The Lagoon Page 6

  He made for the southern beach.

  Although unused to woods, till he reached this island he had the instinct for direction, a brain compass more mysterious than the little trembling fish that had directed the movements of the wheel on board the Portsoy. Making due south, amidst the gloom of the trees, he reached the beach where the sun was blazing on the sands and the birds flying and calling over the lagoon. The reef lay far out, a continuous line, unlike the reefs to the north, continuous but for a single break through which the last of the ebb was flowing out oilily, mirroring a palm-tree that stood there like the warden of the lagoon. The sound of the surf was low, the wind had died away, and as Maru stood watching and listening, peace came to his distracted soul.

  He felt safe here. Even when Talia had been with him the woods had always seemed to him peopled with lurking things, unused as he was to trees in great masses; and now released from them and touched again by the warmth of the sun he felt safe. It seemed to him that the ghost could not come here. The gulls said it to him and the flashing water, and as he lay down on the sands, the surf on the reef said it to him. It was too far away for the ghost to come. It seemed to him that he had travelled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme youth, losing everything on the way but a weariness greater than time could hold or thought take recognition of.

  Then he fell asleep and he slept whilst the sun went down into the west and the flood swept into the lagoon and the stars broke out above. That tremendous sleep unstirred by the vaguest dream lasted till the dawn was full.

  Then he sat up, renewed as though God had remade him in mind and body.

  A gull was strutting on the sands by the water’s edge, its long shadow strutting after it, and the shadow of the gull flew straight as a javelin into the renewed mind of Maru. Talia was not dead. He had not seen her ghost. She had come to life and had been walking by the sea wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had seen walking in the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now. Ghosts do not cast shadows.

  And instantly his mind, made reasonable by rest and sleep, revisualized the picture that had terrified his mind distraught by grief. That was a real form, what folly could have made him doubt it? Talia was alive—alive, warm, and waiting for him on the northern beach, and seized him with a great joy that made him shout aloud as he sprang to his feet yet with a pain at his heart like the pain of a rankling spearwound as he broke through the trees shouting as he ran: ‘Talia! Talia! Talia!’

  He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns. He heard the sounds of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the northern sands and lagoon and sea.

  He stood and looked.

  Nothing.

  He ran to the place where he had laid her beneath the trees, there was still faintly visible the slight depression made by her body, and close by, strangely and clearly cut, the imprint of a little foot.

  Nothing else.

  He stood and called and called, and no answer came but the wood echo and the sound of the morning wind; then he ran to the sea edge. Then he knew.

  The sand was trodden up and on the sand, clear cut and fresh, lay the mark left by a beached canoe and the marks left by the feet of the men who had beached her and floated her again.

  They had come—perhaps her own people—came, maybe, yesterday whilst he was hiding from his fears, debating with his Tabu—came, and found her, and taken her away.

  He plunged into the lagoon and, swimming like an otter and helped by the out-going tide, reached the reef. Scrambling on to the rough coral, bleeding from cuts but feeling nothing of his wounds, he stood with wrinkled eyes facing the sea blaze and with the land-breeze blowing past him out beyond the thundering foam of the reef to the blue and heaving sea.

  Away to the north, like a brown wing-tip, showed the sail of a canoe. He watched it. Tossed by the lilt of the swell it seemed beckoning to him. Now it vanished in the sea dazzle, now reappeared, dwindling to a point, to vanish at last like a dream of the sea, gone, never to be recaptured.

  ‘And Maru?’ I asked of Lygon, ‘Did he ever—’

  ‘Never,’ said Lygon. ‘The islands of the sea are many. Wait.’ He struck a gong that stood close to his chair, struck it three times, and the sounds passing into the night mixed with the voices of the canoe men returning from fishing on the reef.

  Then a servant came on to the verandah, an old, old man, half-bent like a withered tree.

  ‘Maru,’ said Lygon, ‘you can take away these glasses—but one moment, Maru, tell this gentleman your story.’

