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« on: July 28, 2023, 08:54:31 am » |
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ORVIL sat in the snug bathroom. As usual, he imagined himself locked in there for ever.
‘What would I do if I were a prisoner locked in a cell no larger than this?’ he thought. ‘Would I go mad? What would I think about to keep myself sane? My food would be put through the skylight and I’d have nothing to watch all day but that tiny patch of light waxing and waning.’
His set of circumstances changed. He still had a room no larger than the bathroom, but he was rich and free now, if extremely recluse. The walls of his tiny hermitage were entirely encrusted with precious stones, enamel and painting. There would be diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topazes, carbuncles, garnets, agates, onyxes, aquamarines, jades, quartzes, pearls, amethysts, zircons, chalcedony, camelian, turquoise, malachite, amber. Whenever he learned a new name, he added it to his list. Set in these stones were the most beautiful Italian primitives and Russian ikons, together with mediaeval Limoges enamel plaques.
Orvil had learnt many interesting facts from the pages of the magazine Apollo, which he saw regularly at school when he went for his extra drawing-lessons; and so he was able, from his memory of these, to furnish the most intricate details for his fantastically rich dream closet.
The minute patch of floor was to be all of inlaid coloured marbles, outlined with a thread of gold, as cloisonne work is. The skylight and door would be draped, first in Chinese peach gauze woven with sacred and Imperial symbols, then with the heaviest, dullest silk crepe. Next would come brocade stiff and iridescent as beetles’ wings, and finally, cut-velvet from the dais of some Renaissance pope . . .
Orvil pulled the plug and left. His phantasy stopped the moment he unbolted the door; and it would not begin again until the next morning at the same time. He went down to breakfast.
With Ben’s coming, Orvil found himself drawn into knowing the other youths staying at the hotel. As he went into the dining-room, he had to nod to the Clifton boy, who had quickly become a great friend of Ben’s, because they both played games so well. He had also to take notice of the boy from Stowe, who at their first meeting on the lawn had told Orvil, apropos of nothing, that it was no longer permissible to speak of ‘Sex Appeal’---that was an old and squalid phrase.---From now on it was to be ‘Body Urge.’ Here he jerked his body forward in pantomime, to explain the words.
Orvil had realized at once that although this boy was almost exactly his own age, he would be unable to carry on any sort of conversation with him. He puritanically thought the Stowe boy unsavoury and dirty, and wished that he did not have to know him; but his mind had also made a note of the fact that the Stowe boy had a glistening new bicycle which he seemed to use very little. Orvil was waiting quietly for the right moment to borrow this bicycle. The thought of spinning away from everyone at the hotel was thrilling.
He sat down at his table and looked across the huge room. The Stowe boy was in the act of putting into his mouth the horn of a croissant roll piled high with dewy unspread curls of butter. Orvil watched and saw him again dab the butter straight from the dish to the roll without spreading it. Orvil smiled and said, “Good morning.” They were both alone at their tables, for the Stowe boy’s mother always breakfasted in bed and Orvil was earlier than either his father or his brothers.
It seemed a very suitable time to ask for the bicycle. Orvil plunged.
“Oh yes,” said the Stowe boy in his most tired voice, “you can borrow it for as long as you like. I loathe riding it. The saddle seems specially designed to deprive one of one’s manhood; but perhaps you won’t mind that.”
Orvil was too happy to be pricked into any retort by the intended insult. He was interested and repulsed by the slippery phrase, ‘to deprive one of one’s manhood.’ After a little thought, he decided that the Stowe boy had found it in some book, lately read. How disgusting and lying it was!---almost as bad as, ‘to lose one’s honour, or one’s virtue.’
Orvil wished passionately that he had no body, so that these remarks could never be applied to him. He felt ashamed of being in a position to be deprived of his manhood.
He spoke and smiled his thanks to the Stowe boy and left the dining-room almost at once. He could eat no more, being too eager to be off.
He found the bright blue bicycle leaning against the wall in one of the garages. The old stable-yard seemed full of chauffeurs, whistling, shouting, smoking, as they hosed or polished their cars.
The newness of the bicycle delighted Orvil. He thought that there was nothing so bright and smart as a new bicycle. The raucous blue paint stimulated him.
Orvil raced over the pink gravel drive and darted out of the gates on to the road. He had no idea or plan in his head; he was just giving way to his deep longing for escape, freedom, loneliness, adventure.
The road was busy with heavy lorries and cars. Orvil, who had an exaggerated fear of traffic, took his bicycle on to the pavement and rode it there, until an irate man stopped him and swore to call a policeman if he did not remove himself at once.
