you? You’ve done a very successful job of forgetting him, haven’t you?”

  She began to walk faster, to escape both her thoughts and the confusion of conflict. She reminded herself that in only a matter of hours she could be on the plane leaving Majorca for Paris. Once on that plane, knowing that she was on her way home, she could relax at last. Oh the beautiful safety of home, she thought longingly; once she reached it she would never, never—

  She stopped walking. The rest was implied: once at home she would never leave it again…

  “The circle of safety and ease,” she thought despairingly. She had not, after all, been able to take it; she could not break through to life. This then was the defeat she walked with now, the failure of an odyssey that she had hoped might change not only her life but herself.