Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Baird excused himself and went below full of annoyance at the thought that he was going to have her for a travelling companion. Through an open door he caught sight of Fearmax wrestling with a cabin-trunk. So he had arrived after all. His own dispositions were easily made. He had taken the barest necessities for the journey. The two anthologies he put aside for the moment. His little India-paper copy of the Phaedo seemed to be the sort of thing one always took on journeys and never read. Lying in his bunk and idly turning the pages he fell asleep, and when he awoke there was that faint interior stir of excitement, that faint preoccupied stillness of a great ship heading out to sea, that told him they were off. It was true. A strip of dark sea curled between them and the bleak grey cliffs with their small fractured groups of houses shining dun and drab in the late evening light. The Europa moved without a tremor — as if she were moving down rails. A bell rang somewhere, and the fans in the corridors suddenly started to bore out their little furry cones of sound. Then they too fell silent; and from the very heart of his preoccupation he distinguished the small even pulse of the ship’s engines driving them southward.

Baird entered the saloon in dread of Miss Dombey, for he saw that he would sooner or later have to introduce her to Graecen — the innocent Graecen who had done nothing to deserve such an imposition. To his surprise, however, they seemed to get on quite well together. It was perhaps because no sooner had he introduced Miss Dombey than he found she had introduced her own Mission. “Thousands are living in the shadow of death,” she said juicily to Graecen. “And my job is to prepare them for the state of death, to wake them up, to shrive them, if necessary.” This struck something of a chord in Graecen’s heart. He had been pondering on his condition as he unpacked, and these forthright propositions seemed to him to refer almost directly to his own mental and spiritual state. Had he thought enough of death? Had he prepared himself? The idea had seemed repugnant to a poet, a hedonist. Miss Dombey’s vehemence gave him a jolt. It was like meeting a prophet. She clawed her hair off her forehead and gave him a brief outline of what was going to happen when the Second Coming started to be fulfilled. Graecen listened to her with incredulity mixed with a certain not unpleasant fear; it reminded him of his childhood at Rickshaw Hall — the stories of hellfire and brimstone which his mother had told him and which he had believed. Miss Dombey was enchanted by so influential a convert. She pressed upon him no less than five separate tracts, which he promised to study at leisure. Baird looked on curiously at this little scene, wondering whether Graecen’s obvious good nature made him indulgent; but, to his surprise, when Miss Dombey left them, he turned to him and said: “Baird, what an extraordinary woman. Thank you for introducing her.” In some obscure way he felt glad to be in touch with someone actively concerned with death — even if it wasn’t his particular death. The tracts, however, were awful. He tried to read them but gave it up as hopeless. The prose, to begin with, was so bad; one could not be carried away by fairy tales of the Second Coming written in this Praed Street vein. Nevertheless, Graecen clung to Miss Dombey.

As for Fearmax, he was concerned with problems of a different order. He lay for hours in his cabin with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. His door was always open, so that whenever he passed Baird could look in and see him there, hands crossed on his breast, collar open, staring at the paintwork. He did not appear to any meals for the first twenty-four hours and Baird wondered idly if he were having a severe bout of seasickness; yet his door stood open, and whenever Baird passed it he saw him lying there. Led by the promptings no less of curiosity than of courtesy, he at last tapped at the door and put his head in, asking Fearmax in his pleasant way if he could be of any use to him. For a time he did not seem to hear — but at last, with an effort, he turned in the bunk and raised himself on one elbow.

“That’s kind of you,” he said hoarsely. “Very kind. No. I am just resting, that’s all. I do not suffer from sea-sickness. But I hate journeys. Do come in.”

The cabin was heavy with the smell of cigar-smoke. There were several large stoutly-bound books lying beside the bunk, a rosary, and a number of yellow envelopes full of papers. Fearmax looked pale and weary.

“I’ve never been out of England before,” he said. “It’s rather a big adventure for me — like the start of a new chapter; and I am trying to read the omens. They are very strange, very strange.”

Between the wall and the bulkhead lay a bound set of Ephemerides, and a notebook covered with jottings. “Omens?” said Baird. (“Omens?” said Graecen later in a much higher key of superstition, of anxiety, when Fearmax made the same remark.)

“You probably don’t believe in astrology?” said Fearmax. What was one to say? It was on the tip of Baird’s tongue to reply, “Not since the atom bomb was discovered,” but he checked himself. Fearmax went on in his hoarse voice.

“I didn’t myself once, but even if it’s an inexact science I’ve found that it could tell me things: potentialities of my own character, for example: forces inherent in the world around me. At any rate I worked out a progressed chart today in the train for the next few months. It shows some curious things. As far as I can see I am in danger of being lost in one of the tunnels of the Great Pyramid.”

Baird stifled his amusement. There was something oddly impressive about Fearmax. He did not talk like a quack, but like a man who had been genuinely in search of something — some principle of truth or order in the world: and who had failed in his quest. With a bony finger the medium traced out the houses and planets on his chart, talking of conjunctions and trines. The influence of Saturn caused him considerable anxiety it appeared. He had no fear for the journey while he was at sea — the influences are favourable. But somewhere on land, in the company of others, there was to be an accident. The nature of that accident he could not guess as yet — nor whether it would be fatal. He simply knew it would assist him in his discovery of “The Absolute”.

It was an odd word to hear at such a time and place, Baird thought. But then Fearmax, as Hogarth said, was an odd person. To be engaged in a search for The Absolute was, however, a fine medieval conception. He wondered what it could meant

It was some few days before Fearmax emerged from his seclusion; indeed he was not the only one that sunlight persuaded to emerge from the privacy of his cabin. Yet Graecen found the sight of him a little distressing; his nervous habit of pacing the deck, as if he were on the look-out for expected catastrophe; his habit of sitting for long intervals with his head sunk on his breast, of making notes in a leather-bound notebook. His preoccupations seemed to match so little with those of the rest of them that even Miss Dombey was abashed in his presence. He confessed to a slight knowledge of palmistry, and once he took Graecen’s hand, without a word, and studied its lines and curves with great attention. “You have a bad heart,” he said, and Graecen felt the sudden grip of an icy hand upon his throat. Nothing more.

The Trumans, despite their unprepossessing appearance, turned out to be rather a find. They were not only amusing in their way, but self-sufficient and out to enjoy the journey. Truman, they discovered, played and sang comic songs at the piano in the saloon, and enjoyed nothing better than an audience. He had once been a member of a concert party, he said (“a real proper black coon”) and his repertoire was inexhaustible. In particular Baird enjoyed a comic recitation entitled “A Martyr to Chastity”, which he produced whenever Miss Dombey was around. The rawness of the jests usually made her run for cover. Indeed they found that the only way to shake off Miss Dombey was to be seen with the Trumans. She could not bear them. An attempt to interest Mr. Truman in the Second Coming had been a failure.