The Dark Labyrinth

Campion

Campion and Virginia Dale were pushed bodily into something that was not unlike the flue of an old French chimney; the girl had fainted, and Campion had put his arms round her and managed to stagger a few feet into the gap, while the stones and earth poured into the opening behind them. Their faces were brown with dust, he noticed, as he climbed slowly up what seemed to be a flight of irregularly-hewn stairs towards a broad band of daylight. The girl was heavier than she looked; he was carrying her over his shoulders after the manner approved by firemen in rescues from fourth-floor windows. Campion was spared the anxiety of Miss Dombey — spared everything except thoughts of merciful deliverance, for almost from the beginning he could see the encouraging whiteness of daylight at the other end of the hold into which they had been blown. He climbed slowly, pausing to place Virginia gently on her feet and shake her; he did not think she had been hurt, as she had been standing behind him, and might, at the worst, have been flicked by the passing splinters of stone, one of which had lodged in his eye and temporarily blinded him; at least it felt as if it had blinded him. How magnificent the daylight looked, streaming softly into the entry above them. “Virginia,” he called, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Virginia.” The girl seemed inclined to come round. He blew into her nostrils and saw her eyelids flutter. “Are you all right?” he said, but she subsided once more into what seemed to be more like a troubled sleep than a faint. Campion dragged her a few feet higher and paused. To his left there was a hole in the rock, a panel as large as a small bathroom mirror. It pierced several feet of solid rock and gave him a dim aquarium-like view of a cavern, in which, to his surprise, he saw the diminishing figures of Mr. and Mrs. Truman; saw them, briefly, for perhaps a second — for all the world as if he were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. He shouted hoarsely, putting his mouth to the opening, but there was no response. The grey-green subaqueous light shone steadily in a little group of stones. They had been (unless it had been an optical illusion) perhaps fifty yards away. His eyes were beginning to trouble him again; he could feel something stuck to the cornea when he closed it. Virginia stirred and moaned. Pausing from time to time to shake her, Campion mounted the last twenty paces, and collapsed with her upon the ledge, half-blind with sunlight. Here they lay for a long moment breathing the welcome scents of sage in the rare mountain air, and listening to the distant drumbeats of the sea. Presently Virginia sat up and looked round her. She was still pale and seemed about to be sick. Campion peeled off his coat, turning his body as it lay on the ground, to disengage first one arm and then the other. Thank God, he had managed to bring their lunch. “Virginia,” he said, “are you all right?” The girl gave a little cry and pointed to his face.

“Your eye,” she said. “Come here.”

In the cornea there was embedded a small fragment of stone — like the tip of a lead pencil. He sat patiently while she removed it between finger and thumb. It was not painful. He could still see out of it. Campion thanked her and lay back once more.

“What a merciful deliverance,” he said, with unusual piety. He lit a cigarette, deeply inhaling the smoke, and letting it gush from his nostrils; his hand still shook from the exertion and the fear of the last few moments. He thought of the others, trapped down there, and as he did so noticed that the girl was crying. Perhaps the same thought had visited her; Campion hated women to cry. He lay back and closed his eyes. In a little while they would have such food as they should find in their little cartons, and then slowly climb down to Cefalû to bring the first news of the disaster — if indeed the absence of the guide for so long a time had not already given the alarm. He settled himself more comfortably on the hard rock, feeling the wind flutter his hair, and ruffle the leaves of his small sketchbook which protruded from the pocket of the discarded coat. Idly now he took out the little packet of pastel crayons; they were all smashed up in their carton ridges. “Virginia,” he said, “do you feel better?”

She tossed her hair back out of her eyes, and sniffed. “Yes,” she said stonily. She had been thinking of the tender, the considerate Graecen lying down there smothered in earth and boulders. Who knows what declarations he might not have made if they had had the time; or even if he had been here with her instead of Campion. She dabbed her eyes and moved back until her shoulders were pressed to the wall of the natural stone balcony upon which they found themselves. “We’ll have a spot to eat,” Campion was saying, his voice still squeaky with fatigue, “and then work our way down the cliff to Cefalû, to tell them what has happened.” He did not mention his sudden half-second vision of the Truman couple crossing a rickety gallery of stone; what would have been the point? He could not rescue them. Besides he was relieved to see that the girl had stopped crying at last. “Unpack the food,” he said, anxious to give her something practical with which to occupy her mind, while he himself reconnoitred.

