Complete Short Fiction, page 74
Even Jill had worn a dress to dinner: cream silk patterned with daffodils. She had also combed her hair and, short though it was, she looked distinctly feminine, though ill at ease. She was trying to rearrange the long skirt and accommodate herself and her dress to the chair. As for Charlie he was none too comfortable himself in his long frock coat of broadcloth with velvet-laced lapels, together with waistcoat and gold Prince Albert watch chain. Except for Elizabeth’s sallies, the three of them seemed locked into a tableau of formal clothes and stiff manners. He felt that if they spoke at all, they should speak epigrams out of Congreve or Sheridan.
It was then that the drum began in the Carib village. The candelabrum, with its host of roseate angels, swayed above their heads; the goblets tinkled on the table. It did not play to summon or lament, but rather to exult: Storms reverberated in its exultance, and the wind which compelled the waves, and a torrid tropic sun, and animals too—birds and fish, eagles and barracudas, the swiftest, the strongest—all things wild, unfettered, elemental, uniting in a fierce paean of joy.
“It’s nothing to be frightened of,” said Jill tartly, though no one had expressed any fright. “It’s just a simple drum four feet high and made of bamboo, with a black goatskin pegged across the top.”
“Nobody’s frightened,” said Charlie. “Just mystified. Is it Curk playing?”
“Who else?”
“Is it for a festival of some kind?”
“It could just as easily be for a funeral. The drum plays on both occasions.”
He was sick of evasions and reticences. “The funeral of the Goat without Horns?”
She stared at him as if she expected Tark to punish his blasphemy with a waterspout hurled from the depths. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“What I mean is this. First, the sharks. Now the drum. Jill, what in the name of Tark is going to happen?”
“The boat from Martinique is due in three days, as you doubtless know. I expect you’ll go aboard her and leave our little island to its—mysteries.”
“Well, at any rate we’ve had enough mystery for one night,” Elizabeth interjected, reasserting her supremacy over the table. “Let’s imagine that were dining with William Morris, who said that beauty and simplicity were the same thing.” Plainly she feared the frankness of Charlie’s questions or Jill’s answers. She embraced the room with an expressive sweep of her hand, and Charlie contemplated the plain, scrubbed, but ruggedly beautiful oak of the table, the willow-patterned china, the small chairs with plaited osier seats, the red Gothic sideboard, the tapestry of gold thread on woolen twill, illustrating Chaucer’s illustrious women. And most of all, the room itself with its high ceiling and exposed beams.
But his thoughts were not with Morris.
“And you even have a fireplace,” he forced himself to remark. “Morris still loves an open fire, they say. It sets him off on one of his stories. And he will never let anyone paint the natural bricks or clutter the mantel in any of his houses.” He was trying to think of Morris; he was trying not to think about the black land crabs steamed in greens which lay untouched on his plate and, according to the dictates of his stomach, untouchable; he was mostly thinking about Elizabeth and, what with sharks and drums and Goats without Horns, wondering if he could prevail upon her to leave the island with him.
“Yes, I had to have a fireplace, though it’s rather absurd in this warm climate. Still, the nights do get chilly at times, and then I light my fire. It makes me feel as if I were back in England again.”
“And I noticed something else,” said Charlie. “All the food stays hot until it reaches the table. You took Morris’ advice about where to build the kitchen.”
“Build it close to the dining room!” Most English houses separated the kitchen from the dining room with a host of lesser chambers, and the last guests to be served usually received cold squabs in coagulated gravy or blackberries swimming in melted ices.
Suddenly Jill flung back her chair and sprang to her feet, overlooking Telesphorus who, muffled in his hood and muffled of step, had crept behind her to refill her goblet with port. The copper flagon fell from his hand and bounced soundlessly but wetly over the rug, dispersing drops like a garden sprinkler. While his father bustled apologetically from the kitchen to dry up the spilled wine, Jill glared at Charlie and her mother, as if to lock them into a single conspiracy.
