XI

The evening was very still. The smoke from charcoal fires hung in the air. The mountains in the distance, the ranges of massed clouds, the rush built huts and jacales,¹ the corn in the fields, the organ cactus and maguey, the whole world, appeared stunned. Women wearing rebozos, with glowing faces and eyes firelit by the sunset, might have been walking in their sleep² as they slipped by them. Yet their carriage was erect and proud. Footprints departed into the dusk.

Hugh and Yvonne had left by the back way and their path led through a yard attached to the restaurant. A large duck waddled slowly before them, followed by her little nestlings. One would wait for the other to make the first movement, then tumble after in a pathetic fashion, uttering tiny cries.

“Look,” said Hugh, abruptly and awkwardly, “Let’s get this over with. I don’t know what the old man wanted to devil you about. I’m sure it was all lies. But anyhow, what if you have had a few affairs? It’s none of my damn business after all. It would be very surprising if you hadn’t …. I don’t want to be noble, for Pete’s sake, I’m just telling you the truth.”

Yvonne was silent. Finally she said, without emotion:

“But it’s true, Hugh—what he said is sort of true, about the abortions. I was having one that time you came to see me in Paris. I was going to tell you—but not like this …”

Hugh took her arm.

“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to have such a simple time as this explaining away my past.”

“You take that attitude now. But will you always?”

They had paused by a cage and Hugh, self-consciously, was stroking a soft-nosed gazelle.³ Innocence seemed to brood here.

“I’d like to let her out,” he said, breaking the silence.

“No, it would be cruel. Somebody would be sure to shoot at her or harm her in some way.”

“Well, I’ve had my say,” said Hugh, “I’ve never had syphilis.” He gave the gazelle a final pat. “But few enough of my friends have ever passed me without my saying: there but for the grace of God goes me.” They walked on a little, pausing again where there was a hawk⁴ cowering at the bottom of its cage. “That’s not as courteous as it sounds, either. Forgive me—” The hawk looked ill fed and miserable, and appeared to withdraw from them in shame. Its eyes were hidden, to protect from them, perhaps, its last possession, the dream of clawing the cold air of the mountain tops, of resting among icy falls of rock, splashed with snow. “But we might let him out,” said Hugh.

“Yes! That little man obviously mistreats it!”

“We’ve left him the gazelle, hang it all, now we’ll give his hawk back to where it belongs.”

They looked around furtively. No one was watching. Their eyes met.

“I love you,” Hugh said.

“I love you.”

“Strange,” said Hugh. They were opening the cage. At first the hawk made no move, unable to believe its good fortune. “Come on,” he urged the hawk. “Come on, be quick, we’re friends.”

The hawk fluttered out of the cage and alighted at their feet. It hesitated where it was for a moment, one wing drooping in the dust. Then it gathered its strength together and took flight to the top of one of the neighboring sheds of the yard.

“Do you think we’ve done right after all?” asked Yvonne.

“I’m sure it thinks so. Look!”

The hawk, after another preparatory testing of its wings, and after slipping back once or twice on the roof, flew off.

It was flying with a powerful cleaving of pinions. Soon, just as it had been with the aeroplane that morning, they could not see which way it was moving. Then it was gone.

“I know what it feels like,” said Hugh as they walked on. “I was in the calaboose once.”

“Oh,” Yvonne laughed, restraining an impulse to burst into tears. “What for?”

“Raising hell in the Azores. On a Christmas Eve with a lot of the black gang from my ship.”

“They imprisoned Columbus in the Azores⁵ too. And you can always tell your grandchildren you’ve been jugged in Atlantis.”

“Which brings us back to Bilbao and Euzkadi⁶ and your father. Now, to be practical. What shall we do? Look for him?”

Yvonne shook her head slowly and turned away. They were standing by the falls again. “No, he’ll be all right. He’ll just drink himself tired and come home.” She was watching the vapours, a phalanx of ghosts, which, in the sunset, commingling with or isolating themselves from the main segment of a rainbow, suggested the dance patterns of some gruesome Maeterlinckian drama,⁷ for in these movements a certain identity of the searcher with his goal was expressed, the seeker pursuing still the gay colors he does not know he has assumed, or striving to identify the finer scene of which he may never realize he is a part.

