The Outcast and the Rite, page 20
The sitting-room, with bow windows looking on to the street, was almost equally bare. There was a wooden chair with a cushion tied to the seat, comfortable enough, though foreign looking; a table covered with a shiny cloth; a brass lamp; above the fireplace the photograph of a man. Near the window was a wooden stool, and the floor, like that of the bedroom, had no carpet or rug on the clean boards. There were five or six books huddled against each other on the window-sill, into which the Frants had never looked. They were not curious in such ways. But one most unaccountable fact they had observed, that three or four times in the year other belongings would make their appearance, from the depths of the chest as it was supposed. They would follow each other in order, obedient to the canons of some private and unguessable ritual which went forward within their owner’s mind.
First, towards the end of May, a strip of silk, claret- coloured, and embroidered in gold, with flowers of yellow and faded blue, would one day be laid across the table; it was not wide enough to cover the whole surface, but, being rather long, hung down richly at either end with flowers and golden scrolls crowding together to fulfil their pattern. There for about twelve hours it would lie without explanation, and at the end of that time be engulfed, to reappear no more until another year summoned it.
Next, about five or six weeks later, on the dull black of Miss Alquist’s everyday blouse would be displayed an ornament like a large round brooch, of a marvellous blue, with patterns and whorls of silver, and in the centre a bird with an orange breast. It looked soft, as though the bird and the circling pattern had been worked in silk; but Miss Alquist had once vouchsafed the information that it was made of feathers.
After this, no splendours would be set forth for nearly six months, when beneath the photograph, blurred with enlargement beyond its capacity, a little jar would be placed, coloured a clear brilliant green fading to white; in this jar flowers grew in what seemed to be red soil, but which was in fact composed of tiny grains of powdered coral, the flowers themselves were of coral, pink and white, with carved spiky leaves of greenish-brown tortoiseshell. They looked so real, though fantastic, that it was almost shocking to hear them faintly rattling when someone trod heavily in the room overhead.
These were the only treasures on which the public eye might rest. They were sufficiently provocative, and each year as the ritual proceeded there was speculation in the Frants’ kitchen. Miss Alquist disregarded hints and questions. She could be intimidating for all her shabbiness; her very sniff and the lean foreign look of her was enough to disquiet the ordinary questioner, and by degrees her hosts became accustomed to her apparition of the silk, the brooch, and the cold flowers, and accepted them as the years passed almost without comment. They had ceased to hope for any explanation.
All day long, save for a short foraging expedition in the morning, Miss Alquist sat in the wooden chair by the window making ugly little pictures in wool on a coarse stretched canvas. Nearly all these pictures represented ships, not sailing ships, but steamers, and one dirty little steamer in particular with two crooked funnels belching thick smoke, cutting stolidly forward through a grey woollen sea. No picturesque aspects for Miss Alquist. Even on canvas she permitted herself no illusions. The things had movement, though; the clumsy lurch of the broad-beamed tramp, the lift of the stem as she sank in the trough of a wave, the smoke streaming away in a cross wind, it was all recorded and set down in stitches. What became of these pictures when they were finished could never be discovered. Perhaps they descended into the oblivion of the brass-bound chest. Perhaps they were despatched as gifts to distant relatives whose existence was not otherwise recognised; if so, they were not acknowledged, so far as the Frants knew. In the thirteen years of her residence in the street only five letters had come to Miss Alquist, and these were type-written, and presumably to do with money; for she had an account, piteously small, at the local bank, on which she drew, every four weeks, an unvarying sum, and paid at once in cash for every need of her life—house-rent, food, and at rare intervals clothing.
That was her day. But in the evening, earlier or later according to season, she would fold up her work, or replace one of her uninteresting looking books, and go out. Slowly she would climb the street—the Frants’ house was at the northern end, near the High Street—looking about her, seeing for the thousandth time the detail of a door, the colour of a roof in sunlight above another in shadow. And towards the top of the street where the porthole windows were more frequent, she would draw long breaths and sniff noisily. Passers by, or watchers in doorways who observed her, always thought that the steep ascent had distressed her; but they were wrong. Her thin body was healthy, though she took no exercise save this. She breathed deeply, expanding her narrow chest, because at this point, among the jutting house fronts, the round sea- windows, and with the flying buttresses of the church rigged against the sky, she felt at home. Treading freely, casting looks of disdain at the tranquilly smoking householders who watched her daily progress, she would climb to the summit of the hill, which below the churchyard became a cliff, falling sheer to the green flats which stretched away to their shadowy junction with sea and sky. There she came every evening, to the same angle of the churchyard fence; and every evening, watching the marsh darken, she would forget its lush earthy green, seeing instead the green of shoal water breaking to white against the cliff. That was how it had been; no grass nor sheep; no smoke, no crawling river with banks of yellow mud; no land to tame men’s bodies, but the clean water shifting, flowing, offering and claiming life. Something in her, some legacy from unknown seafaring ancestors, hungered for this to be as it had been. Each day, coming to this place, she felt the passion in her, alive, incommunicable, that recognised and answered the passion of the sea. Motion, colour; fear and defiance; all craving and all fulfilment was there. She was stirred by the sight of that calm, distant water to a great longing for new perils and adventures of the soul, and these she might command, in imagination building the tumbling waters to storm, or subduing them at will. Standing there in the last light of the sun, a small, unconvincing figure, hands resting loosely on the wooden rail, she had experienced all the terrors and revulsions of one who has submitted himself to the powerful sea. She thought how danger might rise in the tropics. Out of a dark breathless sky would come a single gust of hot wind; it died down, and she could hear again the thud of the engines and the water whispering as it slid along the side. A feeling in the air of expectation, vigilance. Another gust, suddenly pushing against the ship like a hot hand; and now the reflected lights began to dance and to heave themselves into twinkling ominous patterns, and the severed water no longer whispered evenly, but came slapping sharply against the plates.
