The Dark Labyrinth

The Voyage Out

It was some few days before Fearmax emerged from his seclusion; indeed he was not the only one that sunlight persuaded to emerge from the privacy of his cabin. Yet Graecen found the sight of him a little distressing; his nervous habit of pacing the deck, as if he were on the look-out for expected catastrophe; his habit of sitting for long intervals with his head sunk on his breast, of making notes in a leather-bound notebook. His preoccupations seemed to match so little with those of the rest of them that even Miss Dombey was abashed in his presence. He confessed to a slight knowledge of palmistry, and once he took Graecen’s hand, without a word, and studied its lines and curves with great attention. “You have a bad heart,” he said, and Graecen felt the sudden grip of an icy hand upon his throat. Nothing more.

The Trumans, despite their unprepossessing appearance, turned out to be rather a find. They were not only amusing in their way, but self-sufficient and out to enjoy the journey. Truman, they discovered, played and sang comic songs at the piano in the saloon, and enjoyed nothing better than an audience. He had once been a member of a concert party, he said (“a real proper black coon”) and his repertoire was inexhaustible. In particular Baird enjoyed a comic recitation entitled “A Martyr to Chastity”, which he produced whenever Miss Dombey was around. The rawness of the jests usually made her run for cover. Indeed they found that the only way to shake off Miss Dombey was to be seen with the Trumans. She could not bear them. An attempt to interest Mr. Truman in the Second Coming had been a failure.

Fearmax, however, seemed already to have established some sort of link. No sooner did he appear on deck than Mrs. Truman nudged her husband with evident excitement. They converged upon him. Did he remember them? He did not. Once, long ago, he had got in touch with Mr. Truman’s elder sister at Shrewsbury during a séance. The medium passed his hand over his forehead and muttered something about having met so many people; but he seemed flattered. Mrs. Truman had even read a book of his on the astral self.

On the whole the company was not uncongenial, thought Graecen as he lay in his bunk to take the afternoon nap prescribed for him by London’s most fashionable doctors. He had been keeping a diary for the first time in his life and he was propped up by three pillows, his fountain-pen poised over the page on which he was to account for his actions of today. “Account for.” There it was again. That hell-fire note, influenced by Miss Dombey’s preaching no doubt. He ruffled the pages slowly, reading his own large feminine handwriting with slow pleasure.

“Little enough”, he noticed on one page, “have I done to render, as it were, a tidy account of my stewardship on earth, before taking leave of it (the earth). A peculiar sense of emptiness fills me. What am I? What have I been? I can think of little on either score to interest a recording angel. I have been neither good nor bad. The few sins of my grosser nature (Anne, Mrs. Sanguinetti, etc.) would, I am sure, all but cancel out with those few virtues, a quiet life, acts of kindness to friends, etc. I cannot see myself being damned.…”

Dimly, above his head, he could hear the piano in the saloon being strummed in the brisk manner affected by Mr. Truman, while that ineffable voice, half-talking, half-singing, uttered the opening phrases of “A Martyr to Chastity”:

I’m a martyr to Chastity

I’m a victim of laxity

Damned from the cradle I was.

Graecen read on thoughtfully. “I cannot see myself being damned, nor can I see myself being exalted in any way. What, then, is the spiritual fate of the very ordinary person after death?” What indeed? It seemed to him that in the last few weeks all those questions which have baffled the minds of men, had accumulated round him, importuning him for a solution; or, if not a solution, at least some ratification in his own mind as beliefs. The immortality of the soul? The nature of the Trinity? Was progress an illusion? He had simply nothing to say about any of these things. The diary went on: “In some ways I feel very immature, as I do not seem to have any decided opinions about the basic problems of the day. Or is there a discernible attitude to things visible in my poetry?” He shut his eyes and thought about his poetry; all that could be got out of it was a thin Khayamish hedonism, filtered through Georgian influences. “I suppose”, the diary summed up, “that I am rather an unsatisfactory person really.”