“You and your poets. How can you talk about William Morris tonight?” Where was the Jill to whom he had given the fiddler crab, the wistful girl who had accepted his rejection with grave resignation?
He was losing patience. “Jill, do you know what is going to happen tonight? If you do, I wish you would enlighten us.”
“No.” The answer was sullen as well as ambiguous. He had supposed her to be in her father’s confidence, but her explosion and evasiveness suggested uncertainty or perhaps a knowledge too terrible either to contain or share.
“But the Caribs haven’t had a festival for years,” said Elizabeth, “and unfortunately they don’t have many funerals. Unless they happen to knife each other in a moment of pique, they just make love or lie in the sun like alligators and live to a lecherous old age.”
“You have no right to talk about them like that,” Jill shouted. “They’re a poor little remnant of a great people, and you ought to dwell on their past instead of criticizing them now.” She flounced out of the room, rushing no doubt to muss her hair and don her sailor togs.
Telesphorus had vanished into the kitchen with his father, who was muttering parental rebukes while his son was pleading, “But I didn’t dent the flagon.” Charlie and Elizabeth looked at each other with a shared helplessness which made Charlie, at least, feel much less helpless. He took her hand.
“Has she told him I rejected her?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Does he know about us?”
“No. His pride will admit no rivals. His pride, I say, not his heart. You see,” she added, a little wistfully, “it isn’t love he feels for me. It’s possession. I am no longer a necessity or a novelty to him, only a habit. All I can say for myself is that I am a difficult habit for him to break.”
She put a cautioning finger to her lips as Telesphorus returned to serve the dessert of papaya balls soaked in rum and lime juice. The little orange globes swam in transparent amethyst goblets, like suns in a galaxy.
Charlie recaptured her hand as soon as the boy had returned to the kitchen. “Elizabeth, I’m not sorry. I shall never be sorry, unless Curk harms you. But that’s not going to happen. You’re coming to England with me.” At this point hand-holding seemed to him singularly inadequate. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingertips and deliberated if he could attain the mouth before the next entrance of the domestics.
“It’s you, my dear, who may be hurt.”
“I don’t think so,” he said stoutly, if not with complete conviction. “What is Curk’s strength, really? Mystery, more than anything else, wouldn’t you say? Nobody knows him, not even you, after sixteen years. But if we could see through him, mightn’t we find just a big bully who rules over a scraggly bunch of savages?”
“No, Charlie. Whatever he is, he’s not like us. His mystery, I’m afraid, is as terrible as we imagine. If you ever doubt that, look in the lagoon where you swim with your friend. This morning from my bedroom I saw a sight to freeze my blood. Jill was clambering over some tumbled rocks, black and lava-like, which spilled right down into the water. She scurried over them with the agility of her tarantulas, carrying a basket under her arm. There was a final rock which jutted over the water like a small ledge. She knelt, drew off the cover from the basket, and removed a fish. Three black fins converged on the bait.
“ ‘Jill,’ I cried, but she could not—or would not—hear me from such a distance.
“As gently as a dog from his master’s hand, the first of the hammerheads took the fish. His companions did not disturb his feast. Restraint among sharks. Unthinkable! Then I saw that Jill was not alone. A solitary figure loomed on the cliff above her head. She had known that he was close to her. She looked up at him and he smiled and nodded his approval.”
“You think he’s trained them not to harm her?”
“At least when he’s close to her.
I think he has actually taken her swimming with them in the sea. If she swam alone, who can say? They’re almost totally instinctive, and Curk is the only man I ever knew who could control that instinct.”
Charlie shuddered. “And Jill thinks they’re beautiful. She trusts them as she does her spiders.”
“You’re very fond of her, aren’t you?”
“In a way, I am. Fond of and sorry for.”
“Find her, will you, Charlie? She won’t have gone far at night. Not even Jill ventures beyond the village after dark.”
“What shall I say to her?”
“That we miss her in the house. Try to convince her not to tell her father that she is—how shall I say—not with child by you.”
