Home, for the old man, was a two-down, two-up rooming house which, though it must have been built (like all of Bone Lake) within the last three years, was already shoddy and run to seed. There were lights on when we arrived – or rather, there was one light, deep within the echoing hallway; the moon outside was far brighter and cleaner than this murky sentinel which waited for us. The moon had shone down on a crazy sort of building, thrown together with cement blocks, tar-paper, and corrugated iron; the hallway, which was angular and dim, smelt of cooking – if burnt fat is part of cooking – and a sour poverty.
The house was not even doomed to become a slum; it had started life as one. It looked mean, it smelt mean; and the only person stirring was the meanest thing about it.
She was a woman, grim and sallow and small; dressed (far out of her age group) in the kind of sloppy flowered housecoat worn by brides who have given up. She had sighted us first through what I guessed to be an ever-open crack in her door, and had come out very quickly to meet us in the hall. She stood staring at us, hands on hips, like a statue of watchful malice, as we came in – and, to be absolutely fair, we were not the kind of procession for which doormen bowed and managers trotted forward with a bunch of long-stemmed roses.
Mary wore a rumpled camel-hair coat, wet with snow, bloodstained on one shoulder; I was dressed like the northland version of a newspaperman who is saving his money for better things; and I was carrying an old man, exhausted to the point of death, whose face under the lamplight was swollen, bruised, and caked with dried blood.
But still, I thought, she need not have faced us with such vile contempt. She need not have looked at the derelict old man, and said with waspish, sneering satisfaction: ‘I guess he’s corned again.’
For the first time that evening I sighed; a genuine deep-felt sigh of exasperation. This was not my day. Round every new corner, I blundered on to a battlefield; whatever I did, someone had been there first and booby-trapped the area. First I had run away from the old man, and he had caught up with me. Then I had set out to rescue him, and collided with the police – and lost thirty dollars. Now I had carried him home, like any good Samaritan, and it seemed that I had done the wrong thing again, and must explain my ignoble actions to this resident harpy.
I felt that even if I did something invincibly good, like pulling an orphan child from a hole in the ice, I would find myself behind bars, charged with loitering, trespass, damage to municipal property … But patience was still a virtue, and the old man in my arms was still real and pitiful. I summoned what spirit I could, and answered: ‘He’s had an accident. He’s been hurt.’
‘So what’s new?’ The woman’s rasping voice, like her appearance, was the most unpleasant thing in this unpleasant house. ‘He’s always having accidents … Well, you can just dump him, and get out of here.’
Mary came forward. ‘He really is hurt,’ she said. ‘He needs help.’
The woman looked at her. ‘So it’s you again,’ she said, with manifest spite. ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay away from here?’
‘He needs help,’ said Mary again, more stubbornly.
‘He needs his head examined. With an ice pick.’
The old man chose this moment to come to his senses. He did so swiftly; at one second he was the stillest of still life, at the next he had stirred, and slipped from my arms, and shaken himself like a waking dog as he finally stood upright. He remained a fearsome sight; the dim light did nothing for the weal on his face save to make it more livid still, and he wavered about on his legs in a slow, erratic circle, the best he could manage in self-control.
‘Mrs Cross,’ he stuttered, and produced, to my astonishment, a sketchy bow. ‘Apologies for my appearance … Met with a mishap … My friends were kind enough. …’ He waved his hand around in our direction; it was an introduction of sorts, though I had no inclination to bow myself. ‘Hope I haven’t kept you up.’
‘That’ll be the day.’ She was surveying the old man with relentless hatred; a disgusting slattern herself, she was made bold by her belief that she had found a worse human being. One could tell that she had grown sick to death of him, and yet she needed him also; she had to have him near by, as a yardstick of misery and human decline. ‘You’ve tied one on again,’ she declared loudly. ‘Time you finished up in jail where you belong!’
Mary had moved forward again, protective in a way I had not yet matched, and taken the old man’s arm. ‘Come on,’ she said, encouragingly. ‘We’ll get you upstairs.’
Mrs Cross glared at her. ‘Cheap trash!’ she said. And then: ‘Where are you going, miss?’