“But suppose he doesn’t come home tonight?” Hugh was saying. “Will the neighbors be shocked at my staying there?”

“Oh no,” said Yvonne. “At least I don’t think so. When he goes on these benders sometimes he doesn’t come home for days. And it’s partly my fault,” she added, “I provoked him about drinking, though it’s not really his drinking I care about. It’s himself, that he … But let’s try to forget him for the time.”

“He’ll be sorry,” Hugh said, taking her arm, “But I guess it would be better to wait a while. We’ll give him just enough time so that if he recognizes us later it won’t be too embarrassing for him.” He was about to say something more but stopped. Presently he observed with a smile, “But in the main, Columbus proved a good navigator, didn’t he? In spite of thinking that Cuba was on the mainland.”⁸

And something, astonishingly, was settled for her by this remark, something which had been settled neither in Hugh’s manner of mitigating her father’s attack nor in her declaration of love for him. By it, her relationship with him was as if projected forward through time to a point where what had occurred was a distress accepted by both of them, which could no longer do them a hurt. The seas of sourceless driftwood lay behind and the peaks of the new world were visible over the horizon. And she felt the nervous relief a shunned child feels when reinstated with its fellows. She was happy again.

“Do you know,” Yvonne said, as they approached the jungle, giving scarcely a glance at another group of bathers flicking at each other with towels, “I was thinking about cages this morning in Acapulco—you know how you imagine things when you can’t go to sleep? And there’s something of Chaucer’s that’s a private discovery of my own, about a bird in a cage.⁹ It’s in The Maunciple’s Tale I think, and it’s so lovely and true.”

“I never got that far. I never even got through Troilus,” said Hugh.

“Well, it’s sort of hidden away there, and what goes before it is kind of silly and what comes after it is stupid too. But I’ve never been able to get it out of my head.”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“All right, here goes: I can’t pronounce Chaucer but this is more or less it,

Take any brid and put it in a cage

And do all thine entente and thy corage

To fostre it tenderly with mete and drinke

Of alle deyintees that thou canst bethinke

And be his cage of gold never so gay

Yet hath this brid by twenty thousand fold

Lever in a forest that is rude and cold

Gon ete wormes and swich wrecchedness.”

“What’s that last line again?” Yvonne repeated it.

“Gon ete wormes and swich wrecchedness,” said Hugh, “That’s wonderful. It’s a pity it doesn’t stop there.”

“Yes, it’s always a pity there has to be a story.”

“The only poem I can think of about cages is the one by James Stephens,¹⁰ and there I guess the bird isn’t in a cage either. It’s a lark in the bushes with a broken wing. It ends like this: ‘Its heart is broken and its song is gone, there in the dark.’”

Hugh grabbed at a straw and put it in his mouth as they strolled along.

“No,” said Yvonne, tears coming into her eyes, “That’s too much. I can’t stand it. Didn’t he write the one about the little rabbit¹¹ too? I hear a rabbit in a snare. Little one, Oh little one, I am searching everywhere.”

“I guess he did,” said Hugh, “But we must get off James Stephens. Besides, it reminds me of my brother Jack who used to go around letting rabbits out of snares with a mashie-niblick.”¹²

“And yet it is good.” She thought for a moment of The Crock of Gold and her father shouting drunken quotations from it that morning, then forgot it.

“I don’t know. There’s a rabbit in the moon¹³ too, the Chinese say. Or is it a hare?”

“We won’t have the moon very long tonight. And tell me about your brother Jack. He sounds delightful.”

“I won’t tell you about Jack because we’d get back again on to rabbits. I don’t know why all this preoccupation with these horrors,” said Hugh, “unless it’s that—oh Christ, youth is such a dirty thing, so full of blood and desire and disaster and self pity. And yet, by God, it’s good. Where’s Venus,¹⁴ by the way?”

“Don’t you remember, we had Venus this morning. We can’t have her morning and evening.”

“Why not?”

“You were a sailor weren’t you?” Yvonne smiled. “You ought to know.”

“Yes, of course. But it’s a damn shame we can’t have Venus morning and evening. Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a long time since Acapulco this morning? Venus was so bright then …”

“Yes, and the funny thing about Venus is that it gets brighter the further away it gets, and when it’s about thirty-five days away from the time it’s at its nearest, then it’s brightest. Father taught me all I know about astronomy.¹⁵ All the mythology too, though I’ve forgotten most of it.”