Walking to the edge he found himself looking down upon the broad upturned face of the sea, several hundred feet below. The balcony upon which they stood was simply a narrow cockpit thrust out from the cliff-face over the water. His face grew anxious, and then all of a sudden very pale. The rock stretched away in a clear cleavage of limestone, sheer to the sea; not a foothold or cranny could his eyes pick out as they travelled frantically backwards and forwards over the surface of stone. Campion hoisted himself upon the ridge and tried to climb upwards; he found one foothold and hoisted himself a few feet, only to see that it was hopeless. Smooth and unbroken except by major cleavages the cliff swept up into the sky.

He returned once more and gazed out at the sea, moving from side to side, his whole mind furiously engaged by this new problem. Behind him the girl had removed the battered sandwiches from their wrappings and was calling him to eat. Without speaking, he motioned her to join him and, drawing her down by the shoulders, lay beside her for a long time staring down into the insolent blue of the waters below. She gave a little cry as she understood.

It was perhaps three hundred feet down, he told himself. Could they jump? A kestrel whistled and dived from a ledge just below them, flattening out into a glide before touching the surface of the sea. He could feel the dry island wind playing upon his forehead. Faintly, very faintly from the outer world he could hear the music of trees and the singing of birds. A small ragged strip of coastline was their only prospect. The sea looked deep. Nearer inland it became shallower; he could see the yellow freckles of light moving across the sand bar. If they jumped they would have to clear the fringe of rocks beneath. How far was it? Campion knew he was hopeless at factual calculations of any sort. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the height of the eight-metre board at Villars. An airman had once told him that the resistance of water made it as solid as concrete for anyone attempting to jump into it from above a certain height. What was the height? He could not for the life of him remember. They lay there side by side for a long time, hardly moving. The sea rocked below them, its savage noise coming up in the little lulls of wind from the land. Campion opened his eyes very wide and carefully, elaborately lit another cigarette. His fingers were shaking again. The girl said nothing. They turned back to where she had unwrapped the sandwiches. Campion was thirsty, but they had brought no water with them. Lunch would, in the normal course of events, have been eaten near some fresh-water spring under an olive tree.… He made a grimace and said, “I suppose you’re thirsty too.” Virginia sat down, drawing her legs up under her. Her face was flushed as if she had been running. Campion guessed that tears were not far off. “We will have to jump for it,” he said, and undid the little box of crayons, while he held his sandwich in the other hand. It soothed him to scribble on the smooth rock. They sat for a while in silence, he drawing and she watching him as she ate, slowly and tidily, like a cat. After he had done a series of small men in bowler hats, an eagle, a train, and the Europa, he dusted his fingers and said, with something of the old mordant truculence: “It’s just as well, really. I’m not sure I want to go back.”

The girl put her head on one side and examined the statement of his with an expression of gentle impartiality. “I mean, if one could live how one wanted,” pursued Campion, “and not be at the mercy of a silly world that cares for what is ephemeral and neglects everything that is essential.” His silence was only a grace note. He had begun to sketch a little landscape, a house, some olive trees. “At twenty”, he said softly, “I thought I knew what was wrong. I was a Marxist. A redistribution of property was all that stood between us and heaven. The last few years have been an eye-opener.” At twenty a fumiste, at twenty-one a pointilliste, and twenty-five a Thomiste; at thirty a potential Trappist. Campion scribbled away as he talked partly to himself and partly to Virginia Dale. As he did so much of his life came back to him — without form and order, but with a new marked coherence. The girl he met on the Strada Balbi in Genoa; the broken-down room over the wineshop with its cracked and peeling cherubs on the ceiling, and the red-curtained four-poster bed; a broken mirror and a soap-dish with a lottery ticket lying on it. Is it possible that but for the accident he, campion, might have spent the rest of his life with her between those dirty sheets — entangled in long rich-smelling dark hair? Or Nanteaux, where he had suddenly woken one morning to see the blue Mediterranean gleaming like a stained-glass window, and realized that there was nothing more he wanted to do, nowhere he wanted to go? What had ejected him from these situations if it had not been this restless voracious self with its groundless fears and fantasies about happiness and order? Now perhaps if he should find his way out of this impasse, what could he devise for himself as a way of life that would fulfil the potentiality that he felt about to realize — now experienced only as a gaping hole in his moral outlook. “Stay like that,” he called out. The sun was striking sideways on her face. He began with his nervous deft fingers to draw her.

