"But--"
"Are you better than the others? Think."
"No," he thought. "Of course not. Worse perhaps. I know better."
"You are nearly as honest as I am," she laughed. She put her hand out in
a great frank gesture.
"If I can smile, surely you can." Her fingers beckoned. "Come, don't be
silly."
He caught her hands and laughed with her. He had been acting like a boy
in his twenties, and he a man of forty-two....
§ 6
He had thought somehow that in this affair of Hedda he would find--oh,
something: that once more the moon would take on its rippling smile and
the sun its sweet low laughter, and the winds be no longer a matter of
physics, but strong entities. Quickly, unconsciously, the thought had
come to him.... With the wife of his young days had come the magic of
romance, and with Claire-Anne of Marseilles had come a sublime storm of
passion, and with the Arab lady had come the scheme of an ordered life,
good composition and rich color.... They had lasted but little and gone
as a rainbow goes.... With Hedda there was nothing.... It was just
abominably wrong....
Here he was, young--for his forty-two he was young,--supple, successful
in his way, rich if you wanted to put it in that word. And no heart for
life; listless. It was wrong.... All he could think of doing was to be
intimate with an easy woman. No zest for her great noble frame, her
surge of flaxen hair. The veneer of conventional good manners,
conventional good taste, only made the actuality of it more appalling
... she with the gifts of life and grace, he with his, and all they
could do was be physically intimate.... And she took money with a little
smile, contemptuous of herself, contemptuous of him.... They both knew
better, yet there you were ... God! Even animals had the excuse of
nature's indomitable will!
Yes, this made him face things he had been trying to pass casually by.
Forty-two, a touch of gray at the temples, a body like a boy's, hooded
eyes like a hawk's, and a feeling in him somehow that an organ--his
heart maybe--was dead: not ailing--just unalive. Once he had zest, and
he didn't even have despair now. If he could only have despair....
Despair was healthy. It meant revolt. A man might sob, gnash his teeth,
batter walls with his bare fists, but that only meant he was alive in
every fiber. He might curse the stars, but he was aware of their
brilliance. He might curse the earth that would one day take his
lifeless body, but he must know its immense fecundity. A man in revolt,
in despair, was a healthy man.
But despair was so futile. Ah, there it was! Life's futility. It was the
sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility,
spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him
of his youth was a belief in God. At sea he was too close to the immense
mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to
believe, not to accept him as an incontrovertible fact.
But the God of degenerate peoples, the antagonistic, furious, implacable
God--that was a ridiculous conception. A cheap, a vain one. "As flies to
wanton boys, are we to the gods." Wasn't that how Shakspere's blind king
had uttered it? "They kill us for their sport." How strangely
flattering--to believe that the Immensity that had conceived and wrought
the unbelievable universe should deign to consider man, so weak that a
stone, a little slug of lead, could kill him, an enemy worth bothering
about. Man with his vanity, his broad fallibility, his poor natural
functions!
And as to the God of the optimists, how ridiculous, too. "The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want." So pathetic! They never saw that they did
want. That for every well-filled body, there were a hundred haggard men.
They thought of him as benevolent, firm but benevolent, like Mr.
Gladstone. To them he was an infinitely superior vestryman with a
tremendous power for dispensing coal and food to the poor. And the poor
devils were so patient, so loyal. And so stupid; they thought that much
flattery, much fear, would move Him. Their conception never even rose to
considering God as a gentleman, despising flattery and loathing fear.
Poor, poor devils!
To Shane He existed, though how to think of Him was difficult. Why a
man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the
sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will.
Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a
Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great
undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. He
had so much brains....
It seemed to Shane that this optimism, this despair were strange mental
drugs, going through the mental system as a depressant or a stimulant
would go through the physical, creating illusions ... illusions ... and
the sane man was one who had no illusions, not the meaning a man uses of
the phrase when he has been jilted by a woman or wronged out of money by
a friend, but actually, finitely, no illusions.... He was sane, a few
other men in the world must be sane, but the rest were drugged for their
hell or their Fiddlers' Green....
Fiddlers' Green! Good God! Fiddlers' Green!
His mind flashed back a moment to the shining isle, the green sward, the
singing waves, the sunlight on the green jalousies, but strangely his
mind could see nothing. He could no longer make a picture for himself.
Symbols were barren algebraic formulæ. Not enchanters' words. No light.