‘I’m taking him upstairs.’
‘I’ll be waiting to see you come down!’
On the point of flight, I changed my mind. If Mary could prove herself brave, against these degrading odds, so could I. I took the old man’s other arm, and the three of us moved towards the bare cement staircase.
Mrs Cross called after me: ‘Hold it! Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘No visitors after ten o’clock. What do you think I’m running here?’
I was tempted to answer, and then thought better of it. She could out-bawl me, any time … ‘He needs help,’ I said mildly, and kept on retreating.
As we made our escape, she shouted after us: ‘I’ll be waiting for you! And keep the door open!’
Laboriously up the stairs we went, myself now supporting the old man, and Mary trailing behind us. The ascent was painfully slow; twice he had to pause for a rest, once he fell, and lay still in gasping despair. For some unholy reason, I recalled another agonizing journey; the phrase ‘The Stations of Mrs Cross’ slipped into my mind unawares, before I could stop it. I had been brought up to hate blasphemy, and I still did so; the appalling lapse made me angry – or made me more angry still, because there had already been quite enough in that evening to turn all the milk of humanity sour. Even Mary, who must have been exposed to Mrs Cross before, was muttering to herself, as if the new outrage had been more than she could bear.
But as we passed the threshold of his room, the old man put us both to shame. He looked closely into our faces, divining our disgust, and said: ‘If we knew all about her, we would forgive her.’
At any other moment, perhaps from any other man, it would have sounded false, like those phoney answers to interviewers: ‘To what do you attribute your success in running this motel?’ – ‘Well, I guess I just love people.’ (Love people! One might as well say: ‘I just love liquid’, as if it didn’t matter whether one drank champagne or kerosene.) But the old man managed to give his words a positively saint-like conviction; it was clear that he really did mean what he said about Mrs Cross, and that he himself had already forgiven her all things.
In the circumstances, it was the most generous remark I had ever heard; and as soon as he had said it – as though its virtue had cost him dear – he staggered forward and collapsed upon his bed.
For the moment, he was as well off there as anywhere else, and I did not move to help him. But he could not be left indefinitely.
‘We ought to get a doctor,’ I said. ‘Is there one?’
Mary had come to the foot of the bed, and was looking down at the old man with a world of compassion. ‘There is,’ she answered, ‘but he’s off north somewhere. Mercy mission, but he got snowed in. They were talking about it at the hotel.’
Well, I thought, we’ll just have to run our own mercy mission … I took a moment to look round the room. It was icily cold, and hardly furnished at all; a bed, a sagging armchair, and an unpainted pinewood chest was the total catalogue. Behind the door was a rucksack, hanging from its chafed and twisted straps; in one corner stood a pair of high-laced boots, the leather cracked, the toes curling upwards; on top of the chest was a metal coffee pot and a pair of silver-backed brushes, battered and scratched; the worn bristles were as yellow as corn. The iron bedstead was covered with what looked like an ancient army surplus blanket; across one corner of its faded khaki was stencilled the word ‘blighty’.
Giving pitiful clues to the threadbare past, the room promised a most meagre end to a long life.
I returned to the wretched proprietor of this castle. The old man, stretched out on his back, was stirring again. He was also moaning, as his hand went to the ravaged cheek which must, even in this chilly room, be thawing into agony. The rest of his body was shaking with cold.
‘We’ve got to get him to bed,’ I said. ‘And get him warm somehow. This room’s like a morgue.’
‘I’ll make some coffee,’ said Mary obediently. ‘There’s a ring at the end of the hall. But–’ she looked round, ‘they must have taken away his heater.’
‘Then they’ll bring it back.’ I was bending over the old man, gently wrestling him out of his clothes; he helped me as much as he could, baring his shivering body which was wasted away to nothing, like a skeleton drawn with a single smudgy chalkline. It took a long time. Presently he whispered: ‘Nightshirt – pillow,’ and under the pillow I found a red flannel shirt with a flapping tail – a veritable relic of the stately past. Finally I tucked him in under the blanket, still trembling violently, as Mary came back with a coffee pot which made a thin plume of steam in the bitter air.