Graecen turned back further in the diary and glanced at the period of a week before his decision to resign and set out for Cefalû. Tea, dinner and lunch engagements followed hot upon each other’s heels. There was almost no thought directed upon himself, upon his own inward workings: “Feel rather low,” he saw in one place, “Heart not compensating again.” Further down the page he came upon the note: “If Hogarth were not my oldest friend I wonder whether I could tolerate him for a second? Callous. Yet somehow warming.”

He grimaced impatiently. This was hardly the kind of literary legacy one should leave behind. He had bought such an expensive diary too — twenty-one shillings. He pictured himself writing madly as his life drew to an end; the mantic phrases of some English Rimbaud written on the edge of the abyss. But Rimbaud was only a child. This reminded him of his age; it was some time now since he had worried about getting old — all his energies had been spent in worrying about keeping alive. Mrs. Sanguinetti had said that his hair was getting thin at the back. Graecen stood up and tried to verify this observation in the shaving mirror. It was an impossible task, however, and he gave it up to return to his bunk. He sighed and took up his pen again. He would try to write something simple and honest; he would trust to time to make it moving. A corner of his tongue showed between his lips as he started.

“Today was the first lovely day. We are beating down the coast of Spain.” (As an afterthought he deleted the second verb and replaced it with “sweeping up”.) “Some vague brown cliffs came out of the dawn-haze to greet us; a chapel, a lighthouse; and one small brown man, with a string of onions round his neck who waved a minute arm like an insect in answer to our gestures. The air has suddenly turned warmer and the weather much clearer though the sea is still rough. This morning I noticed the girl I spoke of yesterday as seeming to be ill; I saw her lying in the sun asleep, stretched out in a deck-chair, her body swathed in a rug. The wind was moving her thin fair hair on her forehead. As I passed I noticed that a book lay open on her lap and with my usual bookish curiosity I stooped down over her shoulder to see what it might be. By the strangest of strange coincidences it was Greville’s Modern Poets, and it lay open at the poem of mine called ‘The Winds of Folly’. One may imagine my surprise, pride and pleasure. It is so seldom an unknown writer has the fun of seeing someone read his work. I intended on my second trip round the deck to speak to her and find out what she thought of it and the other poems in the book, but when I returned she had gone below. Never mind. I shall reserve this little conversation for some more propitious moment.”

Graecen lit a cigarette, closed his diary, and lay back more comfortably, smoothing the pillows. It was annoying to be ordered to rest every afternoon when you detested it; it was like the prohibition on smoking. The doctor must have known that he could not live without a cigarette. But then if one, why the other? If he disobeyed about smoking, why should he not drop the afternoon siesta? The weather was warm. He would prefer a stroll on deck. Why not? He got up and put on his coat again, and muttering an objurgation against medical men and their works.

On deck it was pleasant enough; the wind was kicking up a sparkling sea, while to the East loomed the capes and inlets of Spain. Graecen saw with pleasure that the girl in the deck-chair was lying asleep in the same place again today. On her lap, too, was the identical book. He approached as stealthily as a hunter to verify it. Yes, Greville’s Modern Poets. He seated himself on a convenient davit-support and waited until she should wake, studying the soft dark plume of smoke flowing from the funnels and the deep white trench gashed by the progress of the Europa through the sea. He felt light of heart all of a sudden. Miss Dale (he had looked up her name on the passenger list) slept with no sign of motion. She hardly seemed to breathe. The wind troubled her soft hair in which shone threads of gold and points of light. She was pretty in a rather watered-down way; her pale skin and soft features seemed to suggest that she was a convalescent. Graecen watched her sleeping and began to spin idle stories in his mind about her.

