There was a moment’s uncertain pause; then Laurie moved nearer to Ralph, as he had with Mr. Straike. They had a very small island to defend, he thought, a very isolated position.
Going back into circulation, he met people’s good intentions as well as he could. A bride was by definition happy, a stepson not; the balance of proper sentiment was, as he had already found out, too much for most of them. Usually they asked him what he was going to do, in the evident hope that he would produce some fortunate prospect, which would relieve them at once of their concern. Just as it seemed that all this would go on forever, the train party moved off, drawing the lesser bodies cometlike in its tail. He and Ralph were left alone with the gritty wooden hall, the broken meats, the head waiter bowing over the tip, and two spare magnums of champagne. He gave one to the waiters, and they went out and put the other in the car.
It was a soft, damp evening, smelling of black rotten leaves and wood smoke. As they got out at the gate, the scent of the cedar came to meet them. They had hardly spoken, except when Laurie showed Ralph the way.
Leaving the lit hall, it had seemed quite dark outside; but now the clouds had opened, and dusk was discovered looking its last from the depths of the sky. You could see the yellow bronze of the lichen on the roof, the iron lace of the porch threaded with the winter thorns of the roses. Along a crack in the blackout a pulse of firelight was beating. The cedar stretched its great dark hands in the gesture of a wizard commanding sleep.
Ralph said, “So this is your house.”
“Yes. It’s been mine for four hours, now. … It looks different.”
Ralph stood looking in silence, and then said quietly, “It couldn’t be different.”
They went up the path together, not speaking till Ralph said, “You’ll keep this place?”
“If I can.”
“You must. It goes with you. It would be bad luck to sell it.”
Laurie turned, under the black floating planes of the cedar. “Do you believe in luck?”
“I’m a sailor,” Ralph said.
Laurie knew he must have slept, because the fire was dying. Once or twice they had dozed before, but not for long; they had opened their eyes at the dry fall of the settling embers, and thrown into the last flames a handful of fir cones, or some of the sawn spruce trimmings from the stack. Now, under a delicate husk of ash, one drowsy red eye was left which only the dark made visible. He lay for a while sleepily staring into it. It was growing cold, but he was warm enough; and it seemed that if he didn’t move, time would stop also and nothing else need ever exist but this. But sleep ebbed away from him, as little to be commanded as the tide, and he felt how the bright fire, burning so long in a closed room, had drunk up the air. He rolled softly off the edge of the mattress onto the hearth rug, got up, and opened the blackout of the nearest window. Swinging the casement back, he tasted the quick air of the night that moves toward daybreak, piercingly cold and sweet. Everything was drowned in that remote, secret, and solitary moonlight which, rising late on a world already empty, will not set but be extinguished by the dawn. The moon would linger, a pale spent wafer, in the blue morning sky.
To Laurie’s eyes, sensitized by almost perfect darkness, the room behind him seemed now to be only in twilight, patched with white shafts almost as clear as day. In one of these Ralph was lying face upward, his fair hair falling back from his forehead, his arm relaxed and empty. He looked marmoreally calm, as if he had died with his mind at rest.
Stealthily the cold silent night slid around Laurie its noose of solitude. But it was only he who was alone. Ralph lay quiet with the image he had created, the beloved and desired, for whom nothing was good enough, of whom nothing was demanded but to trust and receive.
It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted. But Laurie was unhappy with this thought and pushed it away, for Ralph had been very kind to him. He looked at the upturned face and saw how in sleep it did not sag, but held its strength in a kind of innocent pride. He had asked for nothing, except to give everything. He had made no claims. He had offered all he had, as simply as a cigarette or a drink, for a palliative of present pain. He had been single-hearted; and he slept in peace. It was only Laurie who was awake.
He hadn’t been asked to take any responsibility. He need not accept the knowledge that he had moved to this with instinctive purpose, as animals move toward water over miles of bush. It seemed to him now that he had exploited even the loss of his mother to get, without taking the blame for it, what he must long have been desiring. If his wishes had not been fulfilled with such experienced intuition, he need never, perhaps, have been certain what they were. Now he knew, and must go on knowing.
But that was only the part that concerned himself.
His hunger for compensation, once indulged, had driven him to the insistent egoism of an unwanted child demanding reassurance. Not satisfied with the sufficient evidence of his senses, he had longed to prove that he wasn’t receiving only kindness; he needed the affirmation of power. At some stage of a broken midnight conversation, he had said, “I’ve often had a feeling that there’s nowhere I really belong.” He had hardly known himself what he wanted; but Ralph had said, without a moment’s hesitation, “You belong with me. As long as we’re both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else’s. That’s a promise.” His voice had been free of emotion, almost businesslike. He might have been speaking to his lawyer about his will.
For a moment, it had sobered Laurie into self-knowledge; conquest is intoxicating, but a gift makes you think. Ralph had been concerned to notice him thinking, so early in the night, with the empty room upstairs. It hadn’t taken Ralph long to put a stop to that. He had considerable skill and experience, and his heart was in it.
Now he slept in the deep peace of valor and sacrifice; and Laurie, only half understanding the reproaches of his own nature, thought gropingly: I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me too; and no one can do that.
Facing at last, in the lunar stillness, the thought he had been so long in flight from, he knew that Andrew wouldn’t have tried to do it. Andrew was the only one who hadn’t believed that one could be rescued from all one’s troubles by being taken out of oneself. He had a certain natural instinct for the hard logic of love.
Outside, in the bleaching lye of the moonlight, washed of their distracting colors, the shapes of things burned in archetypal truth. Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable, and the good so implacably the enemy of the best.
He felt that his body had grown bitterly cold, and wondered how he had ignored its protests for so long. Returning by the track of the moonlight, he lay down again. Ralph had turned on his side, his closed eyes still smoothed by sleep. Turned by the light to the color of some pale palladian metal, the fair hair, which Laurie had seen for so long only in order and discipline, lay tumbled like a boy’s. A secret thrill of triumph, none the less strong for being mixed with gentler things, drew Laurie irresistibly; he reached out stealthily and touched it. When he moved away, Ralph’s eyes had opened. They were smiling, and with fear Laurie saw in how deep a happiness, too silent and too deep, eating like rust the core of his defenses.
From some great distance, thin and archaic and perilous, the first cock-crow sounded.
13
IN THE MORNING, BEFORE they left, they packed Laurie’s room together.
It had been Ralph who had wakened in time, alert and resourceful, and while Laurie was still dizzy with sleep had stage-managed the house to look as if he had slept upstairs. He had straightened the living room and removed the champagne glasses and the rest of the debris, had made tea and waked Laurie with it and asked him how soon he was expecting the woman to come and clean. Now they were packing the things from the cupboard; or, rather, Ralph had organized by rapid stages a system under which he packed, while Laurie only sorted things and gave directions. The cupboard was emptying, the trunk nearly full. Ralph broke off what he was saying in a convulsive yawn; in sudden catlike relaxation he lay back on the carpet where he had been sitting, stretched, folded his arms behind his head, and looked up at Laurie, smiling.