“Oh, for shame!” she said, mockingly melodramatic, but firm also; “that a boy should speak like that to his mother! He must be covered up. Nobody can look at a boy who treats his mother in that way.”
Outraged, humiliated and frightened by this mummery, Orvil jumped up from the table, tore the napkin off, and fled from the house, swearing never to come back. As he rushed past the dining-room, the hard gay laugh of his mother’s friend floated out of the window.
He hid himself in the lanes till late at night; now loitering under a hedge, now standing in the ditch and stinging his hand with nettles to see how much pain he could bear. He longed to go back, but was unable to humble himself.
At last he dragged back to the lighted french window which looked on to the garden. His mother’s friend had put on her favourite gramophone record of Kreisler playing ‘Chanson Arabe.’ Orvil hated the music, but it made him cry. He licked up his tears to savour and taste them, then he dried his face carefully, slipped through the window and sat down by his mother on the sofa. He could not say he was sorry. He could not even look at her, except for one darting moment. The friend turned to say something biting and satirical, but the atmosphere suddenly seemed to quell her. She went out of the room, leaving ‘Chanson Arabe’ to whine to its end. Orvil heard her getting ready for bed; and still he sat quite still with his mother on the sofa. They said nothing, not even when Orvil stretched out his badly stung red hand and took the signet ring off his mother’s little finger. He tied the ring in his hair, knotting two of his longest curls; then he nodded his head up and down, so that the ring banged rhythmically on his forehead. Heoften played with the ring in this curious way. He loved to feel the soft tug and thump of the heavy little gold object tied in his hair.
His mother got up and went to the store-cupboard in the hall. She came back with a new square bottle of pickled gherkins. Silently she placed two of the minute cucumbers on two beautiful little plates, which were all that remained of an old doll’s dinner-service.
Orvil and his mother sat down in front of the cucumbers, and ceremoniously, with the utmost delight, they started to eat them . . .
Orvil came back with a jerk from the past to the present. The banks of the lane were not so high at one point, and he could see through the gap a small church on a hill. There seemed to be no village near it. Orvil made for the church and left his bicycle leaning against the war-memorial lych-gate. He climbed up the tarred path, between trellis roses choked in long grass. One tall yellow rose had thrown its petals down on to a shorter cochineal-red one. The jarring colours were lovely and arresting, and for one moment Orvil thought that he had discovered a new flower.
He entered the porch, where the brick floor was spotted with white, sage-green and purple bird-droppings. Papers were pinned to a board with rusting drawing-pins. One was a list of ladies who arranged the altar flowers; another a notice about disease in cattle; a card with chewed edges, printed in red and black, asked the traveller not to leave without a prayer and a donation.
Orvil pushed open the heavy door and was surprised at the sudden change to damp coolness. The smell of felt, brass polish and decaying flower-stalks met him. As usual, he was filled with a tingling expectancy; he always had this feeling on first entering a church---if he was alone.
He stood up and looked about him; the church had been drastically restored. Nothing except the old walls seemed to remain; the rest of the main structure was now entirely Victorian. The hard, sharply moulded windows were filled with bright glass. The font was of Aberdeen granite and the quite recent pulpit was in carefully insipid Gimson style. The only charming things remaining were the eighteenth-century memorial plaques on the walls, a few earlier tombs, and one late Gothic brass hidden under the coconut matting.
Orvil, who always lifted all the mats in churches, soon found this. He stood, looking down at the lady in her fantastic homed head-dress. Kneeling on the stone, he tried to read her name and the date, but the black letter and the Latin defeated him, except for ‘Hic jacet.’
Suddenly, without knowing why, he lay down at full length on the cold slab and put his lips to the brass lady’s face. He kissed her juicily. When he lifted his head, the smell and the taste of the brass still hung about his nose and mouth. He looked down from a few inches away and saw the wet imprint of his lips planted in the dulled, frosted area his breath had made.
“You haven’t been kissed for five hundred years, I bet,” he droned in a low chanting voice.
He laid his cheek against the brass and tried to think through the stone, through the coffin, to the skeleton . . .
He was the woman now, lying in the grave, crying out for lovers, and watching from below his own antics on the tombstone.
‘Perhaps she’s got rings on,’ he thought. He wanted to despoil a skeleton; to one day take an ancient ring from a skeleton’s finger. He started to sing piercingly high yet softly:
“Here bring your wounded hearts,
Here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow
But Love can remove.”
Orvil had the habit of bending hymns to his own purposes. Now Samuel Webbe’s music and Thomas Moore’s words were made to illustrate and enrich a quite different experience to the one intended by them.