  ‘The islands of the sea are many,’ said Maru, like a child repeating its lesson. He paused for a moment as though trying to remember some more, then he passed out of the lamplight with the glasses.

  ‘A year ago he remembered the whole story,’ said Lygon.

  But for me the whole story lay in those words, that voice, those trembling hands that seemed still searching for what the eyes could see no more.

  MARY ANSELL

  Martin Armstrong

  Mary Brakefield, wife of Samuel Brakefield, landlord of the Golden Lion, Netherhinton, made her way along the accustomed hedge-bordered road that led to the foot of the downs. From the road end the coarse grass of the downs rose in a single abrupt slope to the flat summit, which was enclosed by a great rampart rising nobly from its broad ditch.

  The face of this ancient earthwork was so steep that he who climbed it could do so only on his knees, pulling himself up with his hands by the strong tufted grass that clothed it like a shaggy fur. Every Thursday Mary Brakefield took the same walk, and always alone. She was a quiet, kindly, respectable woman, not otherwise eccentric, and her husband and the neighbours, though they themselves never took a walk except when some definite object required, had long since grown so accustomed to this weekly stroll of hers that they had ceased to regard it as strange, even when the weather was so stormy that it was incredible that anyone should walk out, much less climb the bare downs, for mere pleasure.

  On winter evenings, when, looking from their cottage windows into a stormy twilight, the villagers saw a lonely figure struggling against the wind and rain down the long village street, they would say without surprise: ‘It’ll only be Mrs Brakefield coming back from her walk.’

  She was a spare, neat woman of forty, though strangers put her age down at over fifty. Her face was pale and bony; the eyes, too, were pale and weary and red-rimmed; and the corners of her mouth had a bitter downward droop that on rare occasions vanished suddenly and surprisingly into a charming, wistful smile.

  It was the beginning of October, and the hedges between which she walked had kindled from the dusty green of summer into long lines of scarlet and yellow flame that danced and flickered against the sagging grey sky in the breeze that flowed through them. All her life she had known that road, and the downs that rose at the end of it, and, beyond them, the wide plains of the sea into which the downs dropped—a sheer fall of eight hundred feet—in scooped precipices of white or rosy chalk.

  For she was a native of Netherhinton and had never been further east of it than Bournemouth, further west than Sidcnouth, or further north than Dorchester. She came of poor parents. Her father had been a farm labourer and her mother the daughter of a labourer, and it had been thought a great piece of luck for her to marry the landlord of the Golden Lion.

  She walked on at a brisk pace, looking neither to right not left nor even ahead of her: she walked, indeed, not at all as if walking for the mere sake of it, but as one on an errand, and when she reached the end of the road she began at once, without a pause or a glance about her, to climb the down by a sheep track that wavered steeply up it.

  Under the stress of the climb her pace became gradually slower and slower; halfway up she paused, breathless, and turned to survey with unseeing eyes the variegated fields below her and, beyond them, the village thatches crouching under the yellowing elms and the gaunt grey fragment of Evesdon Castle, which Cro
mwell had blown up.

  As soon as she had breath enough, she continued her climb, and then, when she was almost at the top and had reached the earthwork, vanished along the long line of the ditch and in half a minute reappeared, clambering on her hands and knees up the steep rampart. Soon she had crawled to the top, and stood for a moment silhouetted against the sky, a minute vertical object breaking the long horizontal lines of down and earthworks. Then again she disappeared.

  The grassy area inside the rampart sloped slightly upwards to the sheer edge, so that from where she stood she saw nothing of the sea, but only the grey, laden sky. But she did not want to see the sea, for she knew that today it would be—not as it had been eighteen years ago today, blue and lustrous as an iris-petal and, near the shore, paler and so clear that the ribs of chalky rock at the bottom were as visible as if seen through it flawless, pale blue crystal—but leaden-grey, desolate, chilling to the heart.