“I suppose”, said Virginia, “you are a Jew?”

This surprised Campion. It was a charge he had never been able to bring himself to admit. “Why should you say that?” he replied in as off-hand a tone as he could muster.

“No reason,” she said. “I was talking to Richard about you only yesterday. He says you are a great painter.”

“Did he say I was a Jew?” said Campion sharply.

“No. I did. He didn’t think you were.”

Campion put down his pastel and rubbed his fingers on the stone. “And what makes you think I am?” he said.

“I met a lot of Jews in the city,” said the girl. “They all had the same sort of attitude to the world.”

“What attitude?” Campion was getting out of temper with her monotonous delivery.

“That the world is not good enough for them.”

He smiled grimly and picked up his small stub of crayon again. He began to shade in those anaemic but rather gracefully equine features. She sat obediently with her face turned away from him so that the afternoon sun threw into relief her throat and the high cheek-bone.

“Yes,” said Campion, “I am a Jew.” He stubbed out his cigarette and added: “If you really think that Jews have a common psychology.”

Virginia Dale stifled a yawn. “When are we going to jump?” she asked. She seemed to have recovered a great deal of her composure. Campion said rudely: “You can jump whenever you like. I was trying to find out whether I wanted to jump back into the world or not.”

She considered for a long moment. “I suppose you’re afraid,” she said, and added hastily, “I don’t mean of the jump, but of the world. You oughtn’t to be. A great artist should have some control over the world. Not be bowled over by small worries.” Campion listened with fascination to this small Cockney child lecturing him in her flattened Golder’s Green accent; the presumption of her made his hair stand on end; and yet he could find nothing to say in return. He went on drawing with an over-elaborate concentration. It was as he was giving her permission to have a few minutes’ rest and a cigarette that a small bedraggled object emerged from the tunnel behind them, whimpering softly. “Spot,” cried the girl, “however did you get up here?” Miss Dombey’s dog looked as if it had been set on fire, its coat was black with dust. It crawled whining into Virginia’s arms and buried its head in her lap. “It’s trembling all over,” she said, becoming soft and receptive and motherly. Campion watched with fascination the endearments, the petting, the cuddling. English women, he reflected, being given to this kind of generalization, only really yield to their pets — to their dogs. Never would the girl register such melting sympathy in the arms of a man. His thoughts turned with regret to the sanguine and lovely Francesca, with her plump, well-modelled buttocks and fig-like breasts. When she kissed it was as if she were burning to print some indelible message on one’s mouth; her whole being ached in her kisses. They hurt her to give and to receive. Campion sighed and ate a bit of bread, feeling steadier.

The girl, too, was happier with a child-substitute to fuss over; fawning, Spot accepted some food and wagged his tail. He must have believed himself safe from peril at last. Neither of them speculated aloud upon the possible fate of Miss Dombey, yet both wondered whether she were alive or dead.

Once more Campion hung over the edge of their eyrie and stared down upon the sea, trying to measure the distance with his eye. It was hopeless. He tossed a large boulder over and it seemed to take ages to reach the water, settling slowly in the viscous blueness with barely a splash. Suddenly he had an idea.

Turning, he called the dog to him, wheedling it with the promise of food. Then, taking it in his arms he stood up and was about to pitch it over when the girl rushed at him. “What are you doing?” she shouted, and half-dragged him back. Campion disengaged himself from her with fury. “Idiot,” he said. With her scuffling he might easily have been pushed over himself. “Can’t you see we must find out?” She protested indignantly against the use of Spot as a guinea-pig for such an experiment. “Don’t be a fool,” said Campion again, and grabbing the now struggling dog he advanced to the parapet once more. Spot squawked loudly and struggled. “Shut up,” cried Campion, and gave a sharp exclamation as the dog bit him.

