Harp looked sad. “My father’s name was also Hornby. Unsung, unmourned who died on the same day, the same year as the other legendary John Hornby.” There was a self-mocking air of gentle tautology in Harp’s voice.
A sudden silence descended like the ticking of a heart in the sun, ticking of a clock in the room, in the snow. And now all at once, in response to Harp’s tangent, I could feel a certain winged shadow of time, a certain winged stage of time settling around me within the commonwealth of man sponsored by ancient Marsden.
I could see upon my inner book, whose pages now seemed to turn backwards, an immense white world in the scarecrow literature and workshop of the gods, a world of falling snow, landscape upon riverscape of snow, treacherous works and poems of ice: a single false step out there in that creation of a wilderness was hell.
I felt I had been transported there into the intimate wildernesses Harp painted and stood face to face with Hornby himself.
“When it falls like that,” Hornby said, “we’re in for the blackest spell. An almighty freeze-up. Madness to put a foot out of doors. But I am mad. You appreciate that, Goodrich, don’t you? You picked me up in a winter abbey….”
“Not you, Hornby. I picked up Marsden far away from here.”
Hornby grinned. “Marsden and I belong to a family of man incessantly seduced and fascinated by the nature of survival. Half-medical, half-military. There are also poets and magicians and religious guys, my dear Goodrich, in our family who sleep in ice and snow like Pavlov’s metaphysical dogs. Survivor hubris. Do you follow? Let me explain. I had no choice, Goodrich, as time went on (and I found myself despairing of expedition after expedition) but to become a loner. In that way I sought to bridge the distance between two legends — the famous Hornby and the obscure Hornby — the famous Marsden and all his dead mates. My mates were all dead too, you see. It was obscene in a sense to be alive. I would reproach myself—Die Hornby die. And I understood the anguish in a black man’s cry—Burn baby burn. Snow ladysnow.”He glanced at the window now and I felt myself drawn back into his Arctic night as if we were steeped in psychologies written into forecasts of the weather. “Why, it’s easing up a bit, Goodrich,” he said to me. “A bloody miracle. Thank god for that. Let’s imagine, Goodrich,” he went on reminiscing as he waited for the snow to stop, “some namesake of yours stopping you in the street and saying to you — you’re GODRICH, aren’t you? Give all you possess to me. I am the poor. I have had no luck at the Pools. I am the poor. Give baby give. Pour Godrich pour.” He glanced at the window again. “Thank god it’s really easing up outside. A bloody miracle. Sometimes it’s really too much. They make too much snow up there. As I was saying, Goodrich. Fanaticism is glorious on the stage. Let down all the fake wildernesses and catastrophes you like. But I wouldn’t really dream of asking any Godrich (despite anything I may have said to the contrary) to surrender his last deadly farthing of ice…. Why, it’s stopped. It has really stopped snowing at last and I shall venture outside….”
The bastard of the sky drew him out into a glittering world beautiful beyond dreams. A whiteness of earth which seemed so intense it became a porous fabric of infinite darkness reaching into the sky. But, all of a sudden, a hundred yards or two from his cabin he realized he had been tricked and it was snowing again.
“I’ll get back,” he said to me. “There’s nothing to worry about. There it is … the light…. I put it there myself … in the window … in the face of my house. Let’s get there fast.”
He travelled a hundred yards or more and stopped. Where home was, where light in the face was, no light was, no house was.
“Extraordinary business,” Hornby said to the sky. “Where has it gone?”
“You tricked yourself,” the bastard of the sky replied. “You thought you saw a light….”
“I tell you it was here,” Hornby insisted.
“Re-trace your steps, Hornby. Come this way.”
Hornby agreed at last. “Now,” said Bastard Sky, “there it is.”
“Thank god,” said Hornby.
He began to make his way towards the light, his eyes glued upon it this time. But slipped. A patch of ice cracked under the snow. He was in, knee-deep.
If Sky had let him down, now it was Creek (Hornby Creek on the map) and he was aware of the great danger in which he stood. The freezing subterranean ice-cap of water had come over the top of his boot and there were two options open to him. He could try and gain the safety of his house though to all appearances with his eye unstuck, unglued from the light, it had vanished again into the sky. Or he could light a fire in the open without delay and endeavour to thaw his foot out, dry his boot out.
He was filled all at once with a sense of the callouses of infinity (the kiss of gloved hand upon booted foot), numb climax, freezing danger rolled into one enduring fabric as though Sky and Creek in deceiving him as reflections of many a dead mate or vanished expedition were ensnaring him into a revelation of the workshop of the gods….
He stood upon the very rim of ghostland — one collective foot already in the grave, one legendary cabin already in the sky. Thus as he began to ascend and descend Sky and Creek he became aware that there were two Hornbys projected from him into the cosmos. One was a man drawn out of the hat of millions, so steeped in extremity and danger beyond humanity’s lot as to become a private body in the stars, quintessential solitariness, Arctic legend of soul. The other was a man standing in the boot of millions so benumbed by humanity’s lot as to die unsung, unheralded, Arctic function of non-memory, non-soul.
Had he as private of space who had conquered the stars achieved his goal, or as the world’s forgotten boot computerized an infinite desolation and an infinite stairway into the ambiguous family of man? …
Harp ceased his vivid and enormous and unfinished recital of the discovery of a new world. He had evoked such an unfathomable and rich correspondence between us that I felt strangely lost, strangely bewildered and yet face to face with him across a fire on the other side of the globe. “I hope,” I said, and pleaded with him across that living fire which drew us together, “you will not burn your father’s papers into a stoical wilderness.”
Harp looked at me and I sensed the correspondence with Marsden’s sackcloth map which had been draped across a chair.
“There,” I said, stabbing the map with a finger, “is Marsden Creek. Marsden’s legacy is everywhere.”
“Ah,” said Harp laughing a little, “have you not answered your own question? …”
*
“Mr. Goodrich, sir, Mr. Goodrich,” said Mrs. Glenwearie shaking Goodrich gently. Goodrich woke but for a moment or two could not tell where he was. Mrs. Glenwearie looked distressed. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Goodrich dear, but you were crying out….”
“I thought … where is he?”
“Where is who?”
Goodrich passed a drowsy hand over his eyes. “Perhaps he doesn’t exist. Perhaps I only dreamt….”
Mrs. Glenwearie moved to a window and opened it wide to let some air in upon the lingering odour of tobacco. “Now, sir, I’ll get you a nice high tea in a little while, as soon as I’ve straightened the room a bit.” She tilted Harp’s cigarette ash into a tray.
“He was here,” said Goodrich.
“Mr. Goodrich dear,” said Mrs. Glenwearie gently. “I don’t understand half of the things you say. If it’s the wee gentleman in the long coat he left shortly after I got back from the butcher’s. I was very late today. And then you fell asleep for a bit.”
Goodrich laughed and tried to make a joke of things. “I need an early night,” he said, “after this afternoon’s session.”