And still he knew it was impossible to abandon an inexplicable desire and hope, the invisible pull in his fingers, a tautness and tension within, around which had been wrapped all doubtful matter and flesh like bait on a fisherman’s hook. A long bar of secret music would pass upon the imbedded strings and his flesh quaked and shook. The nervous tension of the day — that had now rooted him in the bow — had broken every barrier of memory and the tide came flooding upon him. He felt the fine stringed bars of a universal ecstasy tuning within him beyond life and death, past and present, until they neither ceased nor stopped.
He was a young man again — in the prime of maturity — meeting his first true invisible love. She had appeared out of the forest — from a distant mission — far from Sorrow Hill. She was as dark as the curious bark of a tree he remembered, and round and promising like sapodilla. Schomburgh was a stranger to her it seemed (she had not yet discovered his name) fair-skinned, older by wiser years, athletic and conscious in his half-stooping, half-upright carriage of an ancient lineage and active tradition amongst the riverfolk.
What a chase it was. He cornered her and poured upon her his first and last outburst of frenzied self-forgetting eloquence until he felt the answer of her lips. She smelt like leaves growing on top the rocks in the sun in the river, a dry and yet soft bursting smell, the dryness of the hot scampering sun on the fresh inwardness of a strong resilient plant. She smelt dry and still soft. The vaguest kerchief of breath had wiped her brow after her exertion running with fear and joy.
He had hardly found her when she had gone. So incredible it was he rubbed his eyes again as he sat staring into the water. He set out after her but it was as if a superior fury — insensible and therefore stronger and abler than he — had propelled her away. It dawned upon him — like an inward tremor and voice — that she had learnt his name — from what source and person he did not know since she had spent such a very short time at Sorrow Hill — and this had engineered her suspicion and flight. Dread seized his mind, the dread of sexual witchcraft. He drew at last to the distant door of the Mission where she lived, and the dubious light of the fantastic wheel of dawn strengthened and sliced his mind. It was an ancient runaway home of his father’s he had reached. His father had settled here late in life — with a new mistress — and founded a separate family. Some said he guillotined his birth-right for a song, a flimsy strip of a thing, beautiful as a fairy. All was rumour and legend without foundation. Even as a boy Schomburgh had known the truth and dismissed the exaggerated fairy-tale. His father was dead. That was the living truth. And yet he could not stir one step beyond where he now stood. He stood there it seemed for the passage of months until he grew greyer than the ghost of the stars and the moon and the sun. She was waiting for him he told himself, like any young girl — frightened in a first indiscretion and affair — nevertheless waiting for love to enter and take her everlastingly. Her folk and parents would kill the fatted calf and welcome him like a son. He shuddered, and the vibration struck him inwardly, a lamentation in the wind, fingers on the strings of his spirit, the melancholy distant sound of a raining harp. His fear and horror lifted a little as he heard it — riveted to the ghostly threshold and ground of his life. It no longer mattered whether Carroll was his nephew or his son or both. He had heard clearer than ever before the distant music of the heart’s wish and desire. But even now he tried to resist and rebuke himself for being merely another nasty sentimental old man.
*
Vigilance bowed for Schomburgh, his paddle glancing and whirling along the gunwhale, equally alert and swift on both sides when the occasion demanded. His penetrating trained eye saw every rock, clothing it with a lifelikeness that mirrored all past danger and design. His vision of peril meant an instantaneous relationship to safety. He offered himself to the entire crew — as he bowed — a lookout to prove their constant reality — and he hid his tears from everyone. The truth was Carroll was his stepbrother. Vigilance had introduced him to Uncle Schomburgh, and the old man had stared at the ultimate ghost he both dreaded and loved.
Vigilance had been a boy of thirteen when his father had taken Carroll’s mother into his house as his wife, the boy Carroll, her only child, being four or five years old then. Vigilance was the eldest of seven, and their mother had died a couple of months ago in her last childbirth. Carroll’s mother thus became the adoptive mother of the Vigilance brood who were lucky to get such a young woman and stepmother for the large family, the youngest of whom was an infant two months old.
She was lucky too to find the protection of the Vigilance family for her child whose father no one had ever seen. The name the child bore was little-known in those parts. Her husband bore her no malice and wished her son to take his name as a final safeguard. This she resisted. She felt it would do no good — the name Carroll was as innocuous and distant a name as any she could choose. She did not wish to attract upon her head and the head of her new family the hoax of sin in an implacable future. Vigilance could not remember ever addressing his stepbrother as anything else but Carroll. In fact this habit of using the surname was the curious custom amongst most families in the enormous dreaming forest who dreaded mislaying and losing each other. After a time everybody believed Carroll’s name was a true one. It were as if they had a long and a short memory at one and the same time so that while they forgot the name Carroll’s mother had borne (as one is inclined to forget maiden names) they helped to invent and forge a name for her son which established distant ties they only dimly dreamt of. Carroll was one burning memory and substance for his mother and another dimmer incestuous substance and myth for his uncertain and unknown father folk. He had become a relative ghost for all as all ultimately became a ghost for everyone.
It was a strange and confusing tradition beyond words. Vigilance saw that Schomburgh had been overwhelmed in some unnatural way that fractured his vision and burdened him with a sense of fantasy and hoax. It was the darkest narcissism that strove with him and fought against accepting Carroll’s name as Carroll, against relinquishing paternity to some one who was still untouched by and unknown to the spirit of guilt. He wished to give the boy his own name but the desire frightened and killed him. No one knew and understood better than a mother what a name involved. It was the music of her undying sacrifice to make and save the world. Sometimes he accepted and grew enamoured of the thought that Carroll was his nephew and nothing else. Often times he lived in the flight of mortal gloom and fear Carroll was nothing to him at all, a bastard memory from a bastard hellish tribe and succession and encounter. Who and what was Carroll? Schomburgh had glimpsed, Vigilance knew with an inborn genius and primitive eye, the living and the dead folk, the embodiment of hate and love, the ambiguity of everyone and no one. He had recognized his true son, nameless out of shame and yet named with a new distant name by a muse and mother to make others equally nameless out of mythical shame and a name, and to forge for their descendants new mythical far-flung relationships out of their nameless shame and fear.