She had just left Newnham perhaps, where she had been reading literature. She probably wrote poetry herself. Perhaps she had just done a thesis on him for her D.Litt. She would be amazed to look up and see Graecen bending over her; a poet whose work she so much admired. They would be spark to flint. On Majorca they would go for long walks together in that perfect scenery, and she would ask him to help her with a book on Keats she was going to write. They would not be able to part from each other. He would tell her that he was …(Her anguish at this Keatsian repetition of things gave him great pleasure to imagine). Quixotically, madly, they would marry in Naples and visit Keats’ grave together. Then … Then … It all became a little misty. The great liner had moved off a couple of points. A bell rang. The patch of sun in which they were was overloomed by the great hind funnel; in the shadow it was rather chilly. Graecen was roused from this pleasurable maze of conjecture by the fact that the girl started to cry in her sleep. Tears welled out from the closed lashes and her mouth puckered at the corners. From time to time she gave a small gasp of pain. Of what could she be dreaming? Terrified that he might shame her if he stayed, he tiptoed away and went down the companionway into the saloon, where the Truman couple were playing vingt-et-un with Baird, while Fearmax sat calmly by them and watched. That night Graecen added, in his diary, an account of Miss Dale’s behaviour of the afternoon. He felt interested and sympathetic.

In the end, however, it turned out rather differently. It was Baird who introduced them; and Miss Dale had never been nearer to Newnham than Golder’s Green. Graecen was saddened to hear the flattened accent of London’s poorer suburbs ring in her voice. She was, it is true, a convalescent; but that is the nearest she got to a resemblance with the girl of his imagination.

Virginia Dale was a shorthand typist at the Ministry of Labour. She lived with her aunt at Golder’s Green in a semidetached house. The doctor had ordered her abroad because she showed signs of being tubercular. “A victim of the unconscious intention,” said Campion later, when he heard a recital of her woes. Perhaps this was true. At any rate, it was when Bob, her fiancé, died in an air accident in Greece that Virginia Dale began to lose a hold on the life in which he was to play the part of a deliverer. She could not contemplate going on living with her aunt. She became very ill.

So much was easily told, but what interested Graecen was this: what should such a girl be doing with Greville’s Modern Poets, in which his work was well represented? He could not approach the subject for a couple of days until he managed to see her alone. Then at last, one afternoon, he saw her lying alone in the deck-chair aft, and brought up the subject.

“The other day”, he said, “you were lying there with a book of poems.” (Miss Dale blushed scarlet, as if he had said something indecent.) Graecen went on: “You had it open at a poem which I myself wrote. I was so curious to know whether you read poetry for pleasure, or what you were doing with the book.” Miss Dale licked her lips and smiled.

“I’m trying to get my school cert.,” she said, “in order to get into the post office. You see, in my present work there’s no old-age scheme, no pensions, nothing. In the post office, when you get to a certain age, you get a pension.” She said it with considerable middle-class pride. “I have no money of my own, you see.”

“But, good gracious,” said Graecen, both annoyed that he should be taught for the Oxford Locals, and flattered that he should be taught at all. “Good gracious me.” He often used expressions he had heard his mother use when he was a child. “So they are learning my verse in order to get jobs in the post office,” he told himself angrily. Miss Dale was looking confused.

“I should jolly well hope that a girl like you will get herself sensibly married instead of bothering about the post office,” said Graecen gallantly. To his annoyance, this seemed to dispose her to start crying again. He hated tearful women. She recovered her composure, however, with some effort. Whenever people spoke of marriage it made her remember Bob, after whose death she felt that her good looks, as well as whatever little courage she possessed, had gone for ever. As a matter of fact she remembered reading and re-reading Graecen’s poem with an increasing sense of confusion and annoyance. Perhaps since he had written it.…

“I suppose”, she said, “you wouldn’t care to help me a bit with my Litt. paper? I find the poems in that book so difficult.”

Was there ever an author who was not flattered by a request for an explanation? Perhaps. But Graecen was not he. He enjoyed himself a great deal in reading “The Winds of Folly” to Miss Dale in his best radio voice. He enjoyed even more dismantling it for her, showing the syntactical subtleties that held it together, the interior rhyme, the metrical felicities — in fact everything that made it one of the duller anthology pieces of our time. He was flattered at so attentive and modest a listener, and took Virginia Dale in hand. He not only explained his own work, but he explained also the work of his contemporaries — some of which he did not understand himself. “It will not be my fault”, he thought, “if the damned girl does not get a credit in English composition.”

They passed the coarse brown rock of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean.