I said: ‘Back in a minute,’ and went downstairs again.
I had expected a battle over the heater, and was savagely ready for it; when I reached the entrance hall, the battle took place. There was no heater, said Mrs. Cross, looking at me with a malevolent stare as if I had demanded a mink stole on a silver tray. Well, there was a heater but it didn’t work – the old man had broken it. Well, there was another heater, but heaters cost money to run. Well, there was this heater, but it was five dollars a month, cash in advance. Well, there was this heater – and I hope you fall on to it and fry, her furious eyes said as she handed it over, and I started up the stairs again.
She shouted after me: ‘And don’t stay all night! Single room means what it says!’ I had an idea that she would take the heater away again, as soon as I was gone. But that would be another day, another field of battle.
For the moment, at an investment of thirty-five dollars, old Shepherd was home, and dry.
A sort of peace had come to the old man’s room when I returned. He had drunk some of his coffee, and Mary had bathed his face; now she was rubbing his feet under the blanket, while he lay back, his eyes closed. The room slowly warmed as the electric heater did its work. It was domestic tranquillity, of a sort; a moment when one could slip away without too bad a conscience. Thinking that he was falling asleep, I said softly: ‘If he’s OK, I’m on my way.’
Mary nodded, not interrupting what she was doing, and I glanced around for my coat. When next I looked at the old man, he had sat up in bed, bright as a button, and was smiling at me. Then he said, without preamble: ‘Were you in the last war?’
For a moment I thought he was babbling; then, meeting those sharp and shining eyes, I suspected this to be an odd social gambit – he wanted me to stay, for fear of loneliness, and thus had said the first thing that came into his mind. It was not till much later that I came to realize that this question of his, out of the blue, was the trigger for all that came after; that he had planned it that way, and with it, perhaps, the rest of my life. By such small beginnings – asmile, a shot, a single sentence such as ‘Follow me’ – is a man’s path determined; and sometimes we are lucky not to know it.
But all I did then was answer: ‘No. I was too young.’
I said it defensively, as my generation often did, though without much reason. Old people seem to forget how long ago was their war. I was eight years old when it ended; brave as a lion, no doubt, but youngish for that contest. Yet I had something more reputable to add.
‘But my father was killed in it.’
His intent eyes rested on mine. ‘How?’
‘He was taken prisoner in Hong Kong. Then he was killed on the Burma Road.’
‘We are wolves, wolves with the minds of men … I was in both those wars, once as a boy, once as a man.’ (That made him about seventy, at least.) ‘I was a mole in the first, a trench mole. And then a weed, drifting to and fro across the Atlantic, in the second. But never a man with a brain.’
He was looking at the ceiling now, his hands at the back of his head, regretting the past without rancour. I decided to give this only a few more moments. In the line of newspaper duty, I had heard old soldiers reminiscing before; they never needed an audience, even of one.
‘Wasted years,’ he murmured. ‘Wasted people … War is the most absurd game ever invented by the human mind, and sustained by human appetite. But I should not lecture you. Young men don’t make wars. They only fight them. Old men make wars – and survive them. They are immensely brave with other people’s sons. But this time, there will be no such pattern. They have not come to realize that, yet. But they had better!’
I said nothing. I had heard this kind of talk, a hundred times before, from well-meaning people; I believed in what they were saying, but not in their capacity to do anything about it. They would rally for peace; they would donate words and money and dogged patience and sometimes personal pride: and then somebody quite different would press a button, and they promptly fell apart. There had been people like that, by the million – so the books assured us – in 1914, in 1939. But at the first sound of the drum, the audience drifted away, and within an hour had picked up the step for war.
But old Shepherd was going on – and I realized that I had been wrong to think that he was recalling the past ‘without rancour’, for when his voice started again it was suddenly harsh and compelling.
‘They had better realize it,’ he said, ‘because next time, there aren’t going to be any men with brains, alive or dead. Babies with two heads and no legs, maybe. Men with bones already made of glue. Girls with a third breast.’ It was strange how these few words, in a thin bitter voice, could conjure up for me a whole inferno of unspeakable creatures. ‘But no people, as we know them. War won’t be a game any more. It will be global cooking – making a soup of humanity.’
