The Last Crossing, page 17
The downpour keeps up, but I sit patient under it. I keep telling myself fear made no other part of me break and run, only my voice did that. Hold ground, Custis.
Bit by bit, the rain eases off, whimpering in the mud. I lift my face to the long prospect south. The sky is rinsed clean, a weak sun breaks on miles of wet plain patched with apple green, new penny copper, glints of silver. On that plain, a tiny black horse and its rider are making towards me as if the Apocalypse had shaken one of the Four Horsemen out of the clouds and down to earth.
I drag my mashed hat out from under my buttocks, punch the crown into some sort of shape, set it on my head, straighten my back and shoulders, and wait for the horseman to deliver his face to me.
The rider who fords the waters of the Milk and draws rein in front of me is none other than a sopping-wet Aloysius Dooley.
CHARLES It is now two days since we abandoned our fruitless search of the Whitemud and began to trek westward, headed for the many lawless whisky posts that Potts says have recently sprung up in British territory north of the Sweetgrass Hills. He claims that the ruffians who infest this region have constant intercourse with the Blackfoot, and so I cling to the slender possibility that the whisky traders may have learned something of Simon’s fate from the natives. Hope based on such a weak foundation may be delusion, but I have recourse to nothing else. We must pursue every avenue until winter threatens and turns us back to England.
My only reprieve from doubt and despondency is furnished by Lucy Stoveall. I find her a cheering companion. Her talk is unrestrained and genial, her manner forthright and sensible, tempered by an undercurrent of melancholy which we both share. She is unlike any woman I have ever met. It is very pleasant to stretch my legs with Mrs. Stoveall and pass an hour or two in conversation that is agreeable, but not frivolous. As all Americans are, she is a natural democrat, but a refreshing and charming one. Several times she has brought me up short with astute remarks upon the character of our companions, a reminder that one may be ignorant but not necessarily unintelligent.
Yesterday, as we rambled in the wake of the wagon, I was moved to reflect upon how difficult it is to set the boundaries with Mrs. Stoveall, to decide exactly what position she occupies, that of our servant or damsel in distress.
Today, the weather was glorious, not too warm for an extended stroll, and I took full advantage of it to spend several pleasant hours in Lucy Stoveall’s society. With so many more hard miles yet to cover, Mr. Potts advised relaxing the pace of our caravan so as to husband the strength of the horses for the rough terrain that lies ahead. Grunewald and Barker took him at his word, let the horses amble as the drivers dozed on their seats. Addington for once did not contradict Mr. Potts but, full of restless energy, seized the opportunity to ride off with Mr. Ayto to hunt.
Mrs. Stoveall and I were left free to meander and botanize. Lucy, as she has now enjoined me to call her, walked along eyes fastened to the ground, her red hair streaming in the breeze, pointing out to me and naming many small, delicately coloured flowers hidden in the prairie grasses: scarlet mallow, broomweed, sunflower, blue beard-tongue. In the sheltered coulees we explored, there were the ominously named yellow death camas and the pinkish-white bearberry. Once, I caught her deep in contemplation at the bottom of a gully, a small nosegay of native flowers clasped in her hand. A figure of sombre beauty amid the shadows, a subject for a Pre-Raphaelite. I slipped away so as not to interrupt her rumination, and waited on the prairie for her to emerge. She strode out of the declivity very purposefully, announcing she feared I had got myself lost.
A little later, my attention was directed by her to a colony of burrowing owls, tiny feathered troglodytes who make their home in abandoned gopher holes. I was astounded and intrigued that creatures of the air would choose to make their home deep in the earth. The birds were as curious of me as I was of them. From the mouths of their lairs they stared back at me with a comical intensity. I enjoyed a hearty laugh at their expense.
We strolled on and heard a lovely song, the singer of which Lucy identified as a meadowlark. As I stood enjoying the lark’s concert, Lucy shyly inquired whether I would care to see a portrait of Madge taken in St. Louis. I said I would be delighted. She took it out of the sack which was slung over her shoulder and placed it reverently in my hands.
