‘I said: “Yes, of course, Sally, it’s my cupboard. Leave this to me, please.” She went out, and when I unlocked the cupboard and found what was in it, I felt quite sick: it was so horrible. I gave a shriek and Sally came in at once – she must have been waiting outside – and saw what it was. I’ll never forget how she looked at me.’
‘Now, before you go any further, Sapphire,’ I said, ‘you must understand that I’ve not been at your cupboard and know absolutely nothing about the whole business.’
‘Of course you don’t, my love. Whatever anyone may say, this has nothing whatever to do with you.’
‘But what exactly was this horrible find?’
‘It’s there,’ she said, pointing with a gesture of loathing to a sort of china dish-cover with three ugly faces painted on it, lying on a table in a far corner of the room.
‘What, that cover?’
‘No: the thing underneath it. I put the Three Ugly Faces over it as a prophylactic, until I could speak to you about it. Lift the cover, have a look, then put it back at once, please.’
I went over to the table, and gingerly lifted the cover by its snake handle. Then I burst out laughing. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ I said. ‘What an anti-climax! How on earth did Erica manage to plant this on you?’
‘Erica? The brutch woman?’
‘Erica Yvonne Turner, about whom I’ve told you quite enough already. It’s her nasty little cigarette case.’
I picked it up carelessly and opened it. It was the one she had been using the night before: dingy white metal with a very stiff clasp and an appliqué design in stamped brass of a leering nude squeezing milk from one of her breasts into an outsize champagne glass. Inside were twelve cigarettes.
‘She must have meant these for me,’ I said. ‘She knows I like Old Golds. Yes, isn’t it an evil-looking object? It made me feel queer too when I saw it first. I can tell you all about it. There was a time when I thought Erica wonderful and used to give her the most expensive presents I could afford: one of them was a chaste gold cigarette case from a London jeweller’s called Cartier’s. I gave it to her at Marseilles, when we were just going off to Algiers. “Thank you, Teddy,” she said. “I can always raise two or three hundred dollars on this heirloom. But it’s not like me, really. You’ve got me all wrong; I’m not an English gentlewoman.” That afternoon she went down to the Basin and bought that horror at a shop in the negro quarter. “Yes, isn’t it deliciously appalling?” she said. “But exactly like me, the real me. The merciless vulgarity is American; the simpering obscenity is French.” She always carried it about after that, just for spite. I never saw the gold case again; she probably gave it to a dead-beat called Emile.’
‘But how and when can she have come into my bedroom and put the case in my cupboard?’
‘I don’t know for sure. My best guess is that she did it when you’d sent yourself to sleep at the end of the Santrepod. Anyhow, don’t take it so personally. The joke’s on me. She offered me a caseful of cigarettes when we last met, and I refused them.’
‘But, my love, you don’t seem to realize what this means!’
‘If you want me to get rid of the case, that’s simple. It doesn’t horrify me in the least; I’ve known it too long for that. Tomorrow I’ll ride down to the sea – no, tomorrow’s the war – very well, early the day after tomorrow, and drop it in. “The sea cleanses all” – didn’t I hear one of you quote that from some poet or other? I don’t suppose the horse will buck, and anyhow you’ll probably give me a charm against that. When I get home you can pour rose-water over my hands, and that will be that.’
‘But you don’t realize in the least what it means. It means that I’m disgraced for ever. By having had that horrible thing locked in my cupboard I forfeit the respect of the entire estate; my only course now is to go off and die.’
‘Nonsense, you didn’t put it there yourself and you dislike it as much as anyone.’
‘No, but my magic failed me. It failed me completely.’
‘If it comes to that, so did Sally’s. She needn’t behave so virtuously. It was her job as much as yours to keep this house free of brutches. Look here, darling, take things easy. It’s absurd to talk about dying, just because a devious-minded slut with whom I used to be in love ages ago has decided to play a schoolgirl trick on you. I’ll break her neck if I see her again, you see if I don’t. She’s the sort that hates to see a discarded lover of hers happily paired with someone else; especially with someone obviously better-looking than herself. Blow your nose, bathe your eyes and promise me that you’ll not talk about going away until I’ve had a chance to settle things with her myself!’