No glamour. Only strange sounds reverberating in the gray caverns of his
head.... Once in the dead past he could see the Isle of Pipers--no more!
It wasn't his past that was dead. The past lived. It was he was dead,
he, his present, his future.
Out of the gray caverns of his head came a thin echo of a word he had
known and he a boy. The Valley of the Black Pig. A phrase from some old
folk-tale heard on a wintry Antrim coast. Some prophecy of old wives
that when the Boar without Bristles would appear in the Valley of the
Black Pig, then the end of all things was nigh.... He had a faint memory
that somewhere in Roscommon was the Valley of the Black Pig.... But that
didn't matter; what mattered was the memory it evoked.... Gray, gray,
gray.... Gray hills, gray boulders, gray barren trees, a gray mist
sluggishly rising from the ground, and a gray drizzle of rain, falling,
so slowly.... And gray rotting leaves beneath his feet.... A little wind
that moaned among the boulders, and the cawing of unseen, horrible
birds.... Neither was there direction, nor time, nor space....
Everything gray like the grayness of old women's bodies.... There was no
sun, and the moon abhorred the valley. In such a place as this wandered
the souls of women who had killed their children, of monks who at dark
of night had said the Black Mass.... Here were masters who had deserted
tall, gallant ships.... Hither witches rode on the bleak east wind, to
be flogged by their masters and horribly caressed.... The Valley of the
Black Pig.... Here were those who had read the frightful inscription on
the altar of the Unknown God ... Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, and
Avicenna; Nicolas Flamel and his wife Petronella; Lady Alice Kyteler of
Kilkenny, and Gerald of Desmond, the Great Earl; and newer names, Dee
and Edward Kelly.... Degraded majesty with soiled beards.... Gray,
gray.... And the faint ghosts in cerecloths, and the horrible shapes of
the mist.... The drizzle of the rain, and the rustle of the Feet of the
Goat.... The cawing of strange birds and the wind among the boulders
and souls, weeping, weeping--unhoping, undespairing, weeping,
weeping.... The Valley of the Black Pig....
What was it? In God's name what was it that had made him this way, his
being suddenly lifeless, like a cow that goes dry, or a field that is
mysteriously, suddenly fallow.... And weariness seemed immortal.... What
had led him into this dreadful cemetery of the mind? Had he gone too far
in thought and emotion and come to a dreadful desert plane within
himself ...? Had he eaten of the tree of which the cabalist wrote:
Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat;
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou
shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die.
Had he blundered on it unwittingly, eaten ignorantly and surely died?...
Or was he going mad? Good God! Could that be it? Was there something
they hadn't told him--a strange taint in his blood, or his mother's
blood.... Would he end his days in a madhouse.... What a fate, what a
dreadful fate! A slavering gray-headed man, wandering through the
Valley of the Black Pig, forever and forever?
Better to end it now.
Yes, but would that end it? The material envelope of cells and fluids
gone, might there not ...? Christ! Worse off yet, if anything were
left.... There might be something left; there was the trouble.... One
knew so little, so abominably little.... Only material wisdom was
certain, and that said: Don't chance it....
Drink? He had his men to think of, his ship.... It might grip him.
But was he forever doomed to this mournful weeping place, place of rain,
place of mists, gray boulders, and moaning winds? Must he abide in the
Valley of the Black Pig until the Boar without Bristles came lumbering
out of the red west, and went grunting, eating ravenously, eating prey
of souls, until he lay down in obscene sleep, and the stars one by one
guttered like candles, and the sun shot into a vast explosion, and the
moon was a handful of peat ashes, and the whole great universe snapped
like a gunshot and the débris of all created things fell downward like a
shattered wall, faster, faster, faster, to where, where, where?
§ 7
In the streets now the June snow fell, not the soft and flaky petals of
the North, but a bitter steel-like snow, that whirled. And the winds of
the pampas hurried like Furies through the sordid streets, and stopped
to snarl, as a dog snarls, and now moaned, and now howled sharply, as a
wolf howls. There was something cold, malignant, about it all ... Old
Irish writers said that hell was cold. _An Ait Fuar_, they called it,
the Cold Place. _Ait gan chu gan chat, gan leanbh, ait gan ghean, gan
ghaire_, a place without a dog, or cat, or child, a place without
affection or laughter.... Had sainted Brendan come on Buenos Aires in
winter on his voyage to Hy Brazil, and thought in his naïveté that here
was hell ...? And was he wrong?