She was sitting under the acacia trees and looking as if she would like to cry but did not intend to let Charlie or anyone else see her a second time in so undignified and undisguised a state. She had not mussed her dress or her hair, and she might have been an English schoolgirl who had been neglected at her first ball. She spoke in a whisper, but the drum had stopped, and he could understand her in the stillness of the night, whose only voice was the piping of an occasional tree frog.
She met him with an accusation. “You’ve come to ask me if I told my father about your scorning me.”
“No.”
“But mother asked you to ask me, didn’t she?”
“I came because I wanted to.”
“You think I’m still angry because you preferred mother. You see, I know you spent the night with her. Two nights, in fact. At first I was furious with both of you. I almost went to Curk. I wanted him to hurt you, and mother too. But then I realized why it was you couldn’t love me. Because you had already loved mother. Since that very first night, I think. It was wrong of you to love her, but she is very beautiful and you were lonely. And I took you to her myself, didn’t I? In a sense, you were being faithful to your first love. A woman likes a man to be faithful. Even to her rival, at first. Then, when she finally wins him, her triumph is doubled. Otherwise, she will value him lightly as too easily won. I only wish I had been first.”
He noticed a subtle but significant change in her use of the word “love” which he could not ascribe to her reading. She no longer sounded as if she were speaking about copulation among the Caribs.
“I do love her,” he said. “She’s like a Christmas evergreen hung with garlands and berry-chains. Even when she’s still, she somehow twinkles and dazzles.”
“And I do forgive you. I guess I’m more of a young fir tree. Hard and prickly.”
“A sapling, I should say, and strong rather than prickly. But have you also forgiven your mother for—being fond of me?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I stay angry with her about half the time. I used to think it was because she was so different from me, soft and pampered and frilly, with a wastefully large bosom. But since you came, I think it’s because I’m so different from her. Yes, I’ve forgiven her for loving you. But not for being beautiful and golden and loved by you.”
“But you have your own kind of beauty. Your mother is a bird of paradise. You’re a—” The poet in him strained for a metaphor which would please her, “—a quicksilver tarpon. Quicker than a dolphin!” (Indeed!)
He patted her shoulder, a brother with a younger sister, and said nothing, because there was nothing more of comfort which he could say. His gesture was protective and instinctive and totally lacking in amorous intent.
She lifted the arm from her shoulder. “You’re just making it worse. If we’re going to be buddies, I think we should restrict ourselves to a manly handshake.”
“But that was a manly pat,” he tried to explain. “The kind I give Gloomer.”
“But it means something different to me. You feel as if you’re just patting me hello or maybe keeping me warm. But I tremble all over like a—” he awaited one of her stark metaphors, “—a shower-of-gold petal caught in a breeze.”
“No embraces then. Just handshakes.”
“Well, maybe now and then a little one.” She replaced his arm and did not set limits on the duration of its visit. “Now I’ve kept two secrets for you,” she said at last. “Your rejecting me and your fondness for my mother. That makes us very special friends, doesn’t it?”
“It certainly does.”
“As close as you and that dolphin?” Having discussed his love for her mother with surprising candor, she was a little girl again, pleading for affection.
Charlie could not lie even to be tactful (if I were one of the old, land-dwelling dolphins with limbs, I would have hugged him for his honesty).
“Gloomer is my best friend. Remember, I met him before I met you. But you’re special to me too.”
She looked pensive. “I suppose I’ll have to be content, though it would be so much nicer to be very special. It isn’t flattering when you lose out to a dolphin, though maybe this one can be trusted after all. At least, he hasn’t tried to eat you, and he’s had a great many chances. The way you undress, he wouldn’t have even had to worry about indigestion from cloth or buttons. I did notice a scar on your shoulder, though. Did he nip you there?”