“Perhaps there’s something to be learned from that. Yes, as though it were better to keep the sun between yourself and love!¹⁶ So let’s take a long stride away from all our rabbits and larks, for Pete’s sake.”

Over the trees was the grim, inverted smile of Popocatepetl’s extinction. The jungle closed over it, the mountains were blotted out. Yet it was not dark; from the stream racing along beside them, a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Bougainvillea, brick red in the half light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them. On the trees, every little while, there was a notice they could just make out, a hand pointing: A la Cascada.¹⁷ Further down the chassis of abandoned American cars and outworn ploughshares¹⁸ bridged the stream which they kept all the while to the left.

They walked in silence for a while. The boles of the trees strained, trying to follow the breeze that tossed their dark plumes aloft. What’s this conspiracy among us, they whispered up there, who is it preparing a voyage this time and why?

Yvonne thought of Byron’s pool¹⁹ at Cambridge. Everywhere there was that same extraordinary lushness: one could almost hear things growing. The roar of the torrent grew louder. Hugh saw Niagara Falls again in his mind’s eye, the river boiling above Niagara like the white wakes of all the ships seen from all the windswept poops in the world.

At last they reached a clearing where two paths diverged. To the left a dim aged sign said again: A la Cascada. To the right: A Parián. Once more the sky was visible above them and to the left, on the hillside, they saw cattle too, moving among gold cornstalks and striped tents. The white cone of Popocatepetl appeared once more: next to it Ixtaccihuatl, his sleeping woman, her jagged angles of blood red snow whipped with darker shadows of dark rock, her whole summit appearing to hang suspended in mid-air, but off from the timberline²⁰ ghosts, floating among forbidding clouds. Chimborazo, Popocatepetl,²¹ had stolen his heart away, Yvonne thought. But the queer thing was that in the legend²² Popocatepetl himself was the dreamer. Yes, in the days of the volcano’s deification the Indians believed the smoking of Popo came from the fires of the warrior’s love burning eternally for Ixtaccihuatl, whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless sleep.

They took the path to the left.²³

Water spurted out down to the rushing stream through thickets festooned with convolvuli on a higher level than the topmost trees of the jungle, which now became lonelier and more savage the further they proceeded. The striped tents, the cornstalks, dropped out of sight. Their thoughts were being dragged on by the swift current past the uprooted trees and smashed bushes to the cascada itself.

Soon they had the feeling of being cut off from humanity altogether. Branches were swinging stiffly, broad leaves unfurling. There was a cracking and tearing among the trees and a rattling, as of cordage.²⁴ The stream seethed on alongside faithfully. A flash of lightning high up in the mountains showed black clouds with great flames leaping between. There was a smell of decay—the barranca was not far off. Rotting vegetation, too, lay about them. They might have been at the ravening²⁵ heart of the world. But after following the stream a little further they reached the cascada. Now everything was again charged with life. One felt that upon looking more closely, he might see this bud open, that branch throw forth a shoot. There were indeed two cascadas: one curving over the stones from above like wild hair over a goddess’ forehead, Yvonne thought, falling in step with Hugh. Once some woodland creature plunged past them in the undergrowth, followed by another in passionate pursuit.

Then the trees fell away behind and they found themselves climbing a hill that seemed to lead them up into the heavens themselves.

The stars came out, portholes on the vast side of the ship of the universe.

“Oh why doesn’t this world stop being so lousy,” exclaimed Yvonne, “and find out more about the stars, about science—all nations in the world, working together, find out what it all means, what our real duties are! Yes, think of the planets now, like ships rounding your old Cape Horn, the eternal Horn of the sun—”

“And come back by what Straits of Magellan?”²⁶ said Hugh.

The evening land above her of worlds and volcanoes, alive and dead, of suns continually bursting into fragments and being reborn again, of planets like moths, filled her with ecstasy. What could her own little death matter when through all so much life was moving? And her own life too, among the multitudinous dizzy wheels of this limitless engine of creation, so minute and yet—great as the infinitesimal cause of a colossal disaster! She laughed: even with such awful thoughts as those, and with all one’s vanities, it was good, just the same, to belong! Long, long ago everything had been understood and settled: nothing was of importance save that they were together and alive.

