Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Baird was glad that the whole subject had come into the open; it enabled him to compliment the Abbot on his honesty, when the old man knew well enough that for ten pounds down any peasant would have furnished the required information. They walked, their arms amiably linked, and Baird found himself once more admiring those eagle’s features from which every trace of earthly grossness seemed to have been purged, listening to that musical-assured voice. The Abbot was a philosopher whose judgment occasionally foundered in his cupidity.

The old man’s daughter came and handed him a bunch of spring anemone and kissed him.

“Come,” said the Abbot. “You must stay tonight at least with us. We have a lot to say to each other. You shall have Niko’s little room.”

Together they mounted the long white staircase of wood to the terrace. Baird could hear snoring from behind a closed door. Brilliant dragon-flies scouted the flowers. The sea shook itself and settled into sleep once more.

The small white cell was spotless. It contained a bed, two vivid oleographs, a table and a chair. The window looked clear out on to the sea. “I will send you a couple of blankets. It must be very primitive after what you are used to, but it is all we have.”

Baird lay down on the bed and said: “Thank God, Abbot, for the Mediterranean basin. Do you still bathe at the point? I should like to try and get brown all over again.”

“After you have slept,” said the old man tenderly, shaking hands with him again and smiling. The little girl came in bearing a pitcher of fresh water and a bowl. “Ah, Calypso,” said Baird, “you are becoming a woman of the house.” She smiled and withdrew again, but not before the Abbot had pulled her pigtails and called her a werewolf-child. “In ten years’ time,” he said proudly, “there won’t be a prettier girl in Crete.”

“By that time”, said Baird, “we shall be fighting the Russians or the Chinese.”

The old man sat upon the chair and threw one leg over the other. He gazed earnestly at Baird for a long time without speaking. “There’s something else as yet,” he said at last, with all his old shrewdness. “That is in your mind to ask me. Something you have come to find out.”

“Yes,” said Baird. “It’s not important.”

“At the heart of the honeycomb lies the sweetness,” said the Abbot oracularly. “What can it be?”

He listened attentively while Baird told him of his dream; of the reappearance of Böcklin in his mind; of the visits to Hogarth. Somehow he found it very simple to express the basis of Hogarth’s teaching to the old man. He nodded all the time. It was surely the first person he had met, thought Baird, to whom Hogarth’s peculiar doctrines were not unfamiliar or downright insane. When he spoke of Hogarth’s suggestion that he should return and dig up Böcklin and lay his body in consecrated ground, the Abbot John slapped his knee heavily and said: “This man is a very wise man. A very wise man. In this way your conscience would clear itself and the dream would lift.”

“But it has lifted anyway,” said Baird excitedly. “In fact, it has lifted by a miracle. For Böcklin is not there — is not anywhere, unless you have moved him.”

The Abbot shook his head. “Unless”, said Baird, “this sudden feeling of liberation is false. Unless I dream of him again. But I feel as if a miracle had happened; as if he had never existed.”

The Abbot leaned forward and patted his arm reassuringly. “You will see for yourself in time,” he said. “Now I am going to leave you for an hour’s sleep. Then we shall walk down to the sea together like in the old times.”

Baird fell asleep as he was leaning down to undo his boots.

For a time she sat in the darkness and tried to shake Fearmax awake, but after a while it became clear to her that he must be dead. The dampness of his clothes conveyed the horrible suggestion of blood flowing from serious wounds. His hands were cold and clenched. Miss Dombey had lost her little torch in the confusion, and she groped at his bony face in the darkness, uttering little wails of terror and supplication. “Mr. Fearmax,” she cried. “Mr. Fearmax.” There was no response. She got up at last and walked slowly down the narrow corridor; she was beginning to feel the staleness of the air, to wonder whether they were not bricked into a tunnel from which there was no escape. She was still moaning under her breath. Her hands outstretched like a sleep-walker she proceeded step by step. When she had gone some twenty paces in this manner her fuddled wits came to life and she remembered that there was a box of matches in her coat. With trembling fingers she cast back her tweed overcoat and took the little box out. The first match shone for a second along an empty black passage-way and went out. The second burned a little steadier. The corridor seemed to have become larger, the ceiling higher. Strange reverberations still shuddered through the length and breadth of the stone honeycomb; dust hung in the unbreathed air. The light went out.

Miss Dombey’s mind was filled with a confusion of panic-stricken images in which all continuity was lost; past and present mingled freely. Perhaps this was the Second Coming she had been so assiduously advertising for so long? She saw the Guardian’s face, with its pale attenuated lines, engraved upon the darkness before; saw Mr. Sowerby peering through his steel-rimmed spectacles at the Wigmore Hall. She struck another match in her nerveless fingers, and then another. She had concentrated so completely upon the death of the world and its summary judgment that she was totally unable to decrease the compass of her thoughts enough for the contemplation of her own personal death. Numbly, with chattering teeth, she went forward, without a plan, lighting match after match until the box was empty. Then she sat down in the darkness and began to weep. What would Andrew, her brother, say? She had not seen him for years. He had been in Quetta with the Army.

Growing up in her mind there came a feeling that perhaps some sort of summing-up, some sort of clue to her whole life’s activities, might be disentangled from this terrible accident which had befallen her. Yet what? She saw her life stretching away, incidents appearing and dissolving before her eyes as meaningless as Chinese idiograms. She was back in the mission-house at Hwang-Tu. Her father was talking about the mystery of the Cross to a group of Chinese children. “To settle your differences with your own soul,” he was saying in that rich deep voice. His clothes smelt of cheroots, his silver hair played on his neck. Her fingers closed absently upon the little phial of sleeping-tablets in her pocket and she remembered Dr. Andrews, looking over the top of his glasses at her, warning her not to take more than …

She heard the dull roar of the minotaur sounding in the depths ahead. The noise passed her in the damp heavy air, almost like an object of weight and substance. She opened the bottle and shook out the little tablets into her palm. Something at the farther end of the corridor moved, a vague shape of darkness upon darkness. She shouted “Hullo! Anyone there?” but her empty voice was flung back at her from the stony throat of the tunnel in little flat echoes.

She swallowed them one by one, remembering how adept she had become at swallowing pills without any water. Malaria had taught her that during the last visit to Egypt. It was with something that bore a recognizable resemblance to relief that she lay down on the cold stone of the corridor wrapped in her coat.

Now she was walking once more across the paddy-fields, hand in hand with her father. Small clouds of thistledown floated in the sky above the river. At the door of the temple a little old man was sitting very softly carving upon a peach-stone; the brooch was one that her father had given her. She lost it one day walking across the wet meadows near Horsham. Search as she might, she could never discover where. It was like the severance of a link in time; she had been cut off from her father by that far more completely than by his own death in China years before. Cut off from her own childhood, that term of happiness and tenderness which she was never to know again once the sea was crossed and Dover reached. She remembered the silent reaches of the lock, the convoy of swans sailing upstream, the yellow kingcups standing attentively by while she walked backwards and forwards, searching and weeping.