Orvil had a literal materialistic picture of his own heart, soft, bleeding, frightening as butcher’s meat. It was blind, yet with a life all its own. Orvil saw this thing thrown down on the stone slab, and the answering uprush of quiet snufflike dust from the skeleton’s left side. He imagined the aromatic acrid dust rising up in a cloud and enveloping the wet cushiony heart, sticking to it and coating it, as breadcrumbs coat a succulent pink ham, or as bright-coloured bitter cocoa powder clings to the rich dark truffle.
Orvil’s imaginings had now formed themselves into a pure, rather distasteful phantasy. The romantic necrophiliac emotion had died, leaving only the thought of jingling, dancing, lively dust and oozy, knowing flesh.
Once more he lay flat on his face, to get comfort from the feel of the hard stone. He pressed against it fiercely with the whole of his body; then he jumped up and began to feel a little self-conscious. This feeling made him tread on the brass face before he covered it once more with the matting.
He left the nave and mounted the two shallow chancel steps. An old rust-eaten helmet and visor hung from an iron bracket over an important Jacobean tomb, which had been newly painted. Fresh gold leaf, powder-blue, strawberry-pink, followed and defined the old geometrical patterns. Orvil had the desire to place the helmet on his own head, but he realized that it would be too difficult to reach.
He left the tomb and went right up to the altar, where he lifted the cloths. The altar was really an old oak table with uncarved, slightly bulbous legs. The altar-cloths, hanging down on all sides, made a small dark tent, very enticing to Orvil. With a rapid movement, he slipped under the table and let the flap of cloth fall into place again. He was now in complete darkness and enclosed on all sides. A thrill of pleasure ran through him. As he savoured the privacy of this tiny room under the altar, he imagined a high mass being celebrated above him. He saw the priest, the acolytes, the books and bells and clouds of incense smoke.
‘What would happen,’ he thought, ‘if at the vital moment I should leap from my hiding-place with an unearthly scream? The congregation would rise in panic, thinking that a devil had come down to earth. For a few moments I would be left to dance about madly; then the young acolytes, recovering from their amazement, would rush on me in a body, seize me and knock me down. The priest would look in dumbfounded horror at the wild tangle of arms and legs on the chancel floor.’
Orvil slipped out from his tent under the altar and went into the vestry. There he found a round shaving-mirror with a distorting wave in the glass. He stood for several moments in front of this, trying to frighten himself by pretending that his nose really was like a huge button mushroom, and his forehead like a swelling reptile’s egg.
He turned from the glass to the mantelpiece, over which hung a charming, amateurish old water-colour of the church before restoration. It looked so delightful in the picture that Orvil grew hot at the thought of its present state. He swore fiercely, saying, “Bastards!”
Along the whole of one wall hung the cassocks and surplices of the choir. Orvil began idly to ferret in the pockets, to find evidences of the personalities of the wearers. He found that a hole had been made in the bottom of one of the pockets; in another was a stiff old handkerchief; a third held a shiny snapshot of a nearly bald woman clasping a fat baby in her arms. Orvil buried his nose in the cassocks, wanting, fastidiously, to be disgusted by their smell.
He looked across to the deep window-sill, where the discoloured, yellowed brush and comb stood next to the embroidered offertory bags. Above the bags rose the neck of a green bottle, glowing richly because of the light behind it. Orvil went over to it, grasped it, and pulled it from its nest of bags.
He read the label, ‘Introibo,’ ‘Vino Sacro.’ It was communion wine, not emptied and not locked away. The rarity of the occurrence struck Orvil forcibly; he realized that he might never again be left alone with a bottle of communion wine. He had not yet been confirmed, and so imagined that the liquid glittering like oil in the dark bottle would have some quite special taste---some taste compounded of treacle, spice and raisin flavour, mixed with a tang of incense smoke and scent.
He pulled out the cork and licked his finger round the inside of the neck of the bottle. He stuck the finger in his mouth. Only a disappointingly corky and metallic flavour came to life on his tongue. Orvil held the bottle up to the light and tilted it until the wine was about to splash on to the floor; then he clapped it quickly to his lips and took enormous gulps. The stuff was suffocating and fiery, like poison; but Orvil did not spare himself, until he felt that he could drink no more. Then he put the bottle down with a jerk, and gave himself up to a fit of coughing and spluttering. He took in deep painful gasps of air, and a little wine trickled out of one of his nostrils. He wiped it away, pleased at the freak, in spite of the stinging of the tender membrane. When he recovered a little from the choking, he tried to savour the taste left in his mouth.
