Laughing and crying in one wild breath. Oh, the happiness was rapture – no living breast could hold it. Singing, her heart swelled and swelled. Nothing in life or death could match this moment’s ecstasy.
She knew at last, as with the revelation of all time, why she was here. It was for him whom all her life she had been seeking. And now the garden was complete. No longer need she dread her loneliness; no longer need she creep away despairing of her childish folly. He was here, beyond the edge of pain, freed from the fetters of illusion. And all her life, forecasted, had lead her to this meeting.
His face, unconscious of her face, stirred pity through her joy. She must declare herself to him, make answering gladness leap into his unseeing eyes. Longing, she whispered his name. He did not hear. Again she spoke his name, more loudly, and made to run towards him. And then, in one swift instant, the new-born rapture of her soul was slain. Upon her lips the smile died coldly. She could not understand. She could not move. She pressed forward, but her feet were prisoned, her body bound. She struggled. Fear and hope were mixed inextricably. Straining she fought to move, torn now by the anguish of defeat. And then, with a little sobbing cry, she woke.
Her eyes, glazed by terror and despair, met the bright perplexity of the new day. She gasped. She was not in the garden but here – held by the staid reality of her bedroom. Hardly breathing, she lay rigid, still dazed by the nightmare-ending to her dream. And then she shivered. So near, so very near, it might have been within the sound of this same booming surf! Yet now so far away! A long sigh came from her. She was bewildered, crushed by the bitterness of unfulfilment.
Rosita, entering with the morning tray, found her with her cheek pressed against her arm; as she pulled the curtain briskly, she declared:
‘See now. It is very much fine today. And, as I have explain, madama have plenty sun.’
Mary stared at the maid in silence, thinking still: So near, so very near, it might have been within the sound of the same booming surf. Suddenly, driven by an unknown hope, she said:
‘Rosita!’ – her voice was queerly secret and remote – ‘Is there a garden near; an old, old place where swans come sometimes, about sunset?’
Rosita paused, round-eyed. Then deferentially she laughed, nodding her head as though admiring a most superior wit.
‘Please, no, madama. Maybe Rosita queer ’nough but she never know nothing ’bout that.’
‘You are sure – quite sure?’
‘Please God, yes, madama.’ Her laughter swelled. ‘ Plenty gardens, oh, please God, plenty. But not like that. Twenty years now I live here and all that time I never see not one swan.’
Mary made no reply. Only half her mind was conscious of Rosita’s answer; the other half was far away, detached, ringing with mysterious premonition.
She got up and slipped on a dressing-gown. As Rosita had said, the day was lovely. But already it was very warm; at least she felt it warm; and her head was curiously dizzy. As her eyes drifted towards the blue sea beneath she thought absently how cool and how refreshing it would be to bathe. Yes, she must bathe. Her costume, holding still some grains of sand from the Playa de los Canteros, evoked a poignant recollection. Yet the recollection did not linger. It passed, a fleeting pang, across the strange perplexity of her mind. She took towels and went down the broad, stone steps past the lily bed towards the water’s edge.
The beach was quite deserted, the sea touched merely by a creamy flicker of wave. She swam lightly, feeling the water thin and unsubstantial as an azure ether. All her body was fluent now and vaguely severed from reality. Though she scarcely noticed, her left arm was stiff and on her wrist a tiny reddish patch had risen. It was a mosquito bite. Three days ago, crossing the mole at Las Palmas, she had been bitten by an infected insect. ‘What is to happen will happen.’ She had said that. And, ‘Not chance but destiny which turns our lives.’ And now, the victim of her own prophecy, a dreadful turn of destiny confronted her.
She had been infected with yellow fever.
This strange lightness of her body, the strange clouding of her mind were but the symptoms of that fever’s onset.
She came out of the water, her ears singing. She dried herself, put on her robe, and started back through the grounds of the hotel. For some minutes she wandered about, her air vaguely distraught, that humming still within her ears. Suddenly, at a turn of the path, she came upon an old man upon his knees weeding a bed of purple lupines. He wore a wide straw hat upon his head, and, in his long dried ears, thin rings of gold. She stared at the old man’s wrinkled, sun-scorched neck. He went on weeding calmly, patiently, but at last he half turned, gave her a slanting, timid smile, murmured a salutation.
She answered him. She could not smile, but inside she was laughing queerly at herself. Oh, how queer, how foolish she was! Always had been – always would be! It was a joke, of course, a dreadful joke. But she couldn’t help herself. She must ask the old peon her question. He would laugh at her to be sure, just as Rosita had done. But what did that matter? She was laughing at herself in any case, laughing deep down in the secret places of her throbbing heart.
But when she spoke he did not laugh. He got upon his feet, searched her face gravely. He was silent so long she repeated her words.
‘Assuredly, señora, I understand,’ he said hesitatingly. ‘Perhaps I would know that place.’
The fact that he did not disown her question brought her a sudden inner trembling. Wide-eyed she stared at him.
‘A long time ago,’ he went on, ‘I have worked across the island for the family of the de Luego. Oh, yes, señora. Then the Estancia was great, oh, very great.’ He fingered his hat-rim, stumbling to express himself. ‘And the armas of that family – it is a swan, señora – a flying swan.’