She knew how a steamer might lie waiting for the dawn outside the harbour of an Eastern port; the pale green of the water, reflecting untroubled the lines of the masts and ropes; the fishing boats with their top-heavy triangular sails veering by on the wind that blows before sunrise. She knew the grey- blue of the early sky. She saw the coolies running and yelling, with little baskets of coal no bigger than so many flower-pots, running, sweating, getting the bunkers filled somehow amid singing and sudden unreasoning quarrels. She watched the sky go green and the coast darken as night came; the stars were tremendous and their colours distinct, yet a swift wind might extinguish them in half an hour and set the water leaping and playing, pale with phosphorus, against the hull. She knew the unfathomable blue of mid-ocean, opaque, the colour of lapis-lazuli. She heard the hours go clanging by and the hurry of feet and voices in the night when the watch was changed. She knew monotony; the endless horizons of the sea, the eternal similarity of distant coasts, the throb of the screw. She learned to long for the shore life, and to hate it. She watched the streets of the world; Australian streets with sporting placards at every corner, and sellers of lottery tickets offering their wares to hurrying men with wrinkled eyes; streets of Japan, with vertical shop-signs, and paper fish floating above the houses; South African streets where huge negroes wearing buffalo horns and kirtles of feathers stood in the shafts of the rickshaws.
This was Miss Alquist’s life. These were the voyages on which she set out every evening during thirteen years, or longer, who knows? They were the voyages of which he had spoken, from which he had brought back the gifts which looked so exotic in her bare rooms, and which she followed in her heart; but the best of all was that which should have been the last. In it she stood on the bridge of a vessel steaming up Channel, and saw the sequence of lights winking out the course. A heavy sea came clouding over the bows, and sank in little whiffs and rattles of spray against the decks, against her cheeks. Lights of France to starboard; La Vache booming out her warning, fog off the coast. Voices below on the fore- deck, and a laugh, one of the hands playing the fool, all the rest thinking of home, and the drawn red blinds of stuffy little parlours, or bars with the strong lights glittering in gilt- framed mirrors. Quiet lights those, not the restless warning lights of the sea; a firm road to tread; stillness, welcome, safety; and their ship driving back to it all through the spray.
Strange that she should so love the sea, which had robbed her of her lover. At first she could not look at it. She remembered how once, just before the news came, she had gone down to bathe in a little sandy cove; suddenly she had become afraid, angry, and standing waist-deep in the water had struck down at it with her clenched hands, hating it because it yielded and slipped away, not resisting her strength. She had not known then, and the little scene remained in her mind unexplained. Since, she had come to think of the sea as a loved thing that had blundered cruelly. She could not forgive the townspeople their apathy with regard to it. They had been glad when the sea, that had made them, departed. They lived within sight of it, oblivious, tilling the reluctant land, ignoring the treasure withdrawn from them. Their town was dead; better if it had gone down in flames, never to rise, when the French raiders sacked it long ago, in the first years of the fifteenth century. Going home down the tall street early darkened by its own shadows, seeing as she passed candles burning without fear of wind, seeing the people eating, secure and warm, Miss Alquist felt a kind of despair.
It was on an autumn night, an October night still and misty, that it happened. Mrs Frant remembered very well how the mist began to roll in from the sea, like the ghost of a tide, at about half past five in the afternoon, when the sun was dropping and Miss Alquist had set out on her pilgrimage. They heard her return, and could follow the sound of her footsteps from room to room, and could distinguish the tinkle of china as she prepared her supper. They did not consciously reckon up these sounds, to which they were so accustomed that they must rather have noticed their cessation than their sequence. The Frants finished eating, and Mrs Frant piled up the greasy plates on a tray to take them down to the scullery. It will be remembered that Miss Alquist rented the ground floor. Mrs Frant came downstairs carefully, the tray held out before her so that she might see where she was treading, and had reached the kitchen before she raised her eyes. Then she saw that Miss Alquist was standing quite motionless by the door which led to her bedroom, apparently listening. The attitude was not strained or unnatural; that is to say, it would not have seemed so had the tense figure relaxed after a moment. Mrs Frant said afterwards that they seemed to stand there for half an hour, the one stiffly with closed eyes, all senses save one forced to quiescence, the other with her tray held before her, staring, and wondering what sound could ever come up Ship Street that was worth listening for like that. Just as the immobility had lasted long enough to frighten the watcher, Miss Alquist turned away abruptly and went into her bedroom. Mrs Frant advanced towards the sink with her crockery, mentally calculating whether they could afford to give up their lodger if she should turn queer. Her back towards the bedroom, she filled the sink with boiling water, shook in some soda from a tin, and began to scrape the fragments of cheese and bacon fat from the plates. Then she heard a step, and looked quickly round, apprehensively. Through the door she could see Miss Alquist standing with her hat on, and her hands fumbling at her bosom; then the figure moved and there came the sound of steps on the boards, the opening of the street door, its gentle closing. Miss Alquist had gone out. Mrs Frant was so much astonished that she tumbled the plates into the hot water and left them to soak while she went upstairs to consult with her husband. He, too, was astonished, and went at once to the window; the mist was impenetrable, but they could hear plainly the short quick steps going up the hill towards the church.