The weather became milder, the air softer. The days of blueness began.

At Marseilles Campion came aboard with his rucksack and easel; his arrival was a not unwelcome surprise to Baird, who noticed that he had aged. “Fancy seeing you,” said Campion coming upon him as he was on his way down to the cabin he had wangled with the help of a shipping agent.

“You are the last person I expected to see,” said Baird, and accompanied him down to his cabin to help him unpack. “I wangled it,” said Campion crisply, unfastening his rucksack and pulling out a lot of dirty clothes, a tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush. He proceeded to clean his teeth and explain in little asides how he had managed to get aboard the Europa without troubling the purser or registering in the ordinary way. “I’m only going to Crete,” he said. “By the way, Baird, it will amuse you to know that I am still attached to the War Graves people. Not content with keeping me busy during the war and preventing me having my head blown off, they are keeping me busy in peace. I’ve got to paint a row of graves somewhere in Crete where half a score of idiots were interred after a gallant if unwise operation. Farcical, isn’t it? But I’m painting like a fiend now. If only I didn’t feel so much at the end of everything.” He sat down on the edge of the bunk and lit a cigarette. Then he took off his beret and absently combed his hair. “It’s like getting farther and farther away from the human race — getting lost. Queer feeling.” Baird was interested. Campion whistled a couple of bars of a popular song and looked across at the stack of canvases on stretchers that lay in the corner of the cabin. “It’s a dull world to live in,” he said at last, as if the impetus to frankness had been succeeded by a reticence more worthy of his listener. “What have you been up to?” he said, peering at Baird’s medals. “Campaign medals I see. And the M.C. Well, my dear fellow, I have some campaign medals too. I wore them on the seat of my trousers last Armistice Day and coughed slightly at the Cenotaph during the silence.”

One’s dislike for Campion was always halted, reflected Baird, by the memory of those innocent powerful paintings. Perhaps an artist was not made to be liked, but to be put up with. Or was it possible to be a great spirit on one plane, and to be at odds with the whole canon of accepted human belief, on another? Or rather, perhaps, was not the work part of the life — a sort of propaganda for it in which one could see the miserable limitations of the human mind? He did not like Campion. Did Campion like himself?

“I’m on the edge of something good,” Campion was saying. “Something bigger than I’ve done to date. And it always makes one feel ill at ease and anxious. I’ve felt awful about this trip — a premonition that something would happen.”

He got up abruptly and took his sketch block and a thick copying pencil. “Let’s go up,” he said. “I’ve never seen the town from the sea.”

Graecen was filled with vague alarm at being introduced to Campion. The little man looked so cold and intense, and was so articulate; he radiated a kind of power which put one on the alert. His very glance was critical and divining. One did not feel quite safe. It was as if the small figure had condensed and crystallized its essential experiences of men, enabling it to bring summary judgments to bear upon them. He was mollified, however, by Campion’s description of old Conklin as a moron. The article on Syrinx still rankled. “You probably know the man,” said Campion. “I don’t but I used to keep a file of his criticisms — some of the things in it were just unbelievable. I remember once, for example, he began an article ‘If Dostoievski had lived today he would be classed as un-British as well as unstable. The persistent vein of cruelty in his work makes one fear that he was the kind of man who would shoot at a fox.’” Graecen laughed politely. He was glad that Campion found Conklin so third-rate as a critic. He was flattered when he found that Campion was doing a sketch of him as he sat reading. The nervous small fingers moved in spidery fashion over the paper, deft and yet cautious. The eyes had puckered into slits. Graecen, whose taste in painting and sculpture was far more dependable than his taste in books or people, knew and admired Campion’s work. He, too, found himself wondering why so violently unorthodox a man should produce painting whose innocence and serene power seemed to be the antithesis of his troubled, obscure and rebellious nature.