A sort of vertigo came over her, she shaded her eyes. Surely it was the sunlight that was blinding her.
‘It is upon the gates – the big, iron gates beside the yellow lodge?’
He reflected, then said:
‘Yes, indeed, señora. And upon the fountain in the patio.’
But Mary interrupted with a little cry.
‘The fountain is dry, and little green lizards run about upon the rim. Outside the porch there is a bed of freesias. Then below the drive there are orange trees, hundreds and hundreds of them.’
He smiled gravely, creasing his tawny eyes.
‘But yes, señora. It is exactly so. You have been there, it is clear. A La Casa de los Cisnes.’
La Casa de los Cisnes! She repeated the name as if to let it sink into her, as though fearful of forgetting. Then she whispered:
‘Is it far – far from here?’
He rocked his head from side to side.
‘No, no, señora. It is not far. And an easy way. First to Santa Cruz señora, then to Laguna where anyone will know the old Estancia. Oh, but it is easy. One day upon the little barca which leaves the bay at noon each day of life. Thereafter one little drive. It is nothing.’
The words ran together through her head, resounding, clashing, shivering with dazzling brilliancy. She had a sort of divine friendliness towards the old man. She heard herself thank him. Her own voice – of course – yet apart from her. She was no longer conscious of her surroundings but away in the splendour of that other garden.
She knew exactly what she must do; and the knowledge filled her with a marvellous delight. She was calm – excited yet assured; only a tiny part of her felt bewildered and afraid.
Dimly she was aware of herself returning to the hotel. She went to her room, washed her flushed face, brushed her hair, and carefully put on the dress she had worn at Las Palmas. Her eyes held a high brightness as she looked at herself in the glass. She took some money, thought for a moment, wrote a few lines to Elissa upon a sheet of paper, then placed this deliberately upon her dressing-table.
She was ready – at last. As in a trance, she slipped out of her room. All eager and on tiptoe. No one must hear her. No one must see her go. About her was th
at queer secret intensity. As she descended the stairs and gained the porch she paused, taken again by that intolerable nostalgia. Casa de los Cisnes, she thought again. All her body trembled. I’m going she thought, at last I’m going. And lifting up her head, with distant eyes she set out upon her journey.
Chapter Nineteen
The evening dew had begun to lie upon the broader cactus leaves as he walked towards the house. His shoulders were hunched forward, his head lowered. All that day he had been working in Hermosa. It had been a bad day, an unprofitable day, an utterly exhausting day for him – breathing the sickly air of pestilence and the fume of burning fomites, dealing with ignorance, incompetence, and dirt. Troops were in the village, he had found the Spanish commandant suspicious of his assistance. Both insolent and suspicious: ‘ We did not ask the señor! –’ To crown it all he could feel that the worst of the epidemic was over. Like a fool, he had arrived too late. It was a galling thought. But he hadn’t been put off. The whole day he had worked like a nigger. He had done his level best. And now, jaded in mind and body, he came round and up the drive.
Then, as he crossed the patio, he raised his head and saw her. Instantly he stopped, like a man stricken mortally. His face went dead white; he pressed his hand across his eyes.
‘It’s the heat,’ he thought painfully. ‘ It must pass.’ But when he withdrew his hand she was still there. An unbelievable emotion surged over him, so unexpected and so exquisite he could only stammer:
‘Mary,’ and again, ‘Mary’. It was the only word his lips could shape. She was here. The light spanning the shimmering courtyard shone upon her face, irradiating it beyond beauty. Her eyes looked towards his eyes. Her figure swam towards him, slender as a young tree, lovely as a strain of music. And within his soul something went leaping and leaping – oh, joyfully! – like a flame.
Now she was beside him.
‘Why did you come here?’ And the voice was unrecognisable as his. Her face, too, was pale; but her eyes, still fixed upon his eyes, smiled towards him.
‘I’m glad,’ she whispered. ‘So terribly glad I’ve found you.’
There was silence. Something suffocating rose into his throat.
‘I thought I should never get here,’ she whispered again. ‘That I should never see you any more.’ Her body leaned a little towards him. She seemed weary, like one who has reached a long day’s end.
‘Mary,’ he cried out, ‘I can’t understand. Why are you here?’
‘It is all right,’ she answered dreamily. ‘Now that I am with you it is all right. And here it is like being home.’
Between them the air vibrated. Yet the heavy brightness of her eyes made him afraid. They were shining, but the light was more upon the edge of darkness than ever he had seen before.
‘You are tired,’ he said in a choking voice. ‘You must have something – something to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry. But I am thirsty. Yes, I’m very thirsty.’
He tore his gaze away from her. With averted head he said:
‘Come, then, and I’ll get you some milk.’
As he entered the house the blood pounding in his temples seemed to reverberate in hollow echoes which confused all thought. He went into the refectory. No one was about: it was already well beyond the hour of dinner; he saw from the table that the marquesa had already made her meal. With an unsteady hand he poured out a glass of milk. When he returned Mary was in the hall.