‘Very well, I promise,’ she said meekly. ‘I’m sorry I look so awful. I was past caring. But who is she?’
‘I’ve told you.’
‘You can’t have told me everything, because if she’s just an evil woman of your epoch, how did she get here and how does she perform her magic?’
‘Not being in the know, I can’t explain technicalities of this sort. And if you can’t either – well, then, I suppose all that you can do is to consult your Goddess. She was visiting the village in person just as the Interpreter and I came back from Sanjon.’
‘Edward, don’t blaspheme!’
‘Darling, I’m doing nothing of the sort. She flew up the mill-stream in the form of a crane with her grey legs sticking out behind her, and perched on the Nonsense House roof. Unfortunately a tree was in the way, so I couldn’t see what she did there; but I don’t think she flew off and when we came up she’d gone. The Interpreter got all worked up and…’
But Sapphire had fallen back in a faint. I put her to bed and then knocked up Sally, who came out of her room wide awake and fully dressed.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked coldly.
‘Sapphire’s fainted.’
‘That’s no affair of mine. You brought this trouble on her. It’s your duty to remove it.’
Then I lost my temper. ‘No, Sally, you won’t evade your responsibilities so easily as that. It was you who brought me here, and it was you who threw me into Sapphire’s arms, and it was your job to lay the brutch. She’s your best friend, and this world of yours is supposed to be ruled by principles of perfect love. If you don’t come along at once and put things straight, I’ll compose such a biting satire on you – in English, but none the less effective for that – that your nose will peel and your hair fall out in handfuls. Sapphire’s good –’
She interrupted me: ‘No good woman keeps obscenities in her cupboard.’
‘But she’s the victim of a bad joke.’
‘No good woman is ever victimized.’
‘We’ll soon see about that. And if you don’t go along at once and fetch Sapphire out of her faint I’ll tell everyone that you planted that cigarette case on her yourself.’
She smiled contemptuously, rang for a woman servant and when she appeared gave her brief instructions for treating Sapphire. Then she said ‘Good night’, and strolled back to her room.
I could have strangled her. But instead I quickly wrapped the cigarette case in my handkerchief, and handed it to the servant, not letting her see what it was. ‘When you make Sally’s bed tomorrow morning, please put this under her pillow,’ I said casually. ‘It’s a poetic gift.’
She pocketed it without comment, nodded, fetched restoratives from somewhere downstairs, and then signed to me that I should leave her alone with Sapphire.
When I was admitted again, Sapphire had regained her colour and something of her serene beauty. She was fast asleep and breathing normally.
‘The Nymph will not wake until midday tomorrow,’ said the servant, ‘unless she’s disturbed.’
I thanked her, and she went away with a respectful ‘good night’.
Then I undressed, lay down beside Sapphire and studied her lovely childish face by candlelight. Somehow I felt that she was miscast as a magician; obviously, she had talent and intuition and was absolutely sincere, a
nd had studied hard, but was that enough? Magic demanded duplicity, not simplicity. Sally now… But was I being honest with myself? Was Sapphire’s attraction for me merely physical, despite the mysterious inner compunction that prevented me from wanting her in the ordinary way? We had no jokes, no ‘little language’, no small talk and no experiences or old friends in common, yet when I had come upon her crying in the armchair I had felt absurdly touched… What was that version of the Song of Solomon that the B.N.C. rowing men used to bawl at bump-suppers to the tune of Come, All Ye Little Children?
Why were you born so beautiful?
Where did you get those eyes?
Your nose is straight, your lips are full,
Your teeth would win a prize.
Your belly’s like a heap of wheat,
Your breasts like two young roes.
O come to bed with me, my sweet,
And take off all your clo’es!