That night Campion went to bed early, after taking three aspirins. It was always the same. He was upset at leaving Francesca behind. And yet he made a point of breaking off his relations with the woman of the moment with wounding suddenness. Hardly had the telegram arrived from London when he felt as if a cloud which had been obscuring his vision for weeks was removed. He must leave at once. Marseilles had become stale. He must walk out of the old life once again into the new. There were problems to be resolved. Crete would make an admirable theatre of operations. This decision was so easily, so suddenly made that he wondered why it was necessary for the telegram to come at all. Could he not have thought of it himself? No, life itself was binding: to have a woman or a studio was binding: it needed a jolt from outside sometimes. How should he tell Francesca, who had been his mistress for a year now? In order to assist his own decision to become determination, he walked across the cobbles and tramlines of the Rue Pigalle to where the shipping agent had his offices. The Europa would be in that night. It was really a holiday-cruise liner, but it was half empty; for a small consideration he could have a cabin.…

Francesca was busy in the kitchen among a litter of pans. He caught sight of her long coltish figure and beautiful legs as he shut the door and threw his beret on the table. She had, he guessed, spent the morning mending his clothes, about which he had made a row yesterday, and in trying to make him the little sesame cakes he had demanded. He sat down, a small and grim figure, at the table and studied the newspaper, reading with great deliberation the account of a murder. It was as if he had no other object in life than to sit there, his lips moving, as he spelt out the unfamiliar French words and let their meaning soak into his brain. “C’est toi, Campyon?” she called musically from the kitchen. He grunted. No one was ever allowed to call him anything but Campion. He laid down the paper and stared with a grave deliberate abstraction at the painting on the wall. It was one of the Aries paintings that Francesca had liked and had insisted on keeping. A peasant seated at the door of a cabin. A tree. It was a complete statement made with the utmost economy, the utmost concentration. What could Francesca like in it? He half-closed his eyes, the better to test the blue of the wall against the shell-pink, almost nacreous tone of the woman’s dress. Still sitting thus, he cleared his throat, and said in a definite clear voice. “Francesca, je pars ce soir pour l‘Angleterre.” She came in to him, all concern, with a dish in her hands. He continued to look at the painting, focusing all his interest on it. She put down the dish and said: “Mais, Campyon.” He felt the faintest stirrings of compassion, mixed with an overwhelming disgust. Why the devil did one need women; or needing them, why the devil did one create dependencies that one could not satisfy? “I have to go,” he heard himself saying stonily. “Help me pack.” She moved across and taking his face between her hands she turned it towards her, fixing her great troubled eyes upon his two stony blue eyes. “Is it true?” she asked. You could never be sure. Campion was always pretending to leave her for ever whenever the evening meal was late. “My mother is dead,” said Campion — a remark which he felt was almost irresistibly funny; yet his voice preserved its leaden calmness. “I must leave tonight.” For a long moment they stared at one another. Then she bent down and kissed him on the mouth, carefully wiping away the lipstick mark with the corner of her apron. “It is not true,” she said slowly and sadly. “It is not true. You are leaving me.”

It seemed to him that all his life he had been enacting and re-enacting this scene, in dozens of different languages. Francesca was a charming and a beautiful creature, but she was no easier to shake off than had been the girl in Syria, or the girl in Paris. Or was she? Francesca sat down opposite him and put her chin on her elbows. He turned his gaze back to the painting and began to study it with complete absorption. They sat for a long time thus. Then she burst into tears, which she quickly stifled in the folds of her apron. Campion winced. Now it was coming.

“Why?” she said.

“My mother is dead,” he said, suppressing a temptation to giggle.

“Your mother died years ago. You said so.”

“I lied.”

“Is it because the food was late?”

“No.”

“Because I did not mend your sandals?”

“No.”

“Is it because you are tired of me?”