“I like to feel somehow,” Hugh remarked, “that the really good people will be there waiting for us when we die,—even though it may be old fashioned of me.”

“Who are the good people, Hugh?”

“I don’t know,” he replied reflectively. “I think of the dead in two ways. First the living dead. The hypocrites and iron-creeping Jesuses²⁷ who would ride our spirits down into blood and gravel. I like to think that most of these, when they really die, vanish forever, as individuals.”

“What about your shark thing?”²⁸

Hugh picked Yvonne up and lifted her over a fallen, moss-covered log, holding her tightly to him for a moment before he set her down.

“Well, my shark thing can’t go on indefinitely after he’s dead, can he?” he replied, as they walked on. “There comes a time when even he has to quit and die completely. Which is a good time for the live fishes who haven’t been swallowed!”

“But I thought they were in the net too.”

“So they are! Oh gosh, Yvonne—with your astronomical mind! But we’re all in some kind of net. Yes, well, and then there’re the others, who have died as we know death: and I like to think that they are continuing their pilgrimage elsewhere, and can help us … I mean the really good, not the egotistic ones, not many of them on stained glass windows, Jesus perhaps, but not the saints and martyrs, above all not the philosophers—my God, not the philosophers! Well, Socrates²⁹ might get by. I mean the simple people, those who were really kind and unpretentious, humble, and yet proud. And who weren’t too pious not to like wine and singing and helping others. But who didn’t make a big song about that. Those who have the tools of our freedom among the dead—who wait for our wills to allow them to teach us how to love one another.”

“It sounds terribly involved,” Yvonne said, “and we don’t know the names of most of them. And don’t philosophers and martyrs ever sing songs?”

“Not the kind of songs I like.”

“Well, the ones we do know the names of then. What about Lorca?³⁰” Yvonne asked. “I suppose you’d call him a martyr. Oh, forgive me Hugh, I forgot you knew him!”

“Yes,” said Hugh, “I forgot too. That the fascists dragged him through the streets of Granada. But what I will never forget,” he added, “is his story about the pigs and lambs. It appears that one day in Andalusia he was walking through some ruins at dawn where little spring lambs were frisking about with their brothers and sisters. But also there were some bastardos of savage looking wild pigs rooting about. The pigs caught sight of the lambs, and before Lorca’s eyes, fell on them and tore them to pieces.”

“Oh please—”

“Yes, I know what you’re going to say—that before we had rabbits and ducks and sharks and now we have pigs and lambs. And you’re quite right. Let’s stomp away again from the whole blooming menagerie.”

“I think Rilke³¹ must be one of your really ‘good’ dead,” Yvonne remarked as they slackened their pace. “Though good’s a lousy word. I think he sort of must look on and help. And Kafka.³² And D. H. Lawrence³³ too, who said so, in as many words. Strange! I can only think of writers at the moment.”

“That’s because you can scarcely think of a great writer—only a few very great ones—without thinking of the poor blighter’s death,” said Hugh, “which nine times out of ten has colored his entire work. After all, it was the one thing he was perfectly assured of from the first moment he began to write. And they are the best ambassadors between life and death. Rilke. Yes,” he continued, “well, maybe if he looks on and helps he can help me to understand most of what he wrote! I don’t know why it is that metaphysically minded birds like myself should be essentially a bit dimwitted.” Hugh was holding aside a branch for her which blocked their way. “Childish, I think. Yes, in spite of all the elaborate pains we take to show we’re not. But there it is.” He let the branch snap back and the leaves quivered. “And you females by and large are much more intelligent. You can help us a lot. You could teach me about the stars, for instance. And the constellations: all these obscene and friendly creatures lolling about the sky. I’m looking right up now and I don’t see any dogs, or bulls, or chained maidens³⁴ or mighty hunters at all—”

“You can’t see any mighty hunters. Because Scorpio has stung Orion³⁵ and he’s supposed to be dead,” Yvonne said. “That is, Orion has set, or hasn’t risen. And soon Scorpio will be setting too.”

“I get it all tied up with astrology.”