The daguerreotype revealed a comely young girl, dressed in a simple white blouse and skirt, her hair coiled on the top of her head in a crown of plaits.
Lucy asked, “Do you note a resemblance to me?”
I did not. Her sister left an impression of fragility very unlike Lucy’s robustness, the fragility of a Meissen figurine. The girl’s smile was timid, her teeth small, her chin deferentially dipped. Not at all like Lucy except, perhaps, for the hair. Lucy’s slightly hooded, slanting eyes, and high, curving cheekbones were certainly not in evidence in the daguerreotype. Madge, unlike her sister, could not be called handsome, a word applied to women of an unconventional beauty and a word so descriptive of the unconventional Lucy.
“Very like you,” I said, returning the portrait. “A very striking girl.”
She did not seem aware I had handed her a compliment, but she beamed, happy that I had claimed to have seen so much of herself in her sister.
It was then she asked if I had a portrait of Simon she might view. Tonight I showed it to her. Not the one Father judged the best likeness: Simon posed in the library of Sythe Grange, feet planted on a Turkey rug, playing the stiff English gentleman. Just as a wax work might be said to capture the original, to that degree Simon had been captured. But not his true, animating spirit. Not a trace of it.
The photograph I showed to Lucy was the one taken our first year at Oxford. When she saw it, she could not help exclaiming, “Why, your brother looks like a beggar!”
Simon, draped in a worsted cloak fashionable at the turn of the last century, smiling equably out at the world from under a shapeless, felt hat. This costume had been acquired at a second-hand clothes dealer because Simon had fallen under the spell of Matthew Arnold’s elegiac poetry. Like so many other Oxford students who rambled the banks of “the stripling Thames,” and mooned about the Cumner Hills with copies of “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis” stuffed in their pockets, he had caught the disease of romanticism. How like my brother to carry his fantasies even further than they and adopt the dress of Arnold’s legendary scholar gypsy, a “hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey.” To believe that by wafting about the countryside, Nature would imbue him with a more mysterious and authentic knowledge than the university could offer.
All this flummery was bad enough, but then he proposed that the two of us should make an overnight trek on foot from Oxford to London when the moon was full, in an attempt to recapture the questing soul and open-air life of the gypsy scholar. From this scheme there was no dissuading him. He said if I could not be prevailed upon to join him, he must make his pilgrimage alone. That threw me into a quandary. Left to his own devices, my guileless brother could not escape disaster. If he wasn’t mauled by farmers’ dogs in the dead of night, he would be mistaken for a poacher, or taken in charge as a vagrant. A threadbare cloak and pulverized, moth-eaten hat would not recommend him to a local magistrate. Despite my exasperation and foreboding, I felt I had no choice but to go.
So one evening in the midst of a bronze dusk we set off from Oxford. Simon in his ridiculous rags, clutching a pilgrim’s staff he had cut in Wychwood days before, a satchel slung over his shoulder packed with porter, bread, and cheese. In an attempt to add an aspect of respectability to the outing, I had dressed myself in the garb of a genteel sportsman.
Down the narrow streets Simon blithely advanced while I hugged the walls and slunk along under the gables, trying to make myself as inconspicuous and small as possible. After an eternity, we escaped the bemused eyes of the townspeople. It was a warm evening, very still, cloudless, and as we made our way the moon peeped above the hedges and lit our way like a lantern. Miles outside of Oxford we encountered a farmer’s cart on the road. He doffed his cap to me, stared uncomprehendingly at my strange companion, was still peering back at us dumbfounded as his cart rounded a bend.
For two hours we briskly strode along in silence, Simon’s pale face aglow with joy and the bright lunar light. At our feet the white lane gleamed like paper cross-hatched with the shadows of beeches and elms. Here and there a window shed its light or a dog barked as we passed a silent cottage, but these were the only signs of life.
Solitude salved my embarrassment, and I began to feel that, just as once we had shared unspoken thoughts and feelings in childhood, I was entering into a wordless communion with my brother. Impulsively, I threw my arm over his shoulder and was rewarded with a smile of sheer delight. He whispered to me, “This is the world. Not that.”