“It is because my mother died,” said Campion with a freezing dignity. He took out the War Office telegram and laid it on the table. The pose of her head with its long throat was beautiful as she bent down to study it. Francesca was incapable of reading English, so there was no fear that she would realize what was in the telegram. He fell to studying her pose with the same concentration as he had studied the picture on the wall. His eye indulged itself with the sweet firm line of the chin and the broad mouth. She had been a wonderful bedfellow. And an excellent girl to have about the house. Why did he not take her with him? It was not because he was tired of Francesca as a person. It was because he was tired of all women — fed up with the whole race of women he told himself. As for Francesca, if he had met her as he was getting off the boat the other end he would in all probability start all over again with her. She was a fine creature. But he just could not be bothered. As he sat on the uncomfortable wicker chair he felt his freedom oozing away second by second. Why could not women realize that all he wanted of them was their friendship — and their cooking? It was reasonable enough. They considered that by making love with you they had the right to tie you down to a small orbit of domestic life. Campion longed suddenly to become a domestic man — a husband, a father, a churchwarden. Anything to break the monotony of this life of change. But not here; not now; not with Francesca.

He got up suddenly and began to pack while she sat with her face red from the heat of the kitchen stove, crying very softly and repeating to herself in a small voice, “J’comprends pas pourquoi, J’comprends pas pourquoi.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Campion in his own mind, as he packed his few belongings. His mind was already busy with the thought of escape, escape across the sea to Crete. He had never been to Crete. He stifled a temptation to whistle. Francesca was not making as much of a scene as he had imagined she would; if his attention wandered she might get really angry. Hence it was wiser not to whistle or sing until he was in the street. And yet, how lovely she was; what a beautiful animal with her tawny skin and brown eyes.

When everything was ready, his easel folded, his rucksack full to bursting point, he went in and stood facing her across the table.

“Francesca,” he said. “Darling.”

She continued her little muffled sobbing. She sat there with a look of preoccupied pain on her features, turned towards the wall. It was as if the hurt that found expression in this muffled whimpering belonged to her alone — had no reference to the Campion that faced her. Pain created its own privacy in her mind, so that she was like a person with a deep toothache, focused on it with such concentration that she could hardly raise her head to answer questions. He laid his small cold hands upon the back of her neck, and softly rubbed the nape, where her dark hair ran down into a little V-shaped peak. This is what one got, he was thinking, for indulging the lust of hand and eye — not to mention the lusts of the mind and body. He wound up his wrist-watch, making little soothing sounds as he did so. “Don’t cry, then,” he said over and over again. “I shall come back next month. You know I shall come back.”

Francesca paid no attention whatsoever to him. She remained sitting on the chair, rocking slightly and whimpering like a spoiled child over a broken toy. Campion took up his beret and dusted it, tightened the thong of his sandal, and hoisted his rucksack on to the table. As he was getting his arms through the straps a sudden gust of compunction passed over him. It was cruel enough to leave her there alone like this; he had, after all, taken her from her family, made her pregnant, detached her from her ordinary life. Her family would never take her back. And she had been a fine mate for him — not like one of those English girls whose reactions to sex were, medically speaking, ear, nose and throat only. Francesca was a nymph compared to so many other women he had loved. He really ought to consider her. But already an obstinate part of his mind had begun insisting that the Europa would dock in half an hour, and his agent friend had warned him not to be late. He stood at last, pack on back, bundles in hand, and looked at the girl, who had not moved from the chair though her tears seemed to have abated. She sat with her back to him, hands in her lap, her shoulders round with dejection. What should he say? Campion cleared his throat and then decided that there was nothing very illuminating to be said. He had promised to come back. It was wonderful how women could tell at a glance when one was lying or not. In his pocket there was some loose money — about a thousand francs: quite a lot, in fact. He put it on the table saying: “There, I have left some money to carry on with till I get back. I shall telegraph you from London, Francesca.” The girl said nothing. She did not move. She seemed to be in a trance. He moved the door with his hand in order that its creaking should wake her, but it did not. “Good-bye then,” he said, with such accents of relief that he was ashamed of the sound of his own voice. “Good-bye.” He was down the long staircase in a flash and to the corner of the street. Going down the cobbled side-streets in the direction of the port he began to whistle, filled with an exaggerated sense of freedom and independence. His eyes drank in the streets, their colour and shape, as if they were the eyes of someone newly born. Under his breath he sang:

Aux bidets noirs

Gros comme des poires

Du Languedoc, du Languedoc

Les couillons d’un cocu cocu cocu

Tirra lirra lirra bim bim bim …