Spot pitched out into space, and for a second seemed to hang in the air before he began his slow parcel-like flight towards the sea; Campion lay sucking the wound in his hand and watching. The little dog turned over and over, and finally melted with a small white feathery scar, into the sea’s blueness. For what seemed centuries Campion lay, his eyes fixed on the spot. Presently something rose slowly to the surface, and after lying still for a few moments began to weave slowly towards the shore. Campion shouted.

The girl was sitting where she had originally been, with her back pressed to the wall, examining her fingernails. “He’s all right,” said Campion again, and at his cry she rose and came to his side. Spot was out of sight now round the edge of the headland, but moving under his own steam. Campion lay back and breathed a sigh. “Well,” he said, “that gives one some indication.” Virginia was suddenly elated. She clapped her hands together and said: “What a wonderful chance.” Campion lay still blowing smoke softly into the air above his face and thinking. It was, of course, not certain that a human being weighing twenty times as much as an animal, would escape as lightly.

“What are you thinking?” she said, noticing his preoccupied face.

“There’s only an hour of sunlight to go. I think we should wait until tomorrow morning. Even supposing we get down safely and crawl out on to the land we may find ourselves miles from anywhere, wandering about in the dark with wet clothes.”

“Yes,” she said slowly, as if unconvinced.

They sat together and watched the sun sinking ponderously into the sea. Somehow the very act of sitting there, without speculation and anxiety, quietened and soothed their nerves. Gulls wheeled with anguished cries below them upon the great mauve expanse of water. The wind had crept up to pencil its strange hieroglyphs on the southern half of the bay. Slowly, very slowly the great golden drop touched the horizon, and the blue meniscus of evening ran, a crack of nacreous red, from one end of the sky to the other. They had no light, save the box of matches in Campion’s pocket; but there were plenty of cigarettes. The wind was not blowing directly into their balcony of stone. The night was warm. They settled themselves as comfortably as they could against the stone, he placing his arms round her shoulders. The darkness came on, blue and dense, and the stars put up their high malevolent lights, winking like the eyes of so many needles. “Campion,” she said drowsily, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings just now.” Campion pretended ignorance of any slight, but he knew quite well what she meant. “I mean’ about being a Jew,” she added. Campion smoked on in silence for a while. “I think you are unjust to me,” he said at last, “in assuming that my idiosyncrasies are racial; I do belong to a race — but the race of artists: the Jewish part is what is personal in my nature, but there are other difficulties which belong to my other racial inheritance. As a matter of fact,” he went on with a chuckle, “I am not a Jew at all. I am just one of the others.” He began to talk slowly and without emphasis of what the artist was, what his peculiar needs were, his fears, his ambitions. It was only when he realized that she was asleep that he desisted.

They dozed fitfully that night under his coat, and rose at the first light of dawn. The air was cold and they were both cramped. A heavy dew had settled over everything. They ate the remains of the food left over from their lunch the previous day, and smoked the last two cigarettes left in Campion’s case, waiting for the sun to warm the rock upon which they sat. “So you do want it all,” said Campion at last. “Golder’s Green? The rain? The damp tubes? The last bus?” The girl stopped her ears in mock horror. “Please,” she said. “Don’t spoil it. It isn’t that I want. It’s other things, can’t you see?”

She took out her pocket comb and balancing a strip of mirror in a cranny, made up her face as well as she could, combed out her hair, and smoothed down her eyebrows with her finger. “I’m ready,” she said quietly. Campion stood up with a sigh. They took off all their clothes except their shoes, and made them into one bundle. Then, naked, they stood hand in hand upon the last jutting foothold of the balcony. “When I give the word,” said Campion. His voice had gone flat and calm and without emphasis. She leaned forward, bracing her toes against the stone. “Wait,” she said suddenly and leaned forward to kiss him on the mouth. Campion smiled and called: “One, two …”

The rushing of wind struck the last word from his lips, and he felt himself turning over and over as his body was poured down the ladder of blueness. A red roaring seemed to fill the horizon. Frightened kestrels fell with them from ledges of rock for a few metres and then planed out, whistling their curiosity and terror. The sea turned up its expansive shining surface and waited for them.