After this, there was a retreat into commonplaces; then presently Ralph began to talk about the sea. They had returned to the fire, but this time Laurie wouldn’t take the armchair. The rug was comfortable to lie on, sprawling with his chin in his fists. He lay there, getting heavy with the heat and the residual fumes of the gas fire.
“… I said, ‘I’m sorry, senhor, but I shipped with you as a passenger to Beira, and I’m not prepared to navigate for you under conditions like that: either your mate’s mad or he isn’t; if he isn’t, you don’t need me, and if he is, you’ll have to put him under restraint even if he is your brother-in-law, because I can’t do with him under my feet in the chartroom weeping and praying and playing about with knives.’ So finally he …”
As he lay listening, Laurie’s whole being seemed to relax in a sigh of mysterious contentment. Even the day’s disaster withdrew into a distance where it was known rather than felt. All the tangles of his life seemed looser and easier to resolve. He didn’t want to take his mind from the story, or disturb with analysis this fragile happiness and security, which were what one might feel if some legend, dear to one’s childhood but long abandoned, were marvelously proved true.
“… these big ocean-going dhows that come over from Arabia with the monsoon. They have a high carved poop like a caravel, and a raked-up bowsprit. There were a lot of them coming into the Old Harbor the way they do, covered in tassels and pennants with the crews singing and dancing on the decks, and beating drums and gongs. Just after we’d passed them …”
The strange feeling of fulfillment touched Laurie again; suddenly he remembered and understood. In the weeks of that summer holiday seven years before, after he had read the Phaedrus by the stream in the wood, he had gone for long walks alone, and, returning, sat in the evening by a September fire, so silent and enclosed that more than once his mother had asked if he was well. It was of this that he had been dreaming.
Involuntarily he moved his hands so that they covered his face, as the dream came back in all the high colors of boyhood: his own room with the fire he had, as a rule, only on the first day of the holidays, furnished as he had thought, then, he would want it when he was older; the flickering light on leather and books; and Ralph’s face at nineteen. In the dream there had always been a pause in which he had looked up and said, “Next time you go away, I’m going with you”; and Ralph, who hadn’t had a first name in those days, had looked down all the same and answered, “Of course.”
“… She was the filthiest ship I ever set foot in, garbage trodden into the decks, Indian kids piddling in the scuppers, the officer on watch was drunk, and the stink was something you could hardly …”
Laurie took his hands from his face and looked up: at the room, the blackout curtains fastened with safety-pins; at the padded fingers of the glove lying on Ralph’s knee; he could feel in his lame leg the pull of the cobbled muscles, and in his heart the bruise that couldn’t be forgotten for long. Life is cruel, he thought; leaving out war and all that wholesale stuff, human life is essentially cruel. Sometimes you can feel a smile. The Greeks felt it. Apollo Loxias at Delphi smiling in the smoke behind the oracle, and saying, “But I don’t mean what you mean.”
“… came tearing up to say it was typhoid they had on board, as if that were something astonishing.”
“Yes?” said Laurie. A part of his mind, which had never lost touch with the story, had become aware of a pause. “Yes, go on, what happened then?”
“Oh, of course that put us all into quarantine, so I missed the job with Union Castle after all. Spud, you shouldn’t lie down flat like that in front of a gas fire, you’ll fill yourself up with carbon monoxide or whatever it is. Are you all right?”
“Yes. Of course I am.”
“Because we’ll have to go now, or you’ll be late back.”
Laurie began to get up, turning himself into a sitting position and catching hold of the chair-arm to pull on. He sat there for a moment, his head beside Ralph’s knees, and this sharp sense of life’s cruelty trembling in him like an arrow that has just struck. “It was such a good story; you might finish it.”
“There isn’t much more, and there’s not time anyway. I thought you’d dropped off.”
“I could have listened all night. Most people get muddled and have to keep going back.”
“I used to keep a notebook and write all that sort of nonsense down. Look at the time, we’ll have to get a move on.”
“I wish I’d got a late pass tonight. I wish I could stay.”
Ralph put the good hand on his shoulder and sat looking down at him with his brows drawn together. “Poor old Spud, what a hell of a day you’ve had.” He rose smartly to his feet and helped Laurie up.
Just as they were starting, he said, “By the way, how about some aspirin?”
“What for?” Laurie asked.
“Why, for the leg, of course.”
“My God,” said Laurie incredulously. “It hasn’t started. I’d forgotten it.”
“Well,” said Ralph briskly, “that’s one of your troubles on the way out.”
He turned off the light and the fire and they began to grope their way down the dark staircase. They had crossed the landing and begun on the lower flight and Ralph was guiding him a little around the turn of the stairs, when suddenly a round white eye of light leaped out, almost in their faces. It held them blinking for a moment and disappeared. There was a pause of complete silence, then a soft laugh.
Later on, it struck Laurie as odd that it should have affected him so strongly. Earlier in the year, he had spent a number of hours lying, helpless and in pain, exposed to the efforts of people openly trying to encompass his death. It was ludicrous to have one’s hair lifted by a mere giggle in the dark.
Ralph said in a cold empty voice, “Good night, Bunny.”
There was a brushing sound against the wall and a whiff of scent. The laugh came again, from the landing above them now.
“Good night, boys. You sillies not to have waited. It’s madly unlucky to pass on the stairs.”
10
THE OFFICE WAS DIFFERENT by artificial light. Major Ferguson had taken off his white coat and was sitting in uniform, to look more disciplinary. It only made him look like a doctor dressed as an officer. He stood Laurie at ease and fixed him with a calculated stare, at the same time tapping unconsciously with a pencil on a pair of prominent front teeth.
“Well, Odell. This is a pretty disgraceful business. Uhm?”
“Sir.”
“Got to deal with this now, I’m operating all tomorrow. It’s a serious matter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve taken a good deal of trouble with you one way and another. We don’t expect you to start setting the place by the ears as soon as you’re able to get about.”
“No, sir. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know what you’ve done? In effect you’ve forged an army order. Don’t you realize that’s a court-martial offense?”
“I see, sir.”
“As this is an E.M.S. hospital, the position’s slightly less cut-and-dried than it would be in a military one, fortunately for you. But use your common sense, man. If every relative a hospital sent for knew it might be a hoax, imagine the position. You can’t monkey about with these life-and-death services, it isn’t in the public interest. D’you understand?”
“I’m sorry, sir; yes.”
“Now I’ve had this man dragging his wife in here to beg you off, tears and intimate family histories and the Lord knows what. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, he insists you’ve kept him from desertion and manslaughter. What you’ve kept her from isn’t gone into, and it’s a matter of opinion I should say. However, in view of all this I’m not dealing with you as severely as I should have done otherwise. All passes stopped for a month.”