  So she did not go towards the cliff-edge, but followed the base of the rampart until it bent inwards at right-angles and crossed the hilltop. There she stopped, and in the bend, as if in the corner of a roofless room, sat down. For a while she sat motionless, self-absorbed; then leaned back against the slope of the turf wall, turned on her left side, and closed her eyes.

  And soon she knew that he was there, the Jim Ansell of eighteen years ago. She felt no human touch, no warmth, and his voice had no sound, but he was present to her and she could speak to him, not with her lips, not aloud—for there was no need to speak aloud—but in her heart, with a speech much more real, much more close, than the cold, audible speech she exchanged with her husband and neighbours and the tourists that came to the inn.

  And in that unworldly, spiritual speech he answered her. With her eyes and all her senses closed and his visible absence shut out and forgotten, she lay in his arms, felt her body wrapped, safe and sound, in his body, the warmth of his face against hers, the smell, like heather and seaweed, of his khaki jacket. She was alive once more, escaped from the death of her present existence into the warm life of her early days. That life was so real to her that whenever she reached their meeting-place and lay back and closed her eyes, her actual self ceased to exist, and she had never once thought it strange that a tired faded woman of forty should lie in the arms of this dark-haired young man of twenty-two, nor had she ever told herself that their child, if it had lived, would by now have been a boy only five years younger than his father, or that, just as there was another Mary, the faded Mary of today, so there was another Jim Ansell, withered and eyeless, lying in some unknown cemetery in France.

  Such thoughts never came to her, for he and she met in a timeless and unchanging world which belonged to them alone. This angle in the earthwork was especially theirs, but they met in other places too, for she carried their secret world within her and could drop back into it whenever opportunity occurred. When she was alone at the inn, working in the kitchen or sitting, darning, in the little private parlour, she would often leave her patient body to get on with its work and would step across the threshold; and at night, the moment the candle had been blown out and she had laid down in bed with Sam, she would be gone, abandoning to her husband the tired, obedient Mary Brakefield like a corpse laid out, hurrying back to her real life and Jim.

  But sometimes, when she was very tired, she had not the strength to escape. The outer world—Sam Brakefield, the inn, the neighbours—was too strong for her. She was too feeble, by herself, to support and preserve the world of her desires. If only there had been someone else who knew of it and recognized its reality, who would speak of Jim, who would, perhaps, call her, not Mrs Brakefield, but Mrs Ansell, what a help and what a comfort it would be.

  But there was no one: her secret was unshared. That name, Mary Ansell, which she had never borne in real life, was the name by which she thought of herself. She had actually written it in the few books which Jim’s mother had left her at her death fourteen years ago. It was safe to do so, for Mary Ansell was the name of Jim’s mother, and if Sam had ever noticed it he would not have been surprised.

  Mrs Ansell had left her not only the books, but also Jim’s scroll, neatly framed—the scroll that had been sent to her after he had been killed. But Sam, as far as Mary knew, had never looked into the books. He had shown no surprise when they and the scroll had been brought to his wife, for he had known that she and Mrs Ansell were old friends. When she had opened the parcel he had lifted up the scroll and examined it. ‘It’ll look nice on the wall,’ he had said, and had then asked: ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Her son,’ Mary had answered, and she had put away the books in the hanging bookcase in the parlour and hung up the scroll there. Sam never sat in that room. In the summer, on those days when so many visitors called that there was no more space in the public room, some of them were served there, but for nine months in the year Mary had it to herself, and she would sit there often to sew and darn.

  Seated there near the books he must often have read, and with his scroll before her eyes, she felt closer to him than anywhere else but in the earthwork. She often glanced at his name at the bottom of the scroll—Lance-corporal James Ansell—but she seldom read what went before it, for the last sentence—‘Let those that come after see to it that his name be not forgotten’—spoke too painfully of his absence, made of him in name only, its name threatened with oblivion.

