The Charioteer

  “You’re sorry?” Laurie looked up. There were still people fairly near; he only looked for a moment.

  “I should have said it was Langham. What if he runs into Jeepers again before he forgets? You’ll be the one to get the backwash.”

  “So I ought to be.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have done it. It was just a rather tarty bit of exhibitionism, really.”

  Laurie looked at the nut in his hand and slid it unseeingly over the worn screw. “You know why you did it. Because I wanted you to.”

  When Ralph spoke again it was so quietly that no one else could have heard at all; but he only said, “Did you?”

  Laurie fixed the nut to an unworn scrap of thread at the bottom, and heard the soft wood crunch faintly. Staring down at it, he said, “Yes.”

  “Laurence, my dear boy, if I may make a suggestion.”

  Laurie knew that in the moments of Mr. Straike’s approach they had been silent; he clung to this certainty, and quite soon was able to look around.

  Later, while he was perambulating with sausage rolls, it occurred to him to wonder why Mr. Straike called him Laurence with such determination, when he must long have known that no one else did so. He realized that in Mr. Straike’s considered opinion Laurie was a sissy name, such as would be wished by a woman on a fatherless boy. He was being rechristened as a bracer. With this thought, he looked around for his mother, and couldn’t find her. She had gone to change into her going-away things.

  For a moment he thought of following her home, so that he could say goodbye to her alone. But if she had wanted it, he thought, she would have told him where she was going; and he oughtn’t to leave the guests for so long. He gave up the idea, with a relief for which these reasons seemed enough. The house he had inherited was waiting for him. It wasn’t fitting any longer that he should encounter her in it.

  At the other side of the hall Ralph had stopped to talk to a girl. She was a Straike guest, a Wren in uniform. Looking at his face, Laurie could tell that he was talking service shop with a conventional garnish of sex which he had found to be expected. They both seemed to be enjoying it. For a moment Laurie felt sharply jealous; but almost at once the feeling became unreal, and he went on watching Ralph with a tolerance in which pleasure was barely concealed. The girl had become a shadowy figure to him, a demonstrator of something in which she had no rights.

  He had a sudden memory, heightened and colored by his present emotions, of how at Alec’s party he had watched Ralph standing in the crowd, and had felt his essential isolation. He had been like a solitary outpost standing fast in a rout. He had courage, the catalyst without which pride and truth cannot combine. Almost all the others had sold out truth for vanity; or, in the more fashionable phrase, they had flaming inferiority complexes. But Ralph had been willing to lay on his pride the burden of self-knowledge, and carry it with his shoulders straight. How has he managed all these years, thought Laurie; where has he gone, who has he talked to? But now voices at the door were telling his mother how charming she looked, and almost at once someone was crying, “The car’s here!”

  The grape-purple feather on the little hat tickled Laurie’s cheek, he smelt the fragile bloom of powder and violets; then she seemed carried away from him as if he had been trying to hold her against a river flowing strongly to sea. Voices laughed and called, the noise of the rapids; the car vanished, swirled away around the bend of the stream.

  He had a feeling, not of grief, but of absolute full stop and aimlessness. He turned, and Ralph was beside him.

  For a moment so short that it was over almost as their eyes met, Ralph looked at him with great tenderness, understanding, and reassurance; then said with cheerful conventionality, “Come over here and talk to Babs Whitely, she says you don’t know each other yet.”

  He steered Laurie over to the girl and plunged him into the thick of a conversation. She was amusing, full of little party tricks which repetition might make tiresome, but which were diverting the first time. They all had some more champagne. They were the only people there under thirty, and all in uniform; unconsciously they reacted to their elders’ reflected image of them, young, brave, and gay. Ralph had taken Babs’s measure quickly; she was unexacting in spite of her façade, with that display of bawdiness on safe occasions often found in women who are not highly sexed, but long to be taken for rakes. As the champagne took effect one could see that she was very good-natured, and liked men, as some people say of dogs, in their place. Laurie reflected that if it hadn’t been for Ralph he would have run away from her.

