John Powys - Rodmoor

“What is it?” repeated Sorio dreamily, and in a low melancholy voice. “How can I tell you what it is? It’s a knowledge of the inner truth, I suppose. It’s the fact that I’ve come to know, at last, what human beings are really like. I’ve come to see them stripped and naked — no! worse than that — I’ve come to see them flayed . I’ve got to the point, Tassar, my friend, when I see the world as it is , and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant sight!”

Baltazar Stork regarded him with a look of the most exquisite pity, a pity which was not the less genuine because the emotion that accompanied it was one of indescribable pleasure. In the presence of his friend’s massive face and powerful figure he felt deliciously delicate and frail, but with this sense of fragility came a feeling of indescribable power — the power of a mind that is capable of contemplating with equanimity a view of things at which another staggers and shivers and grows insane. It was allotted to Baltazar by the secret forces of the universe to know during that hour, one of the most thrilling moments of his life.

“To get to the point I’ve reached,” continued Sorio gently, watching the colour die out from the water’s surface and a whitish glimmer, silvery and phantom-like, take its place, “means to sharpen one’s senses to a point of terrible receptivity. In fact, until you can hear the hearts of people beating — until you can hear their contemptible lusts hissing and writhing in their veins, like evil snakes — you haven’t reached the point. You haven’t reached it until you can smell the graveyard — yes! the graveyard of all mortality — in the cleanest flesh you approach. You haven’t reached it till every movement people make, every word they speak, betrays them for what they are, betrays the vulture on the wing, and the hyena on the prowl. You haven’t reached it till you feel ready to cry out, like a child in a nightmare, and beat the air with your hands, so suffocating is the pressure of loathsome living bodies — bodies marked and sealed and printed with the signs of death and decomposition!”

Baltazar Stork struck a match and lit his cigarette.

“Well?” he remarked, stretching out his legs and leaning back on the wooden bench. “Well? The world is like that, then. You’ve found it out. You know it. You’ve made the wonderful discovery. Why can’t you smoke cigarettes, then, and make love to your lovely friends, and let the whole thing go? You’ll be dead yourself in a year or two in any case.

“Adriano dear,” he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper, “shall I tell you something? You are making all this fuss and driving yourself desperate about a thing which doesn’t really concern you in the least. It’s not your business if the world does reek like a carcass. It’s not your business if people’s brains are full of poisonous snakes and their bellies of greedy lecheries. It’s not your business — do you understand — if human flesh smells of the graveyard. Your affair, my boy, is to get what amusement you can out of it and make yourself as comfortable as you can in it. It might be worse, it might be better. It doesn’t really make much difference either way.

“Listen to me, Adriano! I say to you now, as we sit at this moment watching this water, unless you get rid of this new mania of yours, you’ll end as you did in America. You’ll simply go mad again, my dear, and that would be uncomfortable for you and extremely inconvenient for me. The world is not meant to be taken seriously. It’s meant to be handled as you’d handle a troublesome girl. Take what amuses you and let the rest go to the devil! Anything else — and I know what I’m talking about — tends to simple misery.

“Heigh ho! But it’s a most delicious evening! What nonsense all this talk of ours is! Look at that boy over there. He’s not worrying himself about grave-yards. Here, Harry! Tommy! Whatever you call yourself — come here! I want to speak to you.”

The child addressed was a ragged barelegged urchin, of about eleven, who had been for some while slowly gravitating around the two men. He came at once, at Baltazar’s call, and looked at them both, wonderingly and quizzically.

“Got any pictures?” he asked. Stork nodded and, opening a new box of cigarettes, handed the boy a little oblong card stamped with the arms of some royal European dynasty. “I likes the Honey-Dew ones best,” remarked the boy, “them as has the sport cards in ’em.”

“We can’t always have sport cards, Tommy,” said Baltazar. “Little boys, as the world moves round, must learn to put up with the arms of European princes. Let me feel your muscle, Tommy. I’ve an idea that you’re suffering from deficient nourishment.” The child extended his arm, and then bent it, with an air of extreme and anxious gravity. “Pretty good,” said Stork, smiling. “Yes, I may say you’re decidedly powerful for your size. What’s your opinion, Tommy, about things in general? This gentleman here thinks we’re all in a pretty miserable way. He thinks life’s a hell of a bad job. What do you think about it?”

The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Ben Porter, what cleans the knives up at the Admiral’s, tried that game on with me. But I let him know, soon enough, who he were talking to.” He moved off hastily after this, but a moment later ran back, pointing excitedly at a couple of sea-gulls which were circling near them.

“A man shot one of them birds last night,” he said, “and it fell into the water. Lordy! But it did splash! ’Tweren’t properly killed, I reckon — just knocked over.”

“What’s that?” said Sorio sharply. “What became of it then? Who picked it up?”

The boy looked at him with a puzzled stare. “ They ain’t no good to eat,” he rejoined, “they be what you call cannibal-birds. They feeds on muck. Cats’ll eat ’em, though,” he added.

“What became of it?” shouted Sorio, in a threatening voice.

“Went out with the tide, Mister, most like,” answered the child, moving apprehensively away from him. “I saw some fellows in a boat knock at it with their oars, but they couldn’t get it. It sort o’ flapped and swimmed away.”

Sorio rose from his seat and strode to the edge of the quay. He looked eastward, past the long line of half-submerged wooden stakes which marked the approach to the harbour. “When did that devil shoot it, do you say?” he asked, turning to the boy. But the youngster had taken to his heels. Angry-looking bronze-faced gentlemen who interested themselves in wounded sea-gulls were something new in his experience.

“Let’s get a boat and row out to those stakes,” said Adrian suddenly. “I seem to see something white over there. Look! Don’t you think so?”

Baltazar moved to his side. “Heavens! my dear,” he remarked languidly, “you don’t suppose the thing would be there now, after all this time? However,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “if it’ll put you into a better mood, by all means let’s do it.”

It was, when it came to the point, Baltazar who untied an available boat from its moorings, and Baltazar who appropriated a pair of oars that were leaning against a fish shed. In details of this kind the passionate Sorio was always seized with a paralysis of nervous incompetence. Once in the boat, however, the younger man refused to do anything but steer. “I’m not going to pull against this current, for all the sea-gulls in the world,” he remarked.

Sorio rowed with desperate impetuosity, but it was a slow and laborious task. Several fishermen, loitering on the quay after their supper, surveyed the scene with interest. “The gentleman wants to exercise ’isself afore dinner-time,” observed one. “’Tis a wonder if he moves ’er,” rejoined another, “but ’e’s rowin’ like ’twas a royal regatta.”