“Oh Hugh!—Astrology’s all bunk!” said Yvonne. “The astrologers are always two constellations out in the first place, and anyhow—”

“Maybe; but I was going to say,” said Hugh, “and perhaps I won’t, that we’d have to have a whole lot of Russians in our ‘after life,’ and that we can’t have all of them … Damn it, one thing leads to another with these fellows and somebody would be sure to bring Tolstoy³⁶ along and that would be the beginning of the end.”

“We’d have to have some painters,” Yvonne said, thinking: why, ‘we’d have to have’?—could it be that they had unconsciously realized that there might be no place on earth for their spirits to rest? ‘Spirits’ she said to herself. Perhaps there was no place for their bodies either for very long: their honeymoon would be in chaos, their house in death. “No, if we start on that we’ll only get snobbish,” she added aloud.

“I could do without all painters save Brueghel the Elder,”³⁷ said Hugh, “and I could do without all his paintings save the one of the huntsmen in winter.”

“Wouldn’t we get a bit tired of just one painter for company and just one picture?”

“We could have Van Gogh.”³⁸

“I don’t like Van Gogh,” Yvonne said. “That is, I don’t admit it to anyone else, but I don’t.”

“Well, maybe he wouldn’t have us, anyhow.”

“I look at his pictures but they don’t mean much to me.”

“Doesn’t that sense of sunlight almost roaring mean anything to you?” asked Hugh, smiling to himself, for he remembered Yvonne praising or about to praise Van Gogh that morning to her father.

“We could have Van Gogh’s sunlight without Van Gogh. Oh, no. That’s hard on him.”

“Get along with you. As if he cared a damn! He’s far too great to bother about us.”

“We can’t have everything and everybody,” Yvonne said. “But don’t we want a few statesmen, yes, and philosophers and such after all?”

“I should think Plato,³⁹ on the strength of this conversation. But no, do let’s keep all philosophers out, definitely,” Hugh said. “Or we’d only get mixed up with birds like Nietzsche⁴⁰ and Schopenhauer.⁴¹ Karl Marx⁴² too. Ugh! A vexing old buffalo.”

“Careful Hugh, now now, there you go again, birds and buffaloes.”

“Besides, perhaps that soul of Schopenhauer’s his pals saw flying out of his mouth turned out to be only his false teeth after all. So maybe he isn’t there if he didn’t want to be.”

“Let’s say the philosophers can drop in from time to time if they want to,” said Yvonne. “But that they’re not especially invited. Though that doesn’t apply to astronomers, does it? We really must have Galileo.⁴³ I was always so fond of him. I bet he’s roosting right on one of Jupiter’s moons—he was so proud of them—”

“—And I forgot your Chaucer,”⁴⁴ said Hugh. “But that doesn’t mean—”

“That we’d have to have all the Canterbury Pilgrims too, does it? Or does it?” said Yvonne.

“Perhaps we might find an old carpenter⁴⁵ I knew at sea among them by this time,” said Hugh. “Gosh, he was a good man. He’d absolutely have to be there.”

“What about music? We’ll need some music.”

“Won’t the music of the spheres do?”

“Oh, and I forgot your Herman Melville.⁴⁶ We’ll have to have him.”

“Oh definitely! We could all boil up a mess of crabs together—which was his idea of a binge—and have a fine time. Then we’d have friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.⁴⁷ Probably Herman’s still making up his mind to be annihilated and Nathaniel’s discouraging him.”

“Nathaniel Hawthorne was Consul at Rock Ferry, near where Father was for a time,” said Yvonne. “And what about Shakespeare⁴⁸ and Beethoven.”⁴⁹

“And Rabelais⁵⁰ and Donne.⁵¹ And Abraham Lincoln.”⁵²

“If they’d come.”

“But all communists, prohibitionists, crack pots, all Oxford Groupers,⁵³ Latter Day Saints,⁵⁴ social creditors,⁵⁵ Tolstoy, fascists, Nazis, Japanese—out” said Hugh. “No. We’d have to have Hokusai,”⁵⁶ he added.

“If we had Hokusai then we’d have to have Debussy,”⁵⁷ said Yvonne.

“Why Debussy?”

“There’s the obvious connection people always point out.”

