“Look here,” said Carston. “You’ve had a touch of the sun. We’ll grant that. Scylla has a fool female friend in London, fool enough to be in love with you. Wrote you a spiteful letter you lap up. Scylla comes down to explain it and comfort your feelings, and you try to kill her by torture. I know you were mad. If you don’t pull yourself together and try and face it, everyone will know you were mad; for you’ll do it again outside your home circle. The world won’t make delicate excuses for you, you spoilt, hysterical, self-pitying, self-centred, uninventive, incompetent son of a bitch.”
“Not uninventive,” said Scylla, “but you’d better try something else.”
“I’m taking you over to Tambourne right away. We’ll start now, and you can wait at the inn while I get a car. The old parson there is the company you need. You can come back to Gault, if they want you, when you’ve got your senses back.”
Picus nodded. “We are all for you, Carston.”
“All of us,” said Scylla.
“Don’t say,” he answered, “That if I stay here much longer, I shall be one of you. Because I never shall, and I don’t want to be.”
“Our house is your house,” said Scylla.
“Besides,” said Picus, “did you ever enjoy a summer more?”
“Hasn’t it been better than a movie? Leave Clarence at Tambourne and come over and look at Felix’s find.”
In his heart he knew he would not. Though there was continuity in this adventure, a circle like the design on Clarence’s mazer, a ring near to a magic ring, he knew that nothing would induce him to go back to that poverty and pride, cant and candour, raw flesh and velvet; into that dateless, shiftless, shifting, stable and unstable Heartbreak House. Not for a bit. Off to Paris on his own folk-adventure. In his last moments with them, looking at Clarence’s bowl, he saw the changes in things.
There had been an apple once. There had been an apple tree. When it gave no more apples, it had made fire, and a slice of its trunk had become a bowl cut out into birds. The bowl unless it was turned into fire again, would stop growing and last for ever. Things that came out of time, and were stopped; could be made over into another sort of time.
Clarence sat silent, a tear or so falling, shame and anger mounting. Once away, he would leave Carston; would not go to Tambourne. He would go to Tambourne because he must have somewhere to hide. The old parson might have comfort for him while Picus was with Scylla, and she enjoyed the reward of warriors. She and Picus alone together, playing at happy warriors.
If there was nothing for him at Tambourne, there would still be Picus’s father, a fine story to pick over together.
He said:
“Perhaps you’ll send my clothes. We must go before mid-day. I shouldn’t like Carston to have a repetition before he gets me to Tambourne.”
He took Scylla’s hand, remained a moment in her embrace. Carston followed him down the hill.
That afternoon cloud flecks flew over and the wind freshened. Ross and Nanna left the house scented with boiling sugar and took a walk down to the sea. He listened to a comparative history of her jam-making and a sketch of her intentions about the vegetable marrows with the interest he gave to each man on his subject alike. From the cliff above the fisherman’s hut they saw a ketch running before the south wind, straight for the bay.
“A french boat,” he said, “they’re running her in too close to the reef.” The old nurse shaded her eyes.
“It’s Mr. Felix steering. In a hurry he is as usual. It’s a nice way to bring his friend home.” Silence. A Russian brought over in a fishing-smack: in a hurry. The ketch made the channel (where the bluff hid it from the coastguards’ telescopes and the sooner the better), and Ross saw Felix and a sailor drop into a dinghy and pull fast for shore. In the stern sat another. They went down to the water’s edge to meet them. A few strokes out, Felix sprang thigh deep in the weed and dragged up the boat till her keel scraped the rocks. He embraced Ross, turned and gave the boy a hand to spring to shore.
“Ross, this is Boris.”
“But what made you come this way?”
He thought that he was looking at something at the same time old and young. A youth he understood. An age he did not. Also that it was worn and tired and sick. And that Felix’s eyes were like dark-blue coals, his step certain, his voice without petulance.
“I had no papers,” said Boris.
“We got into a row,” said Felix, “the police raided a café, and we did a bolt. We ran straight into two men up a back street and sent them spinning. One was hurt. Then I saw that it was no good, especially for Boris, and got a car to the coast. Paid up those chaps to bring us and cut back. There’s a third man below to replace Boris in case we were seen from the shore.”
Not bad for Felix. Ross looked again at what he had brought, standing on the tide-mark, his back to the water, the ooze soaking his poor shoes. The sailors landed two suit-cases.