‘I’ve drunk communion wine!’ he thought ‘Some people pretend it’s God’s blood.’
The bottle looked much emptier. Orvil hoped that the parson did not measure the wine after each service. He hurriedly thrust the bottle back behind the bags and grouped them round it again. He now wished to leave the church as soon as possible, but аз he turned to go he caught sight of the little spiral staircase which led up to the tower. He could not resist it; he ran up the worn steps, round and round, sometimes in complete darkness, sometimes in a grey dead light thrown from narrow unglazed slits in the wall.
He came to a room where bell-ropes passed through the ceiling and the floor. The jarring and whirring mechanism of the clock ticked in an extraordinary glass case like a coffin. Brass wheels glistened, and some upright thing knocked backwards and forwards.
“Be careful, be careful,” Orvil told himself; “the clock will strike and frighten you out of your wits if you don’t get ready for it.”
He looked up at two old mildewed hatchments nailed on the walls. They had evidently been discarded from the nave and left to rot up here. One was charming, with classical medallions and wreaths round the coat of arms. In admiring this, Orvil quite forgot the clock; so that when it did strike one of the quarters he was off his guard, instead of being prepared as he had been a moment before.
Orvil ran for the head of the stairs. The brutal strokes thundered after him. One of the tower windows was open, and as he tore post, he caught a glimpse of white, seemingly flattened-out tombstones far below him. To his mind they looked like teeth scattered on the ground after a fight.
He ran madly down the stairs, often tripping and stumbling over several together. By the time he reached the ground, he was quite dizzy from the revolving motion. The communion wine was also beginning to work on him, making his head buzz and sing. He giggled as he shot out of the porch into the sultry heat of the sun. Glittering, dusty clouds were closing in now, and a sulphur-coloured haze gilded objects in the distance. Orvil realized that therewas going to be a storm. He had now quite lost himself in the lanes, but he leapt on his bicycle and pedalled hard in what he hoped to be the direction of the hotel.
The sun still shone grudgingly; no spots of rain fell. Orvil began to be seriously affected by the communion wine. He was eaten up with an extreme melancholy. The hopelessness gnawed at him, until he shook his head violently from side to side in a wild effort to rid himself of it. This unwise action brought him off his bicycle. He felt the wheels slithering to one side, and the ring of the bicycle bell as it struck a stone.
He lay on the dusty road for some moments, without attempting to get up. He was quite unhurt, but had begun to cry bitterly. He was crying for all the tortures and atrocities in the world. His tears made damp chocolatey lumps out of the feathery dust.
He sat up and took himself in hand. “You’re only drunk,” he told himself; “morbid drunk.” If it felt like this, he wondered how people could ever drink for pleasure. He remembered that the word he wanted was ‘maudlin,’ not ‘morbid.’
Huge drops of rain began to fall on the ground, rolling into trembling little balls in the dust, or flattening into dark round spots on the dry mud. One spat against his cheek and trickled down. The slight shock seemed to rouse Orvil. He thought of the heavy drop falling through thousands of feet of space, to land at last on his cheek. He stood up rather shakily and looked about him. Over a hedge he could see something glistening. It was the river.
‘If I can get to the river,’ he thought, ‘I’ll know where I am.’
A little footpath seemed to lead in the right direction, so Orvil left the road and followed it. But the storm broke before he had reached the shelter of the trees along the river-banks. The furious rain beat down so heavily and sharply that he was wet through to the skin in a few minutes. Rivulets trickled from his hair down his back and over his chest. The feeling of the soft mournful trickles gave him a certain pleasure, but there was discomfort too---the soaked, squelching shoes, and the sticky cling of the wet flannel trousers.
Orvil huddled under a thick bush and leant the bicycle against his knees. The young trees lashed about and creaked; the long grass, overburdened with water, waved and trembled hysterically. The whole surface of the river bristled with a fur of hissing rain-drops, sharp as bullets. Orvil waited, gazing truculently into the water, until he caught a glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of some black-and-white moving object. He turned his head sharply and saw, coming towards him along the tow-path, a figure in a long striped gown.
The sight was so unexpected that Orvil started. At first he was unable to tell whether the figure were male or female; then, as it drew nearer, he saw that it was a man so deep in thought that he did not seem even to notice the rain. His left hand held his right elbow and his head was bowed. He walked deliberately, with a sleep-walker’s rhythm. Orvil could now see that the black-and-white striped gown was made of towelling. The next moment he had recognized, with a shock, the man of the red canoe. But there was no laughing tranquil expression now---only a look of concentration and endurance. He seemed to be saying things, for his lips moved slightly. It was clear that he thought himself absolutely alone.