Of course I agreed – who didn’t? – and his words, and particularly the last phrase, had found their mark, both in myself and also in Mary, who had stopped rubbing his feet and was staring at him, almost horror-struck. But mostly I agreed because of my father; I did not need anyone else’s nightmares. My strongest childhood memory had been of my mother learning of my father’s death, and – later and far worse – of the sort of death it had been. A surviving friend of his, with the best of intentions, had made a long journey to talk to her, had got maudlin drunk, and told her a detailed story.
‘They jest at scars, who never felt a wound’ was never true thereafter, in our small household. My father had been pulped to death by a Japanese sergeant trying out a new bamboo swagger-cane. He had died praying, and then screaming, and, at the end, only twitching. On that day, and ever afterwards, when I thought of war I thought of my father dying sweetly for his country in that forest clearing, broken and rebroken for as long as he moved, and then stamped into the ground like a bloody reed mat.
Sometimes, on a street corner, a smiling oriental face would jog my memory.
Because I felt thus strongly, I answered the old man offhand. ‘You don’t have to sell it to me! I don’t want to die, not in anyone’s quarrel.’
He reacted to my tone, frowning as Mary was frowning. ‘That’s not enough! You must want to live!’
‘Oh, I do, I do … Look, it’s getting late. I must go home.’
Mary said suddenly: ‘Don’t be such a smart alec.’ I didn’t think I deserved that, but I wasn’t going to tell either of them about my father. I got up without a word, and began to put on my coat.
‘Stay,’ said the old man, anxiously, as if some plan were going wrong. ‘I have more to tell you … About the end of the world … It has happened once already, I can prove it …’ He seemed to be wandering again, losing his grip; I realized that his wits ebbed and flowed like any other tide. ‘I can show you a sign … I will tell you my secret!’ I thought he was growing wilder still, but suddenly he calmed down, and his eyes grew lucid. ‘I will really tell you. And you are the last person I shall tell.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t need to be told.’ Though he sounded sane enough, I thought he might be confusing a lot of different things, that this would turn out to be some sort of Mad Trapper story, the Hidden Treasure of Baffin Island in six instalments. There were scores of them current in the northland; they mostly featured a lost mine, and a man who came into town with a sackful of gold, then went back for more, never to be seen by mortal eye again. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ I repeated. ‘Why not settle down and get some sleep?’
But Mary was frowning at me again, and the old man was pushing on, brushing aside all objections. ‘You need to know this! Not one person in the world has believed me, so far, except–’ he nodded to Mary, ‘perhaps you. But I shall try once more.’ He was looking at me steadily. ‘You are young, as well – young and good-hearted. Perhaps you will believe it, and perhaps you will do something about it.’ Half in and half out of my coat, I tried to interrupt again; but before I could get a word out, the old man asked quickly: ‘Do you know what the Dew Line is?’
I was ready to be irritable. ‘Of course I do.’
‘But do you know what it stands for?’
‘Distant Early Warning.’
‘Quite so … I can show you another sort of Dew Line. A very distant early warning. The earliest of all.’
This didn’t make any sense, but in spite of my resolve I asked: ‘You mean, you think there was a Dew Line before?’
‘I would not doubt it.’ For some reason his voice held a tinge of sarcasm. ‘But this is something different. A discovery …’ His voice was becoming charged with excitement, and his head lifted from the pillow. ‘I discovered something which proved that everything has happened before, that this is not our first time on earth …’ He saw my face, disbelieving, not ready to listen much longer, and he grew desperate. ‘I tell you, I can prove it! Ican prove it because of something I found up on Bylot Island, at the very top of Baffin. One of the most desolate places in the world! Scarcely habitable, even now! Scarcely visited! But it has been used before!’
‘Used?’
‘Used by skilled men, men of science!’
‘What did you find then?’
He nursed his secret for a moment more; long years, much mockery, had made him a jealous guardian. Then he said, calmly and quietly: ‘I found a colossal refrigerator. And it was full.’