Like so much of what Simon said, this was not comprehensible. “Not that” might refer to the university, or perhaps my reluctance to be seen by amused onlookers as we left the town. But the implied criticism caused me to remove my arm from his shoulders and say, “Surely the world is everywhere.”
My brother stopped and gazed about him. “Yes, you are right,” he conceded. “But it is difficult to feel and know the world in certain places.”
“Perhaps I feel the world, hear it, under different conditions than yourself. You must not be dogmatic, Simon.” I felt it would be false of me to be anything but perfectly frank.
“I am filled with happiness here. Does your perception of the world promote your happiness?”
I sidestepped the question of happiness. “My perception promotes my comfort. It permits me to make my way in the world.” I thought for a moment and attempted to reverse the pressure he was bringing to bear. “If you continue as you seem intent on doing, you will pay a price. Your path -” I hesitated, gesturing to the road, “will not be as easy and plain as this byway. Fairy moonbeams do not provide a steady light.” He slowly nodded. It was painful to watch. I feared I had wounded him dreadfully. “I have hurt you,” I said.
“You grow more like Father every day.”
“Nonsense. How can you possibly say that?”
Without answering my question, Simon resumed walking. “You were made to marry, I think,” he said, another impenetrable remark.
I retorted, “I mean to be a painter. Don’t you know? Painters keep mistresses.”
“We are a family of dissemblers,” he said. My brother gravely pursed his lips, a judge momentously weighing a sentence. “And I am the greatest dissembler of us all,” he said at last.
I could not help but laugh at this self-accusation. Nothing could be more patently ludicrous than his claim of dissembling. From childhood on, Simon had never been capable of concealing any of this thoughts or motives. But my dismissal of his claims to dishonesty had upset him. Once more he halted, tapping his staff on the ground. His voice rose. “You are more obvious than I, and always have been. You have always yearned for love, Charles. Father’s love. But you were ashamed to ask it of anyone but me. You felt your need a weakness, a weakness that could only be revealed to someone weaker than yourself. You took me for that person. But now my peculiarities, as you would describe them, have made our attachment a burden to you. So you must seek love, affection elsewhere. Do not follow your present course. It is a dead end. The dead end of the perfect English gentleman. Go away. Go to Italy, or to France,” he said forcefully. “You are not strong enough to resist Father, to find love and freedom here. You care too much for the approbation of others.”
I shot back, “So your vast experience with the fair sex recommends to me a foreign wife. Which is your preference? The Italian or the French?”
“Both of us,” he said, “frozen in a pose.” Simon touched his hat, his cloak significantly. “I edge towards honesty. But this is only a first step. I must learn courage by degrees.”
“Riddles.”
My brother reached out, clasped his hand to the back of my neck, and drew me close, so near I could feel his warm breath on my face. “I would not have you think ill of me. Do not think ill of me, whatever happens,” he said. At that moment, he looked so beseechingly into my eyes that I can recall his expression even now, years later, the swollen moon and tiny stars riding above his shoulder. With vehement emphasis he recited to me, “ ‘To the just-pausing Genius we remit / Our worn-out life, and are – what we have been.’ ”
“Arnold,” I said.
“Arnold.”
“And what does it signify?”
“We are not alone, Charles. Given time, the spirit of the universe will accept us. For the present, it asks us simply to be. To be ourselves and not someone else’s dream of us.”
“Is this the speech of a Christian?”
He avoided justifying himself. “Why are we on this road? To arrive at London. We think London exists because we have seen it with our own eyes; we believe it still stands on the strength of daily reports-articles in the newspaper, your friend Tom Budge’s stories about his visit to Kew Gardens a fortnight ago. But we cannot know for sure it still stands until we reach it ourselves. There may be no city awaiting us at the end of the road.”
“That is preposterous,” I said.
“And the universal spirit, Genius, God, where is It, He?” Simon said. “He, It, is to be found in the reports that we poor human beings have been filing for centuries, reports of encounters, reports of intimations, reports written and spoken in every language known to man. None of them the same, but all sincere. To pursue the ‘just-pausing Genius’ is the only proper aim of life.” Concluding his homily, Simon was immediately lightened. He released his hold on me and was himself – old, happy Simon. “Remember Mr. Jacks?” he said. I nodded. Jacks, the head gardener at Sythe Grange, dead for years.
