“Who want to fool you?” Cameron cried again. He listened closely to his own voice. It was the voice of dread: the voice of dread at the thought that nothing existed to fool and terrorize anybody unless one chose to imagine one was bewitched and a fool all one’s life. The terrible sound and vision struck him a blow, sharp and keen and intimate as a knife bursting into a drum. The ground felt that it opened bringing to ruin years of his pride and conceit.
“Who want to fool you?” Cameron shouted in rage and indignation. He wished desperately the oracular grave under his feet would close for ever and disappear and he could cherish once again his old pagan desire and ambition. It struck him like an acute dismemberment and loss and injustice.
Jennings jeered — “You silly dope, Cameron you,” he laughed. “I shit on devils like you. By the time you fall out of one scrape you land in another. Who is you to ask me a thing?”
“What I want to know —” Cameron was in a greater rage than ever — “who trying to fool who?”
“O buzz off” — Jennings laughed. “You is just anybody’s plaything and wood, Cameron, a piece of what I call flotsam and jetsam” — he spoke jeeringly and a little sententiously, advertising his phrases and words. “Me?” he cried. “I is me own fucking revolution, equal to all, understand? I can stand pon the rotten ground face to face with the devil. And I don’t gamble pon any witch in heaven or hell. I lef’ that behind me long long ago.” His voice grew wicked and chiding — “You is one of them old time labouring parasite, Cammy boy, you is such a big grown man but you still hankering for a witch and a devil like a child in a fairy-tale Cammy, boy. You must be learning more sense than that by now! You mean to say you ain’t seeing daylight yet Cammy, me boy?”
Cameron saw red. His arm shot out and burst Jennings’ mouth. Jennings’ look lost its jeering ease and smile in a startled flash of surprise. He wiped his mouth, even as he tasted the salt on his lips, and he spied the blood on his hand. He sprang. Cameron took the over-eager blow on his shoulder, ducking where another deadly wild fist crashed to his skull. Jennings went mad and Cameron felt an onslaught such as he had never dreamed to face in his life. He defended himself, retaliating with the swiftest flying fists in the world. An overpowering sense of injury smote the air again and again in their joint nameless breath.
“Stop,” Donne shouted. “Stop.” The voice was so terrible and full of suppressed turbulence and demonic authority, it halted them like an overflow of scalding self-confidence and self-knowledge.
“Stop.”
They were turned to stone stung to the bitterest attention by what they knew not. Jennings remained powerful, thrusting, the air of a primitive republican boxer upon him, and Cameron stood, heavy and bundled like rock, animal-wise, conscious of a rootless superstition and shifting mastery he had once worshipped in himself and now felt crumbling and lost. Donne stood pointing at them with an air of aristocratic fury beyond words. His eyes were liquid and misty and dark. It was a picture to be long remembered in an age that stood at the door of freedom though no one knew yet what that truly meant. It was a grave of idols and the resurrection of an incalculable devouring principle.
*
Once again the crew came around to the musing necessity in the second day’s journey into the nameless rapids above Mariella. They had hardly entered the falls when they knew their lives were finished in the raging torrent and struggle. The shock of the nameless command and the breath of the water banished thought and the pride of mockery and convention as it banished every eccentric spar and creed and wishful certainty they had always adored in every past adventure and world.
They felt naked and helpless, unashamed of their nakedness and still ashamed in a way that was a new experience for them. They saw and heard only the boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end. And the terror of this naked self-governing reality made them feel unreal and unwanted for ever in dreaming themselves up alive. They wished the man who stood before them, or next to them, was real and true and capable of exercising the last power of banishment over them by dismissing their own fiction and unreality and life.
The monstrous thought came to them that they had been shattered and were reflected again in each other at the bottom of the stream.
The unceasing reflection of themselves in each other made them see themselves everywhere save where they thought they had always stood.
After awhile this horrifying exchange of soul and this identification of themselves with each other brought them a partial return and renewal of confidence, a neighbourly wishful fulfilment and a basking in each other’s degradation and misery that they had always loved and respected. It was a partial rehabilitation of themselves, the partial rehabilitation of a tradition of empty names and dead letters, dead as the buttons on their shirt. It was all well and good they reasoned as inspired madmen would to strain themselves to gain that elastic frontier where a spirit might rise from the dead and rule the material past world. All well and good was this resurgence and reconnoitre they reasoned. But it was doomed again from the start to meet endless catastrophe: even the ghost one dreams of and restores must be embalmed and featured in the old lineaments of empty and meaningless desire.
A groan rose from their lips to silence their half-hopeful half-treacherous thoughts that oscillated over their predicament as the sky dreams indifferently over the earth. The vessel had struck a rock. And they saw it was the bizarre rock and vessel of their second death. The life they had clung to and known before was turning into a backward incoherent dream of the first insensible death they had experienced. Even so a groan rose to their lips and a longing to re-establish that first empty living hollowness and brutal habitation. Surely ignorance was better than their present unendurable self-knowledge and discomfort. Their lips however were smothered and silenced in the hunger of spray.
The boat struck and glanced into the foaming current on the edge of overturning. Wishrop danced at the bow. His paddle hooked and caught a sharp point an inch beneath the belly of the vessel’s wood. He hurtled into the air like a man riding a wheel. A nameless gasp riddled and splintered the crew. He vanished.
The boat appeared to right itself miraculously. And Jennings’ machine — which Cameron kept a sturdy hand upon when Jennings had sprained his wrist in the struggle — sent a hideous strangled roar out of the water. It had lost its vulgar mechanical fervour and its enthusiasm was dwindling into an indefatigable revolving spider, hopeless and persistent.
Hopeless to dream of finding Wishrop in the maelstrom. He too had dwindled in a moment. They had seen his hands aloft two times quickly after his immersion for all the world like fingers clinging to the spokes and spider of a wheel. The webbed fingers caught and held for an instant a half-submerged rock but the crouching face was too slippery and smooth and they had slipped and gone. The wheeling water lifted him spread-eagled once again for an instant. He disappeared from their view. But rose still again — a skull on whom the hair had been plastered for a changeling demon. It was impossible to say. Anything was everything in the whirling swift moment and in the fantasy of their shattered boat and life. All rose and were submerged a hundred feet or yards apart or ages.
The boat still crawled, driven by the naked spider of spirit. Wishrop’s flesh had been picked clean by perai like a cocerite seed in everyone’s mouth. They shuddered and spat their own — and his — blood and death-wish. It had been forcibly and rudely ejected. And this taste and forfeiture of self-annihilation bore them into the future on the wheel of life.