Cold of wolves! It must have been like this in ancient Paris when Villon
thieved and sang, and the wolves came clamoring at the gates ... and the
crusaders in warm Palestine.... Or in Russia--Siberia, a cold name....
Here it was hell, but in Europe ... oh, different there! The heavy
flakes, so solid, so wonderful, the laden trees, the great stretch of
white. And in the houses the farmers blessing the snow, that would keep
the ground warm and fertile for the coming year, that the blue flax
might arise, and the fields of corn, with the great pleasance of the
clover, and the golden-belted bees.... And the turf fires of Ulster, and
Christmas coming, and after that Candlemas, and then March of the
plowing, and glossy crows busy in the fields.... Always something to see
ahead.... Not in Ireland only, but England, the jingle of bells and the
people of ruddy faces.... And in Germany, too, the bluff important
burghers having their houses heated by quaint porcelain stoves, huddling
themselves in furs, and waddling obesely.... Very pleasant.... And in
France, too, in the _assommoirs_, the tang of wine in the air and the
blue hue of smoke, excited Latin voices. "_Encore un bock! T'es saoûl,
mon vieux! Flûte! Je suis comme le Pont Neuf!_" A raucous voice singing
a political skit:
Cordieu, Madame! Que faites-vous ici?
Cordieu, Madame! Que faites-vous ici?
Je danse le polka avec tous mes amis!
Je danse le polka avec tous mes amis!
Buenos Aires, hell!
And the worst was the strange inversion of time. Here winter was, cold
streets, steely snow, garbage frozen to stone.... And in Europe was sane
June. Purple flower of the heather in Ulster, and white flower of the
bogs, and in the little bays of Antrim, men spearing flounders from
boats in the long summer evenings. And the bairns hame from school, with
a' their wee games, fishing for sticky-backs wi' pins, and the cummers
spinning. Eigh, Ulster! And in England, they punting on the Thames,
among the water-lilies. Soft Norman days, and in Germany the young folks
going to the woods.... In Buenos Aires, hell!
Within the house a cold that the little fire could only gallantly fight
against. Without, cold of wolves.
"Hedda, you come from a cold country. Tell me, is it like this in
Sweden, any time?"
She was sitting in the candle-light, doing the needlework she took such
quietness in. Her firm white hands moving rhythmically, her body steady,
her eyes a-dream. It was hard ever to think that she was--what she was.
It was hard for him to think the word now, knowing her. She looked up
and smiled.
"No, Shane, not like this. It's cold, very cold. But very beautiful. By
day the country-side is quiet, white, ascetic, like some young nun. And
at night there are lights and jollity. It is like a child's idea of
fairy-land. One wishes one were further north, where the reindeer are.
One is not enemy to the cold, as you are here. One accepts it. It has
dignity. Here it is naked, malevolent. That's the difference."
"Naked, with awful hands.... A cold that seizes...."
"Yes, Shane." She took up her work again. "Sometimes I think long until
I get back to Sweden."
"You--you are going back?"
"Of course, Shane."
"When?"
"Five, six, seven years, unless I die, or am killed. Certainly I shall
go back."
"Yes, but in five, six--hum!"
"But what, Shane?"
"I once knew a woman, Hedda. She was--as you are. Just having friends.
And she was as handsome as you are, too. She didn't have your head, your
poise. She liked beauty, as you do. But this woman looked forward, as I
don't think you do. She saw herself always going down. She saw herself
in the end like the helmet-maker's daughter, in some archway of the
city, seeking a couple of pence.... And she was afraid, horribly
afraid...."
"She was a silly woman."
"How, Hedda?"
"She didn't know two things. That luck changes; destiny is sometimes as
kind as it is cruel. And also, when you are old, the money of the
archway will bring you as much joy, a drink, a bed, a meal for the
morrow, as do the diamonds of youth. The old don't need much, Shane.
They haven't far to go."
"But you, Hedda. Aren't you afraid of--the archway, and the few pence--"
"No, Shane. That will not be my way." The broidery dropped to her lap.
Her eyes, blue as winter, looked away, away. "I shall survive it all,
barring death of course, and in seven, eight, ten years, I shall drop
all this and go back, and be a lady in the land of my birth, a quiet,
soft-voiced woman in a little house that has glinting brass in winter
and flowers around it in summer. And I shall be very kind to the poor,
Shane.... And all young things that are baffled or hurt can come to me,
and tell their troubles, and I shall understand. And oftentimes, sitting
in the long Northern twilights, I shall think: Is this Froken Hagen, who
is all the world's friend, the girl who was once despised in Buenos
Aires?... And I shall choke a little, and think: 'God is good!'"