‘Thank you.’ She drank, looking at him over the rim of the glass. Then she sighed. ‘It is good. I had a headache. But that is gone now I think.’
He took the empty tumbler carefully. Again his hand trembled – lest he might touch her fingers.
‘You must rest. Really you must rest. You look dead tired.’
She shook her head – carefully – as if afraid she might bring back that splitting pain.
‘No. I’m not tired now. I feel better. I feel all happy and light somehow – like air. And I want to go into the garden again.’
He tried to force a smile but no smile came to his dry lips.
‘It’s rather late, isn’t it, to think of that?’ Once more, despite himself, he spoke her name. And she repeated it in that distant tone, saying:
‘It is lovely to hear you call me that. It reaches away down deep and far, far back.’ Impulsively she pressed her hands together and exclaimed: ‘Let’s go outside. That is where the freesias are – hundreds of them – cool and beautiful. And there is the orange grove. I want to feel I’m truly there. Oh, don’t you see I’m happy and excited. It’s so wonderful to know it’s real at last, that we are here together, that I don’t have to wake up alone and sad.’
Her words, spoken with a dreamy earnestness, alarmed him; he wished at once to protest and to obey. As he gazed into the smiling darkness of her eyes, within his mind a warning sounded. Again he was afraid. But the tenderness of her mouth dissolved alike his fear, his faint resistance. He could no longer think. He wanted only to be near her. He followed her through the silent hall.
Outside the portico, the shallow steps, creviced with their scarlet lichen, held her motionless for a moment. Gazing to the west, standing close to him, she drew a long, deep breath in which seemed mingled sadness and delight. There, upon the lava peaks, the sun, a bubble of fire, had burst and splashed the sky with wild, empurpled flame. Cupped by the vaulted heaven the blazing tongues sank downwards and greenish lights appeared, translucent, quivering upwards into the pale yet darkening canopy. Moments passed and then she sighed.
‘When you stand near to me like this I feel the sunset throbbing in my heart.’
He did not answer and again the silence linked them. The words he might have uttered were gross beside the singing sweetness of that silence. Slowly before their eyes the day languished as with love, swooning towards the arms of the dusk.
Then she stirred. With eyes upturned and unveiled she smiled at him, began to walk towards the orange grove. The freesias, outsoaring upon the pathway, brushed gently against her skirt; stooping, she trailed her fingers among their draped whiteness, soft and caressing, caressing as a sea.
‘I’ve been cheated of this before,’ she murmured. ‘Always when I went to clasp the freesias there was nothing. All vanished and cold.’
Suddenly, overflowing the barriers of reason, a haunting illusion grew. It swelled and swelled. There came to him quite vividly an intuition – mad yet splendid. All his faculties resisted. But in vain. He was lost – and went plunging downwards, downwards through space and time. In a low voice he said:
‘This is the place you told me of? You are sure?’
‘Yes,’ she answered with perfect naturalness, ‘I’m sure! That is why I feel that I am truly home. Everything the same. The house, the courtyard, the funny twisted tree, the orange grove. Everything the same. And my freesias, my lovely, lovely freesias.’ She broke off, a poignant sweetness in her tone. Then with a little gasp she added: ‘And you. I know at last, you see. The dream is nothing, the garden nothing, without you. For we have been here before. Oh, linked by something more than dreams. I know it to be so.’
Her voice was faintly strained as though she willed desperately that he should understand. And again, at her words, dimly, as with recollection through the thick texture of reality, something rose and turned within his soul. It was madness: a mad and shapeless myth. But here on this volcanic isle, erupted from the rim of sea back through primal aeons, the facts of life were myths and every myth a towering actuality. Suddenly, as a star might gleam athwart a shadowed world, the meaning of their meeting grew clear to him and it was as if life had suddenly begun. He could not explain, he could not fully understand. He could only believe.
He drew nearer to her. The beauty of heaven and earth was sublimated in her eyes and flowed towards him in a burning stream. He loved her. It could not be denied. They stood now in the orchard of the orange trees. Darker grew the dusk, and, like a slow-swung thurible, silver and alight, the moon sailed lambent
into the sky, touching the trees with radiance. Beneath one tree she paused and raised her hand into the fragile branches.
‘Look,’ she whispered. ‘Is it not lovely and strange?’
The tree, laden with heavy, ripened fruit was burdened, too, with blossom and with bud on which the moon made lovely gleamings. Blossoms and fruit; innocence and knowledge; a twofold dignity which she mysteriously possessed.
He thrust up his hand through the drooping foliage and clasped a shining orange. It lay within his fingers, cool and smooth as a virgin breast. He did not pluck it. Nor had she plucked the fruit but merely a tiny sprig of blossom which now distilled a fragrance from its calyces against her cheek.
Suffused by trembling tenderness he looked at her. The thin line of her bosom outlined by her upraised arm offered itself innocently to him and he longed to clasp it as he had clasped the fruit.
‘Mary,’ he said; and again her name sounded so exquisite upon his lips that tears came into his eyes. ‘I have never known anything like this, nor anything so beautiful as you. I can’t understand. But I know that all my life has been nothing up till now.’