‘Looks like she don’t know what time ’tis,’ said Frant, ‘did she go out for her usual?’
Mrs Frant did not answer. They had both watched her go out, just after five.
‘Thick night, too,’ said Frant, closing the window. “Well. None o’ our look-out.’
‘Not our look-out,’ Mrs Frant echoed angrily, ‘’T’ll be our look-out if she comes over funny and tries to kill us all in our beds one night.’
She had been frightened down there in the kitchen. Frant, who had not seen the still figure, grunted, and took up his paper again, comfortably saying, ‘You don’t want to go thinking of such things.’
Mrs Frant looked up and was about to speak; but realising how foolish the thing must sound told in her words, sighed, and went, not without qualms, back to the sink and the crockery. From time to time she stopped her washing-up to listen, holding her hands still in the water. Ship Street was silent. The old walls cut off the sounds from neighbouring houses; no one passed on the cobbles. She dried the plates, and hung up the cloth on the line that was stretched across the kitchen from window to fireplace; then slowly climbed again to the upper room where her husband sat. His pipe filled it with rich smoke; the new wick of the lamp gave a good light. Mrs Frant took her chair by the fire and gradually forgot, in that atmosphere of familiar warmth, that half an hour ago she had been frightened by the sight of a woman listening.
Listening, astounded, to the thud and rustle of surf, breaking, so Miss Alquist thought, not a hundred yards away. At first she did not heed it; a trick of the blood, perhaps, rushing in her ears. But it would not be denied. It was real. When she understood that, she was filled with a mad hope that the sea had come back to claim the town, advancing without cause, as it had retreated. The sound persisted, and she made her decision, to go up at once to the cliff by the church. From there she could watch it come crawling over the fields, lapping towards the town. In some haste she put on her shoes and hat, but delayed, strangely enough, over another matter which puzzled the Frants afterwards; then she set out, walking quickly through the mist to the churchyard. She was happy, until as she went it occurred to her that perhaps owing to the mist the sea might not be visible; but when she came to that part of the cliff from which she was accustomed to look across the marsh, she clasped her hands, pressing them in a kind of ecstasy against her breast. For the night was clear, with a half-moon rising, and not a quarter of a mile away she could see a line of white that sometimes drew back hissing, and then launched itself forward, at every such attack gaining a little ground. It seemed to her a battle of two surfaces; one dead, motionless, blindly resisting, the other vivid, alive, wrinkled into a million tiny strengths which at last must overwhelm the single strength of the land. It had reached the outlying dwellings. She saw it close round a cottage, coming creeping and fawning to the threshold, mounting in little waves and surges towards the windows, higher, higher. The glass burst inwards under the impact of a larger mass of water, which poured through, foaming over the jagged edges noiselessly. She observed this silence, and accepted it, though it had been the sound which had summoned her; now she watched while the drama played itself out, and found it natural that it should be presented without sound. Every moment the liquid glittering surface increased, and the dull squares of grass yielded to it, dwindling one by one. The track of the moon grew longer, and was broken into shifting ripples of light, multiplied as the sea advanced stealthily, but more swiftly than before. At this rate, she thought, another five minutes must bring it to the foot of the cliff, and she strained towards it, gripping the wooden railing, thinking rather confusedly of those cities in the Old Testament, overwhelmed that the power of God might be made manifest. She thought of the limitless strength of the sea; of its hills and shadowy valleys, hidden too deep for light to discover them; of the strange jewels of the sea, living creatures, and pearls crusted together in obscurity. There were mysteries there of which the land could know nothing, wonders consummated in the utter darkness, shapes moving above in their own radiance, broken ships like leaves drifting down. She would not open her eyes, she resolved, until she heard the first beat of the waves against the foot of the cliff, for when the water had attained its goal there would be sound again. She began to count the seconds, blindly waiting; sixty rather slowly, and sixty again; and again. Now surely the victory must have been achieved, the walls of water must be piling up in withdrawal to fling themselves in a last assault upon the rocks that withstood them. Another minute went slowly by. She opened her eyes, looked, and felt the blood run to her heart.
