Armed With Madness полностью

Played by that demon Picus, when he had whistled up mystery with what was now undoubtedly a Victorian finger-bowl.

Played by Malatesta having Isotta sculpted for the Madonna; and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

Played by Chaucer who loved everything for what it was. A sword for being a sword, or a horse. And they for what they were, the ‘gentle girls and boys.’

Good thinking, good eating. All things taking care of themselves. Each thing accordynge to its kynde.

Would there be a train for Carston to go away by? Good idea of Picus to say it would be better for him to be slept with than visit that wood.

Was there anything to eat for dinner, anyhow? She jumped up and went out discreetly through the kitchen. In the scullery there was Felix, cleaning a basket of fish. Too much fish. Enough for half to go bad, and the rest infuriate Picus, who would say he had been given it to encourage his brain. Felix said:

“I thought I might as well help. Nanna and Janet are at it all day. Nothing like getting in a stock. Had a good walk with Picus?”

The basket, full offish-shapes, was wet, black-ribboned inside, a shell sticking here and there, a live whelk walking up. Sea-smelling, almost living food, still running with the live sea. She took a knife and a fish, and cut down on the slab of dark blue slate used for cooling butter. Felix had covered it with scales and blood.

“We’ll do it together,” she said.

“You’re not very good at it,” he said.

She hesitated, testing the contact with him.

“We’ll do other things together, then.”

“Don’t we pretty well always?” —His knife scraped down on a bone— “I mean, it’s only half the time I don’t understand.”

She thought: ‘So he went and gutted fish for me.’ She said: “What, my dearest dear, did you understand to-day?” He answered: “When you came in with Picus I saw your beauty. After Carston had been talking, and surprised me, rather. After the things which have happened lately. It was a kind of answer. A sudden opposite to what I was thinking. To what the world is usually, I suppose. You see, I would sooner have you or even Picus in the right. Only, I haven’t faith.”

She thought: ‘Try and have faith. No. Don’t try and have anything. Be with me.’

And in answer, she told him about the wood. The bird, Picus. O lady, be good. Everything. That she could not have told the others. She heard a thought in his head: ‘I shan’t be able to keep this up, but to-day I am my sister’s.’

More love for her now, handed back through Carston’s spite; peace in the scullery with her flesh and blood. Fish blood and flesh on a stone between them. In one day, two kinds of perfect love. Life with Picus. Life with him. (He had understood love for Picus. Picus would not understand love for him.) Life without Picus? Life without him? She remade Antigone’s discovery that you can have more lovers and more children. Not another brother, once your people’s bearing days are gone.

Life with the two gone. Life with Clarence, Carston, Ross? She thought she heard a voice saying: “You will soon be left alone with them. You will be without Felix. Because there is coming to you the opposite of what you’ve had. Must come to you. More than separation; avoidance, treachery. Equal to what you’ve had. At one point, life without them will mean that.”

“Not if I can help it!”

Behind this somewhere was an immense discovery, a huge principle which made it immaterial if she could help it or not. She rested in the knowledge that it was there. Their nurse came in, and they thought at once of washing and going away to change. Mounting the stairs, their arms round each other’s shoulders, Carston saw them from his room, and was inexpressibly shocked, unable to understand how Scylla had persuaded her brother that her relations with Picus had been misunderstood.

As Felix said, “pep” had been the mot juste for the way Carston behaved. When he had found that there was no train that night, he had walked across the valley. There he had discovered a coast-guard, and, practically unaided, the system by which the station wireless picked up the lighthouse, and from there communicated by telegraph with Starn. From this, he produced a taxi and a lodging for the night. He walked back and packed vigorously, kneeling on the floor, his back to the window and the wood. When he had seen Scylla passing upstairs with her brother, he had shut his door, ceased to hear the silence of the house, heard instead the wood, a little restless, its branches changing places in a wind risen suddenly off the sea.

Odd that he would not see the place again; have no part with its men, or possess its woman. Never found out what had really happened.