How simple love was for Solomon or a rowing blue! But I did not feel like that about Sapphire, and she would not have accepted me if I had: on the ‘contrary, she counted on me as a poet to take wing and soar with her in spirit to a psycho-erotic seventh heaven far above my reach. I was in a thoroughly false position. Now, to make things worse, she was in trouble, in very bad trouble; and, indirectly, on my account. She groaned and muttered something in her sleep, and another rush of tenderness overcame me.
‘Don’t you worry, darling,’ I whispered, ‘I may not be a magician, but I’m damned if I’ll allow anyone to ill-treat you while I’m still about.’
Chapter XII
Battle is Joined
See-a-Bird, Fig-bread, Starfish and I, all mounted, reached the boundary between the two villages as dawn was breaking. I had felt little compunction about leaving Sapphire; apparently all was well until noon, when I would ride home to see how she was.
We found the rival armies marshalled in irregular ranks, already confronting each other. ‘A very fine body of men,’ I found myself saying to Starfish, professionally, ‘and under a good sergeant-major they should make an even better show. Don’t you go in for drill here?’ But that was another of my stupid questions. Village warfare, it turned out, had more in common with the Old English game of Shrove-tide football than with war as I knew it. The fighting men, whose ages ranged from sixteen to sixty, were all well greased and naked except for leather breeches, gauntlets, mocassins and round leather helmets, and armed only with a light quarter-staff padded at one end. Rabnon, who outnumbered Zapmor by about three to two, were stained all over with a crimson and white crisscross; Zapmor were patched irregularly with red ochre and had blackened their faces with burnt cork.
The sun rose above the eastern hills, a trumpet blew, and the priests approached each other solemnly, as at the previous ceremony. Rabnon’s priest, holding up a painted bunch of wooden damsons, declaimed: ‘Brother, this is our war-token. With the Goddess’s aid, we shall carry it over your village green.’
The Zapmor priest replied in antiphony: ‘With the Goddess’s aid, we shall send it back whence it came.’
‘The war-token is a symbol of the conflict,’ Fig-bread explained. ‘Rabnon intends to carry it by force or subterfuge across the boundary into Zapmor territory. You remember our own totem-pole with the wide-mouthed godling at its base, and the similar one on the Rabnon green? Every village has its godling, and reveres him as the personal genius of the place. The war will end when the godling of one side or the other has been compelled to swallow the war-token. It’s one of the many rules in our code of war that the token must always be kept uncovered and above ground; then there’s another which obliges a man, once his quarter-staff is wrested from him, to stay out of action until his comrades succeed in recapturing it, or permanently if it’s broken; and another is that a captain may fight only a captain. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’
Besides ourselves, ten other magicians had turned up from near-by houses: six men and four women. When Fig-bread introduced me to them, they asked with a show of interest ‘How do you like New Crete?’
‘It defies criticism,’ I answered politely; this had also been my stock answer to the question ‘How do you like our New Germany?’ when in 1937 Antonia and I stayed with friends at Freiburg.
Then followed anxious enquiries about Sapphire and Sally: why had they not turned up? ‘Oh, Sapphire? She’s asleep and Sally’s at her bedside,’ said Fig-bread, who was doing all the talking. ‘It’s nothing of consequence – nothing at all. If the Goddess pleases, they’ll both be here this afternoon.’
But I could see by their manner that rumours of the trouble at home had already reached them.
There was something rather queer about Fig-bread this morning. I looked at him more closely and noticed an unusual lightness of gesture, a quickening of speech, a flashing of his usually sombre eyes. Was he drugged, I wondered. He had been chattering without pause all the way, mostly about the speed and beauty of famous horses of the past, with an honourable mention of his own glossy steed. Something must have happened to him, or perhaps was about to happen… Was he going to volunteer for the fighting, as two other young magicians had already decided to do, one on each side? Or did his behaviour merely reflect his nervous solicitude for Sally? He reminded me strongly of someone – but who was it? Not a physical resemblance, but the identical manner… ‘Legs’ Doughty-Wyllie, of course, on the night before our attack on Monte Cassino – ‘Legs’, a regular soldier, the driest and most taciturn of our company-commanders, talking breezy nonsense about the superiority of the Large Black pig to all other breeds in the English countryside. Queer, that nobody else seemed to be aware of the change in Fig-bread.
