Goodrich glimpsed her with the scarecrow eye which now possessed him: she stood upon the brink of a new and inevitable mainstream rebellion of soul — a new cult of fascination with freedom. Marsden continued, blissfully unaware apparently of the spell he had cast upon alclass="underline"
“God, for his great mercies’ sake, stir up some Phinehas, Elias or Jehu, that the blood of abominable idolaters may pacify God’s wrath…. Delay not thy vengeance, O Lord, but let the earth swallow them up; and let them go down quick to the hells.”
He stopped now and stepped away from his scarlet and black slate and Goodrich discerned upon the unique and rich material compounded of sackcloth and ashes which draped the chair in the room, intricate scenes stitched in black thread and therefore so reticent in background as to be almost invisible until one’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkroom/backcloth dimensions implicit in the scarecrow. He could see also — as his eyes grew accustomed to the strange reticent fabric of catastrophe — the huge head of John the Baptist woven into the globe. At first, he wondered, would it send a delicious shudder through Salome/Jennifer as though those blind eyes could see emotional tumbling rivers, emotional fires, passions unleashed in volcanoes within which whole populations tumbled?
It was an intensely modern dream enacted from West to East as well as within epic abortions — stateless refugees/planned or engineered castaways.
“Look,” Marsden said, softly pointing to the intimate and intricate scenes draped across my Goodrich sitting-room until everything became an anomaly. “What could be more modern, more consistent with act-of-man slate as well as act-of-god slate? Now, Jennifer,” his tone changed and he gave her a stick of chalk, “don’t be afraid to sketch. It’s rich stuff and everything you do can be erased.”
“Sketch what?” asked Jennifer.
“Why, sketch how he sees you.”
“How he sees me? What do you mean?”
“It’s your triumph, Jennifer. That’s what I mean. The head of John the Baptist is yours. The ball is in your court. Whatever he says, whatever archaic or modern dubbing we put on his lips — whatever fierce dubbing we use — and for that matter it could be selective speeches from contemporary figures in the New York Times or the London Telegraph or Reuter’s despatches — whatever words I dub on those lips, it’s the eyes in the head which count in the end, which speak. How do they see you, Jennifer? You are our resurgent Gorgon, our twentieth-century fascination with freedom. How do those eyes address you? How do they see you, Jennifer? Go on. Sketch….”
Jennifer held the stick of chalk in her hand. A tide of defiance began to rise slowly within her, almost inevitably from the canvas in which Marsden sought to immerse her. Love, hate, love, hate. Now with sudden perversity she drew a square box with a slit running down the middle. Marsden sipped his drink, sensed the rising tide in her. “Is that all, Jennifer?”
“He sees me as a pillarbox,” she said drily. “An old pillarbox — Martian female perhaps — but a pillarbox all the same. I suppose he’s right. I consume everything nowadays.”
“What do you consume?”
Jennifer thought a little, hardened herself against the Master. “The post is free,” she said at last. “Once you lick the right stamp. Anything, everything goes into it. This morning I received a book (from whom I haven’t the slightest notion) entitled”—she paused deliberately—“How to Fuck.” She spoke almost unflinchingly, Goodrich thought, and looked into the eyes of John the Baptist with a strange yet child-like cynicism.
6
Harp arrived a few days later. I was the only one in and I ushered him into the sitting-room. He insisted he had had a late breakfast at his hotel and all I could persuade him to have was coffee. He was a chain smoker and with subtle rings, which dissipated themselves into the high ceiling of the room, wreathed himself in evanescent hills and valleys. He could hardly have been more than five feet two inches tall. His legs were short and his arms long. He wore a long white overcoat — semi-military, semi-medical.
His face, however, charmed and delighted me beyond measure. Perhaps the kindest most unpredictable face I had ever seen. A face and head which may have been dug up from some forgotten workshop of the gods where it had lain discarded on the ground or condemned as useless ages ago; so much so that his hair looked white and trodden and there was a kicked look to his chin — a kind of unpolished stubble where the feet of the elements had trod.
He seemed the representation of technical vicissitudes of feeling which sought endlessly to cope with an interminable mopping-up operation across a giant landscape, an enigmatic landscape that was bound to dwarf him in a sense.
He spoke of his environment and of the seasons. One vignette he drew was an evocation of late September. The trees around his house were clothed in a symphony of colour, yellows and reds and scarlets; and long flitting shadows of clouds, light as a feather in the water, mingled with a palette of sun.
He developed his sketches and evoked such an intimate canvas of his backgrounds that we stood there at the edge of an enormous blend of intensely blue water and sky, enormous spectrum of sky and water, until night fell and we struggled down the hill and up again with wood to light a fire in the middle of the earth. To live in a house in the wilderness (cold sky) is like tunnelling a cave into the earth (cold earth) and the ghosts of fires or stars long-dead are rekindled.
“Do you know, Harp,” I said. “Here we are in a house in Edinburgh. And the globe itself seems to be at our fingertips. I have never seen you before. And yet the fact remains that I feel as if we have known each other from the beginning of time. It’s another of Marsden’s phantoms or fascinations.” I nodded with a kind of submission to Marsden’s mirror or globe.
Harp nodded too, his face swept by a backlash of feeling — mopping-up, preserving relationships. “If we probe and reflect and think we may discover we are related, Goodrich.”
“Impossible,” I said. “It’s one thing to evoke a magical commonwealth (all races, all times). It’s another thing to prove it. Tell me. Who is he really? Who is Doctor Marsden?”
Harp’s face was besieged by a sudden passion for self-abandonment — mopping-up as well as preserving and screening intimate relations within the ghostly family of man. I waited.
“My father’s name was Hornby,” Harp volunteered, and appeared to go off at a tangent.
“Hornby,” I said. “That rings a bell. There was a John Hornby. I’ve read about him. George Whalley wrote about him. I quote: ‘the way he died has raised obstacles almost insurmountable to anybody who wishes to discover the true nature of that vivid and desolate man’.”
“End of quote,” said Harp with his mopping-up smile again. “Imagine Hornby’s ghost tapping out fiery morse in the heart of a Canadian wilderness.”
“Was he a legend or was he a man?” I asked. “What do we know of him? I have read that he was quite amiable, even gregarious as a young man but all that changed as he grew older and became addicted to solitariness, courage and endurance. He died on an expedition into the Arctic in the late nineteen twenties.”