  It was eighteen years ago, eighteen years this very clay, that they had met for the last time. On the last day of his leave from France they had climbed the downs together, scrambled up the earthwork, and walked to the edge of the cliff. He had laughed when she had clutched at his sleeve to stop him going too near the brink. The whole immense depth of air below them and the huge expanse of sea sparkled with sunshine. Out near the horizon a ship—an English battleship—drew a long, gauzy trail of smoke after it. Jim pointed to the horizon. ‘You’d never think, would you,’ he said, ‘that thousands of chaps were in the thick of it just over there?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t think of it. I don’t want to think of it

  ‘Till I’m there?’

  She nodded, and they turned away from the cliff and walked across to the angle of the rampart. There they lay down, his arms round her. ‘Then you’ll wait for me?’ he whispered half-jokingly. ‘Only a few months, till my next leave. Then we’ll get married.’

  She pressed her cheek against his. ‘I don’t have to wait,’ she said, her heart suddenly full. ‘I’m yours already.’

  For a while he did not speak. Then he said: ‘Yes, you’re mine Mary, and I’m Yours. Only we’ve got to wait till my next leave to be married.’

  She shook her head. ‘We’re married already.’

  Again he paused, as if thinking. Then he said: ‘But…but suppose I was to stop one?’

  ‘Stop one?’

  ‘Stop a shell or a bullet. Get knocked out.’

  She put her hand over his mouth. ‘Don’t. Don’t say such things.’

  ‘But it might happen,’ he said, when she had freed his mouth.

  ‘That means we mustn’t wait.’

  ‘But think, Mary, what might happen; to you, I mean.’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘That’s wily I say we mustn’t wait.’

  It was already dark when they walked home together, and parted outside the gate of her home.

  A week later, before she had received any letter from him, she was passing his mother’s cottage and Mrs Ansell called to her from the door. Mary went to her, and she led her into the little front room, paused to shut the door, then turned on the girl a face woefully transformed. ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘Jim’s gone.’

  ‘Gone.’ It was as if lightning had struck her. She felt it leap from her head to her heels.

  ‘Killed,’ said Mrs Ansell.

  When Mary knew she was to have a child she told her mother—weeping, as she spoke, not for shame, but for Jim. Her mother laid her arm round her shoulder. She spoke no word of rebuke, and, though she s
poke no word of comfort either, Mary knew that she understood and sympathized. ‘I shall have to tell your father,’ was all she said.

  ‘Will he be angry?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old woman, ‘but I’ll manage him. You keep out of his way and say nothing.’

  Mary never knew of the encounter between her mother and father, nor that her father had wished to turn her out of doors and had resigned himself only when her mother had told him, that, if Mary went, she would go with her. She knew only that, after that, her father never spoke to her, never took the least notice of her.

  Two months later her mother told her that she was to go to an aunt in Devonshire and stay there till after her baby was born. What was to happen after that she did not ask, but she was resolved that, come what might, she would never be separated from the child. But the child, a little boy, was stillborn, and three months after his birth, Mary returned to her home.

  It seemed to her that her life was finished. In her absence a new landlord had come to the Golden Lion. He was a bachelor, and her mother now worked at the inn, scrubbing floor and washing-up mugs and glasses. Soon after her return, her mother came home with the news that Mr Brakefield wanted a handy girl to help in the bar and that she had mentioned Mary to him. A few days later Mary began her work at the inn.

  At the end of a year, to her amazement and horror, he asked her to marry him. Ashen-faced and with a trembling lip she refused, but he waved aside her refusal. ‘You think it over, my dear,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hurry you. Think it over and see what your mother says.’

  Her mother, when Mary spoke of it, pressed her to accept Brakefield. ‘You must think of the future, my dearie,’ she said. ‘When your father and I are gone you’ll have no home. You’ll have to toil and moil, perhaps for a hard master or mistress. Mr Brakefield’s honest and he’s kind. He’ll be a good husband to you, Mary. Take him. It’ll be a comfort to me to know you’re well provided for.’