“Remember when we were ten or eleven, and he gave us porter to drink?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“It made me drunk, Charles. I have never been drunk since. But I have never forgotten the feeling. Lying in the grass with the sun on my face. I tell you, I felt equal to anything.” He patted the satchel that hung at his side. “I have bread and cheese and porter. Let us break our journey.”
And we did. I in my kerseyside trousers, soaking my buttocks on wet grass under a hawthorn bush. We ate contentedly and then walked on contentedly, walked on through the hind end of night, through the false dawn, and through the morning sunshine until, bone-weary, we glimpsed the smoke rising from the chimneys of London, and at last entered the city, saw the men and women bustling about the streets, bent on their own purposes. That sight of London at the end of the road was the closest I have ever come to belief.
And I must confess to myself, if no one else, that despite my best efforts to keep hope alive, and my determination to pursue the search for him, with every day that passes the conviction grows that I shall never see Simon alive again. Perhaps I am already what the old country people call the left twin. The survivor of the cruellest separation: those who shared a womb torn from one another in the world.
Jacks once told Simon and me a story about a young woman who suffered from the dark thrush, whose mouth was filled with ulcers and infection. And a small boy, whose twin had died only a year before, was brought to her, and when he had blown his breath in her mouth three times, she was cured. The left twin, it is said, has the power to heal. But not himself.
15
It being Sunday, and over his brother’s strenuous objections that they keep to the task, press on, Addington has magnanimously granted the men a day of rest. He has decided to mark the Sabbath with a rousing good gallop. After a two-mile run, the sorrel straining under him, the chuff of lungs, the chuck of legs, he savagely reins him up. The gelding sidles, dances, switches his hindquarters while Addington clucks his tongue soothingly. Finally, the animal settles, drops his head to graze, and Addington surveys his surroundings with approval. Mile upon unimpeded mile of firm turf over which to race. All it lacks is a few hedges and gates to sail over and it would be the peak of perfection.
Addington is in high spirits, certain that in a short time he will be in the pink of condition, fit as Nero’s fiddle. The rash that mottled his thighs all last year is gone and with it the ache in his joints. So much for Dr. Andrews and his simpered warnings. Captain Addington, a venereal complaint is a most indolent disease. It will sleep, sir, it will lull you, but when it awakes … I have made a most thorough study of its character. And what I recommend to my patients is a strict regime of regularly administered medicaments – mercury, antimony, and iodide of potassium. A most efficacious and salutary prophylactic against the advance of the ailment, don’t you know. Emphatically, We must be vigilant, Captain. So the vigilant dosing began, went on month after month, without any improvement in his symptoms or his well-being. Injections of mercury and applications of it to the skin. Going out to dine, his body smeared with mercury, gleaming like a sardine under evening dress.
It is a mistake to surrender oneself into another’s hands. Day by day, he had felt himself grow more feeble, more lethargic, more womanish. But that is finished. No more poisoning himself. No more mercury, no more iodide of potassium, no more antimony. Nothing but a touch of Fowler’s Solution, three drops in a glass of port before sleep, the lightest of medicines. Placing himself in the hands of the sovereign physician, healing Nature, that is the ticket. Strenuous exercise, sunshine, invigorating air, game freshly killed and freshly prepared, there’s the true remedy.
All those doses of quicksilver can destroy a man. Heavy droplets of mercury circulating through the body, infesting the brain, weighing down every thought, here was surely the root of his dark imaginings, the explanation for the bony-ribbed, scabby, grey horse upon which he had sat so many nights at Sythe Grange.
Who was that chap at school, the one with the ampoule of mercury? Edson. Its properties fascinated the little beggar. He would slide it out of the vial in a single, shivering globule and, with a mad look in his eye, mash down hard on it with his thumb, sending myriad drops scurrying all about the tabletop like tiny silver mice. Then, playing cat, Edson would carefully bat them back together into a gleaming orb, shatter them all over again, giggling to himself.