  When she left them, in a cloud of warm nebulous resolves to meet again, the party was breaking up at the edges, though a hard clinging core remained. As they returned to their duties, Laurie said, in one of those flashes of high illumination which champagne produces, “Ralph, you’re much more briefed up on all this than I am. You’ve been at a wedding before.”

  “Well,” said Ralph calmly, “I’ve been a best man four times in various parts of the world. It’s previous experience they seem to go for, before good references.”

  “How long do people usually go on staying?”

  “It depends. All night in some places.” Laurie gazed at him blankly, then saw the smile under his lashes. There was a brief and rather breathless pause. “Don’t you know when the mainline trains go?” said Ralph lightly. “That should give you a clue.”

  In fact, the London contingent was moving already; the party for the down train would have to go in half an hour. It would be a decisive exodus; the rest who had come by car would hardly outstay it. He told Ralph all this, explaining it carefully. At the end Ralph, who had listened with a kind but searching look, said, “Spuddy. What have you had to eat today?”

  “Oh, breakfast and everything.”

  “Yes, but what did you actually eat?”

  When it was put in this way, Laurie wasn’t sure. Ralph said, “Well, come and eat now, you’re getting tight.”

  He had been feeling a little strange, but light and clear, not like a recognizable phase of drink. As they stood by the deserted buffet Ralph said, “How’s the leg holding out?”

  “Oh, it’s fine.”

  “Tell me if you want to rest and I’ll fix it.”

  “There’s nothing you can’t fix, is there?”

  “It’s time someone started to look after you.”

  “Is it?” He felt subtle and rarefied. He looked up.

  “Spud,” said Ralph softly, “you’re drunk. Be careful.”

  They held one another’s eyes for a moment, not having meant to.

  Perhaps it was only instinct that made Laurie look around, perhaps it was a movement on the edge of his visual field. At the far end of the buffet, one of the decrepit waiters had appeared. Laurie’s gaze travelled out from Ralph’s face to meet a cold, flat, withdrawing eye, glaucous and sunken, the eye of yesterday’s fish rejected by this morning’s buyers, wrinkling on the slab. The face could still be read, as it were, between the lines; faint traces were left in it of a mincing, petulant kind of good looks. The glance, so quickly caught away, lingered on like a smell; it had been a glance of classification. Laurie sensed, without comprehending, the dull application of unspeakable terms of reference; the motiveless calculation proceeding, a broken mechanism jogged on its dump by a passing foot. His eyes, flinching away, met Ralph’s retreating too.

  There was a moment’s uncertain pause; then Laurie moved nearer to Ralph, as he had with Mr. Straike. They had a very small island to defend, he thought, a very isolated position.

  Going back into circulation, he met people’s good intentions as well as he could. A bride was by definition happy, a stepson not; the balance of proper sentiment was, as he had already found out, too much for most of them. Usually they asked him what he was going to do, in the evident hope that he would produce some fortunate prospect, which would relieve them at once of their concern. Just as it seemed that all this would go on forever, the train party moved off, drawing the lesser
bodies cometlike in its tail. He and Ralph were left alone with the gritty wooden hall, the broken meats, the head waiter bowing over the tip, and two spare magnums of champagne. He gave one to the waiters, and they went out and put the other in the car.

  It was a soft, damp evening, smelling of black rotten leaves and wood smoke. As they got out at the gate, the scent of the cedar came to meet them. They had hardly spoken, except when Laurie showed Ralph the way.

  Leaving the lit hall, it had seemed quite dark outside; but now the clouds had opened, and dusk was discovered looking its last from the depths of the sky. You could see the yellow bronze of the lichen on the roof, the iron lace of the porch threaded with the winter thorns of the roses. Along a crack in the blackout a pulse of firelight was beating. The cedar stretched its great dark hands in the gesture of a wizard commanding sleep.

  Ralph said, “So this is your house.”

  “Yes. It’s been mine for four hours, now. … It looks different.”

  Ralph stood looking in silence, and then said quietly, “It couldn’t be different.”