"You are very sure of yourself, Hedda."
"Yes, Shane. I know my own capabilities. I know, too, my own
limitations. I know I can always be of service. But I know, too, that
there will be no love ever for me, nor any little children of my body,
nor any big man to protect me and my house ..."
"This other woman--I killed her to save her from the archway--she
dreaded so much ..."
"You were very silly, Shane," she snipped off a thread with the
scissors. "People outgrow fear, and it may only have been a passing
mood, that would have gone with the moon or the season. You know very
little about women, Shane."
He laughed bitterly. "I have been married twice, and once I loved a
woman greatly."
"From what you tell me," her voice was calm, "you have never been
married. You made a mistake as a boy. And once again you bought a woman,
as you might a fine dog, admired her, as you might admire a fine dog,
and gave her a little passion, which comes and goes, knocks, passes
on--but no trust. And once you were infatuated with a hysterical woman,
and it all ended hysterically. No, Shane. I don't think you know much
about women."
"You know so many things." He was irritated. "Perhaps you know what is
wrong with me."
"Of course I do, Shane. Anybody would know. You are so important to
yourself. All the world is in relation to you, not you in relation to
the world. And people are not very important, Shane ... I know.... You
look for things. You don't make them. You want everything. You give
nothing. You haven't a wife, a house. Your father gave poems. But you
haven't a house, a child, a wife, a book. You only have a trading-ship."
"But I trade. I do my share of the world's work."
"Any shop-keeper!"
"I handle my ship."
"Any mathematician...."
"I brave all the perils of the sea."
"Are you afraid of death?"
"Of course not."
"Well?"
"Hedda, I handle men."
"Any little braggadocio lieutenant...."
His anger rose in hot waves. "So I am not worth anything in life, Hedda.
How much are you?"
"O, Shane," she stood up and looked at him seriously, "my calling is the
oldest in the world, they say, but to me it's not the least honorable.
It is sordid or not just as one makes it. I want you to think of men
going to sea, and weary of the voyage, and from me somehow they get a
glimpse of home. Are this house and myself more evil than the dram-shop
and the gambling-hell? And aren't there women in England and France who
would rather have their menfolk with me than leaning on some sodden
counter? They might hate the choice, but it's better.... Shane, if you
knew how weary men have talked to me of families abroad, their hearts
burdened. They cannot talk to men ... and sometimes I exorcise devils,
Shane, that young girls may walk safely in the dark.... And sometimes a
man is athirst for a flash of beauty.... Think, Shane--you are not
small.... Even yourself, Shane, I have helped you. There were times this
month when you were close to the river, terribly, terribly close.... I
said nothing, but I knew. And I held you. I willed. I prayed even ...
Shane, Shane, _amigo_, when the time came that I had to work I chose
this with my eyes open."
"I'm sorry," Campbell lowered his head. "I can only say I'm sorry I
said--hinted.... But Hedda, weren't there other things you could have
done?"
"A sempstress, maybe. But I think it's more important to ease a man's
mind than to cover his back."
"But children. You love children, Hedda. You know so much. Couldn't you
have been a governess in some great house?"
"O Shane, Shane _mío_, when will you understand?" Her calm voice had a
note of distress in it. "None can judge of another's life. None can
tell. None direct. What do you know of what passed before--I came to a
mean house in a mean town? I once opened a door I shouldn't have, and
left the lighted room ... for a warm blue darkness.... And I closed the
door behind me.... And daylight came. I am not of a breed that sues for
mercy. So I went ahead ... through the world. And I never look back,
Shane. I am no Lot's wife, to become a pillar of her own salt tears...."
"But Hedda, you are good. And this life--"
"Of course I am good, Shane. There is no man can say I did him wrong in
mind or body, or heart, either. And I am a comfort to many.... All I
have done is to outrage a convention of property that I don't believe
... Shane, do you know people cover greed with sentimentality and call
it virtue?"
"But, Hedda, the women don't see. They scorn you--"
"Do they? Poor souls. Let them! _Amigo mío_, I have a life. I have to
think, gage, act, concentrate. And when I want time of my own, Shane, I
have it. The housewife with her frowsy duties, being kissed
perfunctorily on the mat, the man who wears a stilted mask to the world,
and before her--lets go.... Ugh! And the _mondaine_ with her boredom ...
the hatred in wide houses.... Oh, I know. Sometimes I think it's so
wonderful, being free....