“I bruised myself on a rock, and Gloomer healed me with some juice from seaweed.” He trusted her—for the moment—but he was not going to tell her about the passage to the sea. Girls of fifteen had been known to change their minds; Jill had changed her mind as often as the sea changed its moods. The simile seemed to him unoriginal but nonetheless applicable.
“If he only weren’t so ugly.” She deliberated. “And yet you like your women all golden and fluffy. I would expect you to make friends with a parrot fish instead of a dolphin. Or perhaps—”
“My children, it is time.”
They had not been aware of Curk’s approach until he knelt behind them and enfolded them in a single embrace. They both started to their feet. He smiled. It was a night of smiles, encouraging, conspiratorial, wistful, and now triumphant.
“For the Goat without Horns?” Jill’s voice faltered with rare fear. Was it possible that she did not know the nature of the ritual?
“Yes.”
“Where, my father?”
“On the Cliff That Looms Like a Shark.” His words were forbidding but his voice held the tenderness of a devoted parent. His arm around Charlie’s shoulder was almost paternal. It was also irresistible. It held and compelled him toward the place for which, knowingly or not, he had been bound since he had read the advertisement in the London Times.
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
XI
WORDLESSLY they exchanged their clothes for the garments offered to them by the wordless Curk, the garments of the festival. With the joyous abandonment of a moth which sheds its chrysalis, Jill shed her ankle-long frock, her Englishness, and her innocence, for a tight leather tunic with beads woven into intricate designs of sea anemones and coral forests. With abandonment which was anything but joyous, Charlie exchanged his frock coat for a loin cloth like that of Curk.
“I’m a bloody savage,” he thought.
Curk surveyed them with familial pride. He seemed to make no distinction between them now that he thought them mates.
“It is time, my children. You are ready—and worthy.”
No one spoke as they climbed the side of the cliff, but Charlie’s mind was a coliseum of conflicting selves. The gladiator in him said: Act now, break loose from this magnificent but slit-cheeked savage before he delivers you to his friends; attack him or flee from him. The martyr said: If he meant to harm you, would he treat you like a son? Besides, there is no escape from him on this island. At least go with him to the cliff and learn his intention.
The path was precipitous and seemed to have been oftener climbed by goats than men. There were treacherous stones which slipped from under your feet and sheer vertical rises with only roots for hand- or foot-holds. But there were resting places of verdurous moss overhung with frangipani trees, and the air was sweet with the fragrance so beloved by Elizabeth. Yet it seemed the wrong scent for such a night and place. There should be—what? Incense, perhaps, frankincense or myrrh. Something a little acrid and—sacrificial.
Charlie had often been mountain climbing in Scotland, and there were no difficulties for him on this small cliff, except that of keeping up with Jill, who had played her solitary games in just such places, if not in this very place. Curk did not seem to climb or scramble so much as to ascend. There was no effort in his movements, no labored breaths or pauses to rest; there was assurance and ease and most of all dignity. Instead of a slit-cheeked savage, he seemed the genius of the mountain, vouchsafing guidance to those who aspired to his heights.
The top of the cliff was hidden for most of the climb. Then, suddenly, they stood among pine-knot torches, a forest of writhing brilliances. The darkness had been protective; the light was a nakedness and a confrontation.
The altar was one of the high places of the Old Testament, but pagan, Philistine, not Israelite, not dedicated to Yahweh, for its stones were shaped into the semblance of a deity with the head and shoulders of a shark and the body of a man, a reversal of the fish-tailed Dagon whose temple Samson had leveled. The Caribs—the twenty adults from the village—had assembled beside the altar. Noisy chatterers by day, indolent and decadent, they stood now with the stillness of stones as their king, his daughter, and his—disciple? captive?—approached them. In the torchlight it was possible to imagine them to be their own ancestors at the height of their power before the coming of the Spaniards. Barbaric with black slit cheeks and with golden earrings in the form of sharks, and yet with a ghost of sublimity imparted by their adoration of Curk. He was their master; he was their god as well as Tark; only he could remember the old way and conjur them momentarily out of their indolence and decadence.