“Oh, I see—you mean the Sea, the Wave, whatever it is,” said Hugh. “Ah, I’m smarter than you think, aren’t I? But then,” he continued, “Debussy doesn’t express the sea for me. For me the sea’s a place of lots of ships. And especially steamers. And most especially tramp steamers.⁵⁸ Old colliers out of Marseilles stationary in a big sea in the Bay of Biscay.⁵⁹ And dirty freighters showing red lead⁶⁰ tilted alongside the wharf in Kowloon⁶¹—”

“I can see one now, perfectly,” Yvonne laughed, “with the mate on deck, cleaning his teeth in a bucket.”

“—or homeward bound, plunging past you in the Indian Ocean when the next port’s Penang.⁶² Yes, and especially tramp steamers, by God! Not little stinks, but honest to God deep water ships with bosuns and coal trimmers⁶³ and stokeholds. There’s nothing in the world to me like seeing the masts of one of those tramps sticking up behind the roofs, so that you think it must be standing in the main street of some God forsaken village with a river you wouldn’t think was big enough for anything save a rowboat and when you come up to it, there, sure enough, you see on the stern: Henrik Ibsen—Oslo—”⁶⁴

“Or the Narcissus: Falmouth.”⁶⁵

“Or the Pequod, New Bedford.”⁶⁶

“Or was it Fairhaven?⁶⁷ Or the Oedipus Tyrannus: Fiume⁶⁸—yes, and whatever ship it was, there too, would always be my old carpenter, with a sweat rag round his neck, leaning over the stern smoking a pipe—”

After a while Yvonne said:

“We’d have to have some music anyhow. Let’s hope Bix Beiderbecke and Bobby Hackett and Ed Lang⁶⁹ would be there …”

“Canals!”⁷⁰ Hugh declared. “Debussy never gave us any music about canals. We mustn’t forget canals, that join sea and sea, those dreams that live in the mind of man.”

“I never thought of the Manchester ship canal⁷¹ quite like that,” Yvonne smiled at him. “And we’re getting away from the point.”

“We’d swim all day and work and talk and lie in the sun and laugh and catch fish and drink Lacrima Christi⁷² together at night.”

“That sounds a rather selfish existence.”

“The prickly heat and ptomaine poisoning, not to mention the inevitable cirrhosis of the liver would teach us self-immolation finally.”

They both laughed.

“But it needn’t be selfish,” Hugh said. “We’d help anybody that was ever in any trouble. We’d have a special splendid room with rows and rows of bunks in it so that anybody could come and stay there who liked. It sounds pretty ghastly, I must admit, this bourgeois heaven for simple people and intellectual snobs, however—” Hugh went on, “Wine for everybody!”

“Even for the philosophers and Oxford Groupers and communists? And Japanese? And most of the people we’ve mentioned have turned out to be martyrs after all in one way or another.”

“We’d build a new world!”

“What about the movies? Wouldn’t we get bored without the movies?”

“We need only one silent one,” Hugh said. “In fact, only one half of one. The first half of Murnau’s Sunrise.⁷³ With Janet Gaynor.⁷⁴ Which I saw when I was fourteen! We could play that over and over again and never have to look at anything else. No, we ought to have some—”

“Walt Disney⁷⁵ comedies! And Charlie Chaplin.⁷⁶ Yes, and some early Buster Keaton⁷⁷—”

“We could do without that film your father’s friend was talking about⁷⁸ this morning.”

There was another scrawl of lightning, closer, and the thunder which followed shook the ground under their feet.

“This is damned good!” said Hugh. “That storm will break in another couple of hours. And I thought the rainy season was over.”

“Rainy season,” said Yvonne. “It’s going to be wild. It’ll be a real bangy night.”

They were looking at the approaching storm exultantly: but a fear seizing her she clutched Hugh’s arm: how alike was this love of the storm to that love of calamity which had betrayed mankind so often? “I do hope Dad’ll have sense enough to get in somewhere,” she said, holding on to Hugh’s staunchness.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be O.K.,” Hugh was watching the heliographs of lightning which sent messages flickering across the jagged peaks. “A God,” he said, as thunder went reverberating down the steep valleys, “is sitting up somewhere amusing himself by dropping giant ball bearings on an iron roof.”