"O Shane, please don't be absurd, sentimental ... please, I know my way,
and find yours.... Tell me, do you know yet what day you sail?"
§ 8
A sailor in a jersey and reefer caught his arm in the Avenida de
Mayo....
"All filled up." Campbell uttered brusquely.
"It was no' that."
Campbell put his hand in his pocket looking for a coin.
"You'll be forgetting the Antrim glens, Shane Campbell." Shane flushed.
The coin in his fingers burned him.
"How did I know you were fro' the Antrim glens?"
"You've seen me a few times, though you'd hardly know me. Simon Fraser
of Ballycastle. You would no' recognize me, if you knew me, on account
of my hair being white. I was lost on the coast of Borneo for four
years. When I was lost my hair was black--maybe a wee sprinkle o'
gray--but what you might call black; and when I was picked up, and saw
myself in a looking-glass, it was white. They did no' know me when I got
back to Ballycastle."
"Would you care for a drink, Simon?"
"I don't care much either way, Shane Campbell. And if I wanted a drink
bad, I always have the silver for 't. I would no' have you think I
stopped you for to cadge a drink. I'm no' that kind of man. But I was
wi' your uncle Alan when he died. Or to be exact, I saw him just before
he died. I was visiting in Cushendun. I have a half-brither there you
might know, Tamas McNeil, Red Tam they ca' him. And whiles I was there,
I saw Alan Donn go down."
"My uncle Alan dead! Why, man, you're crazy--"
"Your uncle Alan's a dead man."
"You're mistaken, man. It's some one else."
"Your uncle Alan's a dead man. And what's more: I have a word from him
for ye."
"But I'd have heard."
"I cam' out in steam. It went against the grain a bit, but I cam' out in
steam. From Belfast.... With a new boat out of Queen's Island ... Alan
Donn's a dead man. That's why I stopped you. For to tell you your uncle
Alan's gone...."
"Come in, here," Shane said dazedly. He pulled the man into a bar, and
sat down in a snug. "Tell me."
"It was about nine in the morning, and an awful gray day it was, wi' a
heavy sea running and a nor'easter, and this schooner was getting the
timbers pounded out o' her. Her upper gear was gone entirely, and we
could no' see how she was below, on account of the high seaway. She was
a Frenchman, or a Portuguese. And she was gone. And we were all on
shore, wondering why she had no' put into Greenock or Stranraer, or what
kind of sailors they were at all, at all.
"Up comes your uncle Alan; and he says: 'Has anybody put out to give
those poor bastards a hand?' says he.
"'There's no chance, Alan Donn,' says we.
"And he says: 'How the hell do you know?' says he.
"And we say: 'Can't you see for youself, Alan Donn, wi' the sea that's
in it, and the wind that's in it, and the currents, there's no chance to
help them?'
"'So you're not going,' says he.
"'Och, Alan Donn, have sense,' says we.
"'If you aren't, then by Jesus, I am.'
"He turns to one of the men there, a fisherman by the name of Rafferty,
and he says: 'Hughie, get ready that wee boat o' yours, wi' the spitfire
foresail, and the wee trisail.'
"Then we said: 'You're not going, Alan Donn.'
"'Who's to stop me?' says he. All this time we had to shout on account
of the great wind was in it.
"'We think too much of you, Alan Donn, to let you go.'
"'If one o' you stinking badgers lays a finger on me to stop me, I'll
break his God-damned neck.'
"Says Hughie Rafferty to us--you know Hughie Rafferty, a silent man, a
wise man--says he: 'He'll get out fifty yards, a hundred yards from
shore and be stuck. And he'll say: "Well, I've done my best. Good-by and
to hell with ye, and die like men!" And he'll come back. And if the boat
turns over,' says Hughie Rafferty, 'he can swim like a rat, and he'll
be back among us cursing, like his ain kind sel', within a wheen o'
minutes.'
"Says Hughie Rafferty, says he: 'I'll go wi' your Honor's Lordship, Alan
Donn.'
"'You will like hell,' says Alan Donn. 'You'll stay here wi' your
childer and the mother o' your childer.'
"Then a wee old man, that was a piper, speaks up. He was bent in two
over an ash plant was in his right hand, and his left hand held his
back.