The bugles sounded the Advance and battle was joined. Zapmor made a determined rush to secure the token but Rabnon kept tossing it from hand to hand until Goose-flesh, their fastest runner, caught hold of it and raced for a wood just inside the Zapmor border. A Zapmor outpost was on guard there but Gooseflesh swerved, slipped past and was soon lost among the trees.
The Zapmor captain sent fast runners to the wood. They fanned out and surrounded it, but could not be certain whether Gooseflesh was still inside or whether the distant shouts from a look-out on a tree meant that he had gone away and was making for a wood deeper in Zapmor territory. Scouts streamed in pursuit and Gooseflesh was eventually caught and disarmed as he emerged from the second wood. However, they did not find the war-token in his possession and were forbidden by the code to question him about it.
A game of bluff and counter-bluff now ensued. Zapmor, pretending to have found the token, raised an excited halloo. Rabnon, who had it all the time – because what Gooseflesh had taken into the wood was not the token, but a bunch of roses – pretended to be deceived and crowded after the shouting enemy. A Zapmor patrol then made a detour and carefully searched the first wood until they found the decoy roses. Mocking laughter greeted them from the top of a tree where a Rabnon scout was posted.
A heavy quarter-staff fight was in progress inside the second wood. Starfish and I galloped over and it was a sight worth watching: the fighters used their staffs as blunt spears for thrusting, as clubs for striking, as poles for jumping or for tripping up their opponents. They were incredibly dexterous in its use; the clash of staff against staff was incessant, varied by shouts, laughter, war cries and the occasional dull boom of a well-aimed blow on a leather helmet. Rabnon were outnumbered in this skirmish and soon had to withdraw, leaving ten men disarmed. When reinforcements came up, the fight developed into an attempt to rescue the captured staffs before they were taken off to Zapmor, but several more were lost in the attempt.
Zapmor were the stronger and better-disciplined fighters, but Rabnon still kept possession of the token. They now made several feints at carrying it across the border and Zapmor did not catch sight of it until about eight o’clock, when it had become the centre of a brisk battle fought up and down a stream, only half a mile from Zapmor village. Rabnon decided to fight it out; but by a clever concent
ration of his reserves on a hill dominating the stream on the Rabnon side, the Zapmor captain succeeded shortly afterwards in launching a heavy attack on the enemy centre, which he broke. Zapmor seized the token and carried it a mile or so over the border, where they ran up against Rabnon’s general reserve and were fought to a standstill. At this point Starfish was hastily summoned to separate two fighters, both disarmed, who seemed intent on strangling each other. The way he went about this was simple and effective: he seized the lobes of their ears and said: ‘In Nimuë’s Name, break away!’ They disengaged at once, choking and laughing.
By ten o’clock bitter fighting had brought Zapmor within half a mile of Rabnon village. Nearly fifty of the enemy had been disarmed and their staffs taken back to the shrine for safe-keeping; this brought the rival sides to something like equal strength.
From now on Zapmor showed little tactical finesse. They formed a sort of Macedonian phalanx, with the token dangling from a quarter-staff in the middle, and forced their way forward yard by yard across a broad meadow. But the ground was soggy and Rabnon put up a furious resistance. By eleven o’clock they had gained only a quarter of a mile; but soon after Rabnon broke once more and by noon the war-token had been carried within sight of their own totem-pole. Then a trumpet blew the Cease Fire and both armies lay down panting, while their women folk hurried up dispensing kisses, advice, massage, plasters, food and drink. A Zapmor man had broken his collar-bone and another had twisted his ankle; See-a-Bird and Fig-bread took charge of them. These, apart from minor cuts and bruises and one case of slight concussion, were the only casualties so far reported.