  They went up the path together, not speaking till Ralph said, “You’ll keep this place?”

  “If I can.”

  “You must. It goes with you. It would be bad luck to sell it.”

  Laurie turned, under the black floating planes of the cedar. “Do you believe in luck?”

  “I’m a sailor,” Ralph said.

  Laurie knew he must have slept, because the fire was dying. Once or twice they had dozed before, but not for long; they had opened their eyes at the dry fall of the settling embers, and thrown into the last flames a handful of fir cones, or some of the sawn spruce trimmings from the stack. Now, under a delicate husk of ash, one drowsy red eye was left which only the dark made visible. He lay for a while sleepily staring into it. It was growing cold, but he was warm enough; and it seemed that if he didn’t move, time would stop also and nothing else need ever exist but this. But sleep ebbed away from him, as little to be commanded as the tide, and he felt how the bright fire, burning so long in a closed room, had drunk up the air. He rolled softly off the edge of the mattress onto the hearth rug, got up, and opened the blackout of the nearest window. Swinging the casement back, he tasted the quick air of the night that moves toward daybreak, piercingly cold and sweet. Everything was drowned in that remote, secret, and solitary moonlight which, rising late on a world already empty, will not set but be extinguished by the dawn. The moon would linger, a pale spent wafer, in the blue morning sky.

  To Laurie’s eyes, sensitized by almost perfect darkness, the room behind him seemed now to be only in twilight, patched with white shafts almost as clear as day. In one of these Ralph was lying face upward, his fair hair falling back from his forehead, his arm relaxed and empty. He looked marmoreally calm, as if he had died with his mind at rest.

  Stealthily the cold silent night slid around Laurie its noose of solitude. But it was only he who was alone. Ralph lay quiet with the image he had created, the beloved and desired, for whom nothing was good enough, of whom nothing was demanded but to trust and receive.

  It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted. But Laurie was unhappy with this thought and pushed it away, for Ralph had been very kind to him. He looked at the upturned face and saw how in sleep it did not sag, but held its strength in a kind of innocent pride. He had asked for nothing, except to give everything. He had made no claims. He had offered all he had, as simply as a cigarette or a drink, for a palliative of present pain. He had been single-hearted; and he slept in peace. It was only Laurie who was awake.

  He hadn’t been asked to take any responsibility. He need not accept the knowledge that he had moved to this with instinctive purpose, as animals move toward water over miles of bush. It seemed to him now that he had exploited even the loss of his mother to get, without taking the blame for it, what he must long have been desiring. If his wishes had not been fulfilled with such experienced intuition, he need never, perhaps, have been certain what they were. Now he knew, and must go on knowing.

  But that was only the part that concerned himself.

  His hunger for compensation, once indulged, had driven him to the insistent egoism of an unwanted child demanding reassurance. Not satisfied with the sufficient evidence of his senses, he had longed to prove that he wasn’t receiving only kindness; he needed the affirmation of power. At some stage of a broken midnight conversation, he had said, “I’ve often had a feeling that there’s nowhere I really belong.” He had hardly known himself what he wanted; but Ralph had said, without a moment’s hesitation, “You belong with me. As long as we’re both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else’s. That’s a promise.” His voice had been free of emotion, almost businesslike. He might have been speaking to his lawyer about his will.

  For a moment, it had sobered Laurie into self-knowledge; conquest is intoxicating, but a gift makes you think. Ralph had been concerned to notice him thinking, so early in the night, with the empty room upstairs. It hadn’t taken Ralph long to put a stop to that. He had considerable skill and experience, and his heart was in it.

  Now he slept in the deep peace of valor and sacrifice; and Laurie, only half understanding the reproaches of his own nature, thought gropingly: I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me too; and no one can do that.

  Facing at last, in the lunar stillness, the thought he had been so long in flight from, he knew that Andrew wouldn’t have tried to do it. Andrew was the only one who hadn’t believed that one could be rescued from all one’s troubles by being taken out of oneself. He had a certain natural instinct for the hard logic of love.