“And every time he grins, the whole sky lights up!”

Hugh pointed to a flock of birds⁷⁹ apparently flying straight into chaos itself. “As if in tempest there were peace,” he said. “Gloomy old Tchechov,⁸⁰ we’d have to have him of course. How he’d have loved a day like the Day of the Dead,⁸¹ fond of graveyards as he was! There goes that giant again with his ball bearings! … Which reminds me, we wouldn’t be able to exist without Sibelius’⁸² Seventh Symphony.”

“We quite forgot Stendahl⁸³ and Proust,”⁸⁴ said Yvonne.

“No. They wouldn’t like us. They’d quarrel with Bix and get bored with Sunrise—”

“But wouldn’t you be bored too, with nothing but half of Sunrise to look at?” Yvonne said, “Still, I don’t think I’d be bored with you anywhere, Hugh, even if we had nothing at all to entertain us. I don’t really and truly. We could be so happy. Even on the moon.” She looked up at it with a queer sensation as though the tides within her were responding to some older magnetism still. “It wouldn’t be so simple maybe, you’d have Sunrise there without dawn, light without color—”

“And volcanoes without heat. Yvonne—”

“Yes, Hugh.”

“Do you know, it’s as if we were the only people left in the world!” He laughed. “And to think this morning I was talking about escaping.”

“Maybe we’ve escaped. Look! Over there.”

The wind had dropped completely, leaving a breathless quiet in the jungle. They could see in the distance another hilltop on the side of the valley, with a little cemetery cut into it, swarming with people visible now only as candles lit against the twilight, like fireflies.

While they watched it grew darker; the night was becoming a vast, slowly swaying chandelier. Soft cries and lamentations, of the mourners praying, or gently chanting over the candles on the coffins of their loved ones, wandered down to them.

The Day of the Dead—

It was as though the candles, unearthly to them in the green evening, were gently shaking their waxen jewels, filling the bowl of the whole world with muffled, multitudinous tintinnabulations⁸⁵ that perhaps were really goats going down by the ravine or guitars sounding on graves as the procession moved on, and then, swinging out of sight altogether, left its echoes with them among the grasses and the stirring of the leaves.

“Yvonne, there was something that just occurred to me, a passage at the end of that book, The Sleepwalkers, that I was talking about, by Hermann Broch⁸⁶—”

“Oh Hugh,” said Yvonne. “There’s such a unity about everything that we can’t understand! We’re so helpless! And isn’t Hermann Broch a philosopher too?”

“Listen Yvonne. We can’t mention the names of all the dead, but at the close of that book, this is what I remember, they seem to be saying to the living: ‘Do yourselves no harm for we are all here …’ Yes, and though this crazy conversation doesn’t mean anything, I had the feeling just then,” Hugh went on, “thinking of those words, watching those people with their candles, that that’s what they are saying. They do care whether we harm ourselves or not, those of the dead who are good. They want to help, Yvonne. And perhaps we can help them by listening to what they’re saying. To us. Now. I can hear them. ‘Do yourselves no harm,’ they say, ‘for we are all here—’”

“We may be among them sooner than we think,” said Yvonne.

“I feel we’ve said a lot of stupid things and that maybe we ought to pay homage to them, like those Mexicans are doing, and especially to those who died young⁸⁷—”

“Yes, perhaps they are listening and know.”

“Homage to all of them, though we can only remember the names of a few. I wish we could drink to them. Quickly, for there may not be much time. To Mozart⁸⁸ and Keats⁸⁹ and Shelley,⁹⁰ and Wilfred Owen⁹¹—”

“And Raphael⁹² and Hart Crane,”⁹³ said Yvonne.

“Hart Crane might do some helping of the Rilke kind,” said Hugh.

“Perhaps we can finish The Bridge for him in our lives.”

“Perhaps we can.”

“What do you think can have happened to Hermann Broch now?” Hugh asked all at once.

“I don’t know,” Yvonne said. “Isn’t he an Austrian?”⁹⁴ Suddenly she flung her arms round Hugh’s neck. “Hugh! Say that nothing can ever separate us!”