When he saw Orvil crouching under the hedge, he darted on him a stern, suspicious, masterful, bullying glance.
“What on earth are you doing there? You’re getting soaked,” he said flatly; and his voice was half blown away and lost in the storm.
Orvil glanced rapidly at the wet, brown, sun-coarsened skin, which so accentuated the whiteness of uneven teeth. He saw the rich animal-brown eyes with their rather too creamy whites. It was a voracious face; seeking and difficult, he thought.
Suddenly the man’s expression changed; he again became the businesslike person of the red canoe. “You’d better come into my hut,” he said in a half-ordering, half-coaxing voice.
Orvil got up obediently and left his bicycle lying in the hedge. The man pushed through the whipping bushes, calling over his shoulder, “This way.”
Through the thin trunks and stems, Orvil could see the hut as he had seen it on the day when he spied from his boat on the river. Then it had looked rather squalid; now it looked cosy and secure. He noticed in passing a neat closet with its back stuffed into a hedge and ‘Buckingham Palace’ scrawled in white paint on the door.
The man seemed to have forgotten Orvil; he was walking rather wildly, flinging his arms out, shaking back his dripping hair.
He threw open the hut door and held it for Orvil; then he slammed it, and started to busy himself without looking again in Orvil’s direction. He went first to one corner and pulled out a little ‘Valor Perfection’ stove. Squatting down on his haunches, he put his hand, holding the lighted match, through the door in the brilliant peacock enamel.
“Take off all your wet things and put on that old dressing-gown hanging on the back of the door,” he said, still without turning his head. He himself, as he spoke, threw off his sopping bath-robe and crouched in only his wine-coloured bathing-trunks. Wriggling trickles coursed down his broad back, to make dark pools at last on the boards at his feet.
There was silence for a moment; then the man turned round. “Did you hear what I said?” He asked this question in the quietly ominous tone which is always used for it.
Orvil remembered the control he had seen this man exercise over the two boys in the canoe, and immediately he sat down on one of the camp-beds and began to pull off his squelching shoes. He waited for the man to turn back to the stove, then went to the door, where he huddled out of his shirt and into the old dressing-gown. He undid his belt, let his trousers fall to the ground and then stepped out of them. The voluminous skirts of the dressing-gown swept the floor all round him.
“That dressing-gown belonged to someone who was killed in the last war,” said the man, turning to look at him.
“Did it?” said Orvil, interested and awe-struck. “It must be very old. He was a much bigger man than I’m ever likely to be.” He held up his arms to show the graceful hanging ends of the sleeves completely hiding his hands. He began to feel the dressing-gown and to examine it carefully. It was made of the finest, softest camel-hair; the sleeves were lined with cool Chinese silk. Down the elaborately corded front were several tiny pin-point burns from cigarette-ash. These struck Orvil as somehow piercingly sad.
Orvil felt that his fancy was not true. Only the aigrette and the hobble-skirt were true; he had seen photographs of those. The rest was borrowed muck from books.
The man broke up Orvil’s reverie by telling him to rub his hair with one of the striped bathing-towels which also hung on the back of the door. Orvil sawed the towel backwards and forwards across his head, while the man collected his wet clothes and hung them round the stove on the backs of two chairs.
Soon the clothes began to steam. Orvil hoped that they would smell nice. The man had now stripped off his trunks and was rubbing himself roughly all over. Orvil saw that he had grown cold, running about wet and naked; his jaw danced up and down and sometimes his white teeth clicked, though he was trying not to let them chatter. He pulled on a fisherman’s thick blue jersey and a pair of very dirty grey flannels.
“That’s better,” he said. “The storm has made the atmosphere much colder.”
The rain still beat down on the flimsy hut. It made a thumping noise against the thin wooden walls and the tin roof. Leaves and twigs scratched softly on the windows.
The man nodded his head and placed a filled kettle on the stove. He next opened a cupboard and brought out Huntley and Palmer’s Ginger-Nuts, some bread, some butter, and some cherry jam.
Orvil came over and gazed at the old engraving on the red-and-blue tin. He loved to make out again the horse-carts and carriages outside the forbidding Victorian factory; the tiny, elaborately dressed pedestrians, lost like small dots in the sinister, ghostly perspective of the road.
“I hope they never change the tin, don’t you?” he said to the man.
The man nodded again, but he was not thinking of the biscuit tin; he was trying to remember where he had put the tea canister. He found it when he went to get two mugs and two plates from the dresser.
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