  Outside, in the bleaching lye of the moonlight, washed of their distracting colors, the shapes of things burned in archetypal truth. Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable, and the good so implacably the enemy of the best.

  He felt that his body had grown bitterly cold, and wondered how he had ignored its protests for so long. Returning by the track of the moonlight, he lay down again. Ralph had turned on his side, his closed eyes still smoothed by sleep. Turned by the light to the color of some pale palladian metal, the fair hair, which Laurie had seen for so long only in order and discipline, lay tumbled like a boy’s. A secret thrill of triumph, none the less strong for being mixed with gentler things, drew Laurie irresistibly; he reached out stealthily and touched it. When he moved away, Ralph’s eyes had opened. They were smiling, and with fear Laurie saw in how deep a happiness, too silent and too deep, eating like rust the core of his defenses.

  From some great distance, thin and archaic and perilous, the first cock-crow sounded.

  13

  IN THE MORNING, BEFORE they left, they packed Laurie’s room together.

  It had been Ralph who had wakened in time, alert and resourceful, and while Laurie was still dizzy with sleep had stage-managed the house to look as if he had slept upstairs. He had straightened the living room and removed the champagne glasses and the rest of the debris, had made tea and waked Laurie with it and asked him how soon he was expecting the woman to come and clean. Now they were packing the things from the cupboard; or, rather, Ralph had organized by rapid stages a system under which he packed, while Laurie only sorted things and gave directions. The cupboard was emptying, the trunk nearly full. Ralph broke off what he was saying in a convulsive yawn; in sudden catlike relaxation he lay back on the carpet where he had been sitting, stretched, folded his arms behind his head, and looked up at Laurie, smiling.

  “You’ve done all the work,” Laurie said.

  Ralph made a little movement of the head as if to shake it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, and went on looking at Laurie under his lashes, a long contented reminiscent look, not demanding an answer.

  Because he had brought no spare wh
ite shirt he was working in an old flannel one of Laurie’s, with the neck open and sleeves rolled. Laurie had got into mufti too, partly for the sake of the few hours’ comfort and partly from vanity. He was surprised to discover how much he felt the difference. The fact was that their service conditioning had kept the rank-badges on their uniforms somewhere under the surface of their consciousness; it had echoed the old difference of age which, significant in the teens, can become almost meaningless in the twenties. Reflecting on this, Laurie supposed it was because that was what both of them had really wanted.

  Lying there relaxed and dishevelled, with his cloudy unguarded smile, Ralph seemed to him suddenly for the first time as young as himself. Through the open shirt showed a spearhead of tan which, more than a year after he had last worn tropical whites, was still burned into his fair skin. Laurie thought again that he was built like the hero of a boy’s adventure story: strong-looking, but not with the set look of a man’s strength; the hollows over the collar-bones and in the pit of the throat had still the softened edges of youth. One could imagine him, Laurie thought, stripped to the waist in all the classic situations, fishing in lagoons or pinioned bravely defiant to a tree. He longed to give him something, to help him with something, to be depended on for a moment. Just then, without moving, Ralph said, “Are you thinking about me?”

  “Yes,” said Laurie with affection. “I was thinking you look like Jack in The Coral Island. There was a picture of him sticking an oar in a shark’s mouth.”

  Ralph appeared to wake up. “He’d be taking a chance if it was a fair-sized shark. It would probably bite it straight through. The teeth work like a double saw; I’ve seen a man’s leg taken off above the knee, snap, like that.”

  As his mind had moved back to the memory his face had changed; he looked not like the boy in the frontispiece, but like a competent ship’s officer describing an unpleasant fatality, no more exotic than a street accident, which has put him in mind of a certain harbor, of this man or that. Laurie felt young and amateurish again. His own spell of action had been so brief, before the tide of retreat swept back his unit to the beach and the ships, that now, as if he had had some control over these events, he felt he had set out to prove himself, only to come to grief and be ignominiously rescued. Ralph was saying, “… but the deep-water channel at Mombasa’s the worst, they breed around there.”