“No,” said Hugh, “Nothing can ever—” and as he kissed her, for an instant all the unforeseen forces which might conspire to sever them, and the obvious ones too, crowded into his mind; while a confused picture of jammed troop trains, listing, cheering troopships, moving platforms of receding cities hung with lies, crawled before his eyes—“separate us.”

“Look over there, Hugh,” said Yvonne, as they moved slowly forward again, their arms around each other. “Do you see? Scorpio setting.”

“Yes. What’s that red star?”

“That’s Antares,”⁹⁵ Yvonne said. “It’s nearly five hundred times as big as our sun. And it’s dying. A dying sun, just an ember.”

“Like our world will be?”

“No, it’s not quite the same. Gosh, Hugh, when you realize that life, our life, all life, is running through all this to eternity—”

“And those other stars?”

“I’ve forgotten. That’s Shaula, there. And that’s Lesuth.⁹⁶ What’s that?” Yvonne interrupted herself abruptly. They were standing by the last trees of the jungle, an amate and a sabino,⁹⁷ which appeared to be embracing each other. But the hesitating shadow of a man had drifted before them.

“What? Oh, that must be one of our ghosts,” said Hugh.

“Look, Hugh, it’s still there.”

“Maybe it’s old Nathaniel,” said Hugh, as they sank down on the grass. With his chin in his hand Hugh watched the shadow. “Or old Herman, warning us to prepare once more for the ‘beginning hunt’ of the evil whale. Or maybe Nathaniel has persuaded him at last to make up his mind not to be annihilated and live instead. Or perhaps it’s Hawthorne’s Gray Champion⁹⁸ himself.” He gripped Yvonne’s arm. “That’s who it is! If you listen closely you can hear him too. He’s not being cosmic, but particular. Call it planetary, if you will.” He drew Yvonne closer to him. “Can’t you hear what the old boy’s saying? ‘And when your fathers were toiling at the breastworks at Bunker’s Hill.’ Yes, that’s the Gray Champion all right. There he goes again—‘all through that night I walked my rounds. You won’t heed me now, but I shall come again.’ I put in that bit,” Hugh said, gravely and earnestly as a child reciting his piece on Memorial Day,⁹⁹ “now listen! ‘My hour is one of adversity and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader’s step pollute our soil, still may I, your Gray Champion, come once more, as I come now! For I am the type of New England’s hereditary spirit; and my shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge that New England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry …’”

They were silent for a moment as the shadow—it was an Indian who had paused, curiously watching them—vanished.

“Why should the old fellow want to show himself in Mexico?” Hugh said. “That’s a puzzle. And New England’s sons. Well, so I am one of them!” He was running his fingers through her hair. “Damn it, Yvonne, heroics apart, I can’t help thinking that we all have to—”

“Don’t talk, hold me.”

… Lying with her face turned upwards toward the stars, with Hugh pressed close to her, Yvonne felt herself turning with the motion of the earth and the wheeling of the spheres, and realizing that their very heartbeats were part of the limitless energy of the suns above them, she could imagine that they gripped each other with a gravitational pull, that they were hurling together through space itself with its conflagrations, its catastrophes beyond comprehension.

And slowly the hill beneath her changed in her mind to a little sentient Atlantis¹⁰⁰ newly risen up between East and West, from which she could view both, and perceive all things hitherto disparate in their knowledge of each other being joined together, the unreal to the real, the burning secret to its disclosure, the fear of war to actual conflict, the living to the dead, even the old Mexico to a new, reborn, Mexico.¹⁰¹

It was as though a canal were opening through the aridity of her life, and now the dream of the sea¹⁰² was united to the sea itself with its seawind and darkness as living desire, while the mast of truth, which was the tree of life, was rooted in her heart. When thunder crashed out over the ranges and the volcanoes savagely illuminated with lightning, presage of the next peal, it was a ship coming in, far away to some mysterious landfall, in thunder. Then the ship was at rest in the wharf’s womb.¹⁰³

She saw the waves again coming in that morning in Acapulco, each one a little higher on the beach than the last, and somehow all the weight of the laboring world with its journeys and injustices and sadness was being lifted from her soul, until she was unconscious of any burden, or of her own body, or of though, knowing only that she was being borne upwards,¹⁰⁴ irresistibly, toward a haven swarming with golden moons and wandering lights.