As now, he took his hand from her and stood, staring at the lights of the Jersey shore, unable to believe that this was New York, and he was leaving it; and as dreadfully convinced that it was.
Even now the name Anselm threw him into a whirl, the more so now if what they had said a few evenings before, what Hannah had said and they had accepted, if it were true: and if it were true then ever) thing else was true.
With one hand in his pocket he clutched the gauze-and-news-paper-wrapped tooth, as Anselm's dream, — I dreamt about you last night. . I'm sure it was you. . and the tooth almost came through to bite into his palm. At that the other hand came up in reflex to take her arm, and missed, though her arm did not move at all there on the raiclass="underline" missed only so that his knuckles rubbed her bare arm and she turned that anticipating vacant beauty upon him, her eyes unblinking though the wind was rising and came round the upper decks full upon them now, as she waited, awaited his temper: and Anselm persisted, the more strongly, on the floor, ritu quadrupedis, — Succubus. .
The daring instant of a smile on her face provoked him, — Aren't you cold? Until he asked her she might have been anywhere; now with his prompting question the smile and, if it had been warmth, left her. She shook, three times or four, sharply as though to atone for a multitude of slight shivers.
He looked away, not toward the shore, or where the shore might be, but up forward; and saw only a man on the deck above leaning at the rail, a man in a Chesterfield with the collar up, a black Homburg hat and a long face which seemed to empty through the triangular chin, that, and a glint of gold, at the cuff was it? a finger?
— Don't you want to come in?
After a moment he left her there, and with a shudder of cold went below himself. Roll and go, the motion of the ship was becoming familiar and inevitable to hundreds of people, the sole reciprocation that bound them together.
Already through the Narrows and into the Lower Bay, past Sandy Hook, and into ten fathoms of water when Stanley realized that it was some time since he'd left.her out on deck, and hurried up stairs and passages again with an anxious look on his face.
She was not where he'd left her. But he was confused enough with the unfamiliarity of it all to be uncertain that this was where he'd left her, where he stood at the rail and started to call out, at the moment a wave hit the side and threw up spray, and knocked his voice right back into him. He swung round and looked at the water, terrified.
He heard her call him; and he looked still more alarmed.
She was up on the deck above, and waved to him. He saw her there with great relief, finally, and saw a shadow that had been standing near her turn and disappear in the dark. When she came down, he could not scold her for the fright she'd given him, and so he reprimanded her, — You shouldn't go up there, that's First Class. . and he pulled the door open with more effort than he would have thought necessary.
— Was there somebody up there with you?. . were you talking to somebody?
— Only to the cold man.
— Well you. . you ought to be more careful, you can't just go talking to people.
— That is what he said, when he heard her singing.
— Who?
— The Cold Man.
At the foot of a staircase leading to First Class, Stanley saw Father Martin descending, and let go her arm. Then as abruptly he took it again, up high where there was some sleeve, and came on resolute, slowing his step and so hers, for the greeting, the introduction, the explanations: but Father Martin passed, looking him straight in the face, without a word, without a shade of recognition, the medieval lines of his face standing out livid as though he had seen a ghost.
Off Ambrose Light, there was some commotion. The ship almost ran down a rowboat in which a Chinaman, equipped with three New Jersey road maps, was setting out confidently for home, and had already got this far from the land into which he had been smuggled so many years before.
But Stanley didn't hear of the incident until a day or so later. Down a passage before him, she commenced singing, her voice very low,
— Blessed Mary went a-walking. . Over Jordan river. .
— Where did you learn that? he demanded.
— The song you taught her?
— But I… I never taught you that.
— Stephen met her, fell a-talking. .
— Who is this. . cold man? he interrupted her again.
— The Cold Man, and he carries his arm like the boy did.
— Like. . what do you mean, in a sling?
— In a black one.
Inside, Stanley stood looking vacantly at The Story of Barbara Ubrick. Then he took her bundle from the chair where he intended to sleep.
— Blessed Mary went a-walking. .
— Come… he said, knelt now beside the bed where the yellowed crucifix was already hung, already muttering the Pater noster qui es in coelis he intended to teach her, the metal deck cutting his knees. The engines sounded in a constantly renewed heave forth, as her knee where she stood beside him, brought her weight against his arm, and away, and against him the more heavily as the prow far ahead shuddered into a trough, into twenty fathoms of water, and without a word he drew her down.
III. THE LAST TURN OF THE SCREW
Así por la calle pasa quien debe amor!
Spain is a land to flee across. Every town, and every capital, is a destination; and the names which ring with refuge to the fugitive mount with finality to him traveling relentlessly unpursued, setting destinations one after another whose reasons for being so cease upon arrival, and he must move on, to provide that interim of purpose with which each new destination endows the journey however short, and search each pause with reasons anxiously mistaken drawing nearer, with each destination, to the last.
Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse, laboring their courses with the effort of journeys never before made, straining the attention on sufferance of minutes passed separately until concentration is exhausted, and no other pace conceivable. The very distances become greater, through landscape irreplaceable by the exhausted fancy, unaltered by the most resourceful imagination, impossible at last any other land, oppressed by any other sky.
Five miles behind lay Gibraltar, crouching across the bay from Algeciras heavy-buttocked and dumb, the hulk of an animal in immense malformity with lights stacked glittering at its base like suppliant candles round a monstrous idol.
This time of the year, the levanter blew in its chill from the east, shrouding the rock and bringing dampness and an overcast to the sky. Algeciras showed no light but what was left over from day, and when even that was gone dull glows appeared at last in the narrow cobbled streets leading up to the plaza where trees bore oranges among benches tiled orange and white and blue round a dry fountain. There, when the one-arm church sounded the flat planng of its bell, and the dim lights of the plaza, burning an hour or two now in lusterless illumination of the quiet, failed and went out, that quiet proved not what it had seemed, not an immanent thing at all, but imposition: back down those narrow streets the town seethed behind shuttered casements with music and the violence of voices in strained extremes, driven on frenzied patterns of clapped hands, broken by the disciplined clatter of castanets. Cafe Pinero was betrayed almost two blocks off by the strident crash of the girl's heels on the frail wooden stage. A mute idiot winced in the single door where an unshaven man in a lambskin jacket and dirty white turban pushed him aside to enter, and leave him standing spent in masturbatory gestures for the dancer beyond the round tabletops and coffee cups, turning when she was done, twisted, with a whine, away from the glasses and smoke, frantically hopeless back to the narrow street, drawn by the heels of a passer-by loud on the stones going down the hill unsteadily, with a pause of distress to brush a spot of moonlight off the sleeve, pursued once more by the wail, — sangre negro en mi corazón. . down, toward the bay again and a hotel whose high-ceilinged rooms drown the transient overnight among sunken ribs of ponderous furniture, to surface him rapidly with dawn among tiles of differing intent, exaggerated on rising, distorted in mismatching deep and then not as reflections underwater, bold below as a public lavatory, consumed on shallowing in Moorish intricacy as light separates the louvers and the train sets out before sunrise for Madrid.