The Silver Bough (22 page)

“
I
t was Andie all right,” Martin answered. “He seems attracted by that tallest stone.”

“You've seen him there before?”

“Yes. It's the only thing I have ever seen him lean against.”

“Did he come down this way?”

“I doubt it.”

“Where were you?”

“At the cairn. I rather fancy I might have found your crock if you hadn't appeared.” He leaned forward and pushed a slim log into the fire. The increased glow shone on their faces.

“You've been watching him?”

Martin smiled and gave Grant a slow, measuring, but quite friendly look. “I wondered where you had got to when you didn't come back. You were taking chances, weren't you?”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I happened once to see the flash of your torch.”

“It was very good of you to—come.”

“It was a gamble. I wasn't quite sure what the storm would do in here at the top of the tide. I tried earlier, but was beaten.”

Grant was steaming warm, but every now and then his teeth chittered. There was a self-possession about Martin, a curious slow largeness, which seemed to come out of the storm and the night. A flowering of the man in unearthly danger.

“What do you think of Andie?”

Martin looked at him, then attended to the fire again, this time with extended care, building and balancing with a precision which the flames acknowledged.

“I mean, do you think he has forgotten where he hid the crock?”

“No,” answered Martin, sitting back and lighting a cigarette. “He is merely extra cunning about it. Boyish.”

“You mean primitive?”

“No. I hardly need to tell you that a primitive society is highly complex in its human relations.”

“But, you would think that he would respond to his mother. He must see the condition she's in—or does he?”

“Does a boy really appreciate his mother's concern about the secret he insists on hiding? Does he not, in fact, become more obdurate the more she pleads?”

“You think it's like that?” murmured Grant, staring at the fire. “You think his is just an arrested intelligence?”

“No. We live not in our intelligence but in something else. It's not the boy's intelligence that stops him responding to his mother.”

“I understand what you mean.”

“I wonder.”

Grant glanced at him. Martin acknowledged the glance with a faint smile but said no more.

“Have you ever done any anthropology?” Grant asked, stirring from a vague uneasiness.

“Not in books. But I've seen a few things happen.”

“You mean out East?”

“Among other places. But out East I perhaps had the opportunity of seeing it naked.” He added, as on an afterthought, “Quite literally naked, in fact.”

“Did you?” muttered Grant.

“Yes. She was a very charming woman, too; a white woman. Her husband was manager of a rubber estate. They had polished him off. They took longer over the woman.”

“Did they?”

“Yes. There were five of them, and if you want to go one better than a sexual orgy mere killing isn't enough. The whiteness of the skin of her body obviously roused their perverse interest. It became clear that the little yellow sergeant coveted the skin. He took out his knife——”

Grant's body suddenly heaved forward in a retching spasm, but nothing came up. He straightened and, as he wiped his eyebrows, stuttered, “Excuse me—but—a man once described it—it's my stomach, I can't stomach——”

“Have a drop,” said Martin.

Grant took a suck at the flask and presently in a husky voice added, “I was in the First World War. It's not that I—but——” He shuddered from the raw spirit. “You saw—the flaying?”

Martin was watching his face. In a light even voice he said, “I managed afterwards to break away. I shadowed that unit for a long time. I became knowledgeable in forest craft. In fact, I couldn't have done what I did do if certain dormant instincts hadn't come to life. That's what I meant by saying I didn't get my anthropology out of books.”

Grant was grateful for the cool ease of Martin's voice, for an objectivity so impersonal that the man might have been looking on at what had happened to him. Moreover, the talking itself, the cool fluent talking, seemed as natural in this wild time and place as had his silence elsewhere. And yet, as it went on, he gave little away, came no nearer.

“You—you got away finally?” Grant said, craving this cool strength.

“Yes. But I did a few things before then. It was rather complicated, for I don't mean I merely got to know how to live in the forest. Something more abnormal than that. I lived mostly on their rations, as a matter of fact. These five men—they got the uncomfortable feeling that I haunted them.”

“Did they?”

“Well, I had to get inside their minds. Which really meant inside my own. At that level we are all primitives, we possibly go back beyond the gods, before gods were, to a supernatural
something
. Isn't that the psychic picture? You have a name for it, haven't you?”

“Mana.”

Martin nodded. “A Melanesian word, I was told, for the mysterious energy that comes from the hidden or ultimate source of power. Have you never felt it—at a moment of intense experience? For it is not so occult as it sounds. All profound religious experience is full of it. I rather fancy the magicians up at the cairn knew quite a bit about it—in their own particular way. Didn't they say that everything ultimately was
one thing
?”

“They did,” said Grant.

“I began to understand. For a psychic experience is very different from a metaphysical exercise about it, different in kind. These magicians or druids or whatever you call them——” He paused and a slow ironic smile came about his eyes. “I believe you debate as to who the druids were?”

“We wonder if they came in with the first Goidels or Gaels or whether a certain aboriginal——”

“I know. The name is everything!”

In the silence the wave thundered and the cliff vibrated from a physical power which had in it something of exultance that seemed more than the water and the rock. When Grant moved and the shirt momentarily left his back, the skin there went clammy. The heat from the fire burned his shins and his face; sometimes his head jerked away from the smoke that stung his eyes. Rising above these physical sensations induced in time a curious mental sensitivity which was like another and heightened aspect of himself, tenuous as a vapour that at any moment might pass away altogether.

“The words
power, energy
obscure the thing,” Martin was saying. “They make us think in physical or atomic terms, whereas these magicians were probably searching for—what may yet be found in the sub-atomic.”

Argument never failed to goad Grant and now he made a valiant effort. “Are you trying to tell me that these primitive magic men of the cairn tried to
identify
themselves with the original cause of things, that they were practising mystics of that profound kind; not only that, but that they were Eddingtons trying to penetrate beyond the symbol in the equation?”

“Well?”

“I did not credit them with such knowledge,” replied Grant relapsing into a toneless voice.

“
Knowledge
? Of what?”

“Oh I see what you mean—the kind of knowledge, but the implication is,” and his voice rose again, “that primitive man, before he even began to make gods, had an apprehension of God.”

“O God,” said Martin, pleased by the esoteric flavour. “You'll be asking next whether there hasn't been any
progress
in our notion of God. For it would certainly upset our scientists and psychologists to suggest that God was
given
, like a mathematical axiom, to man in the beginning.”

“Do you believe He was?”

“He? What's He? You cannot get away from the anthropomorphic. Even legend has it that these magicians or druids got such an understanding of how the ultimate essence or power worked that they used it to change human beings into swans and fawns and trees. And even if that was no more than a piece of occult poetry to hold the ordinary mind in thrall—still, it took that shape. For the real druid was after real powers; he wanted to tap, the source.”

“Did you tap it, in the jungle?” asked Grant, a little combatively, for the horror of the operation Martin had witnessed stirred in his vitals again like a sickness.

“In my own way, yes. It took time.” Martin's eyes considered Grant. “I also used certain small tricks, sounds, and after I had disposed of the second man of the five, I got a white sheet. By the time four were gone and only the sergeant left, I was becoming adept. The sergeant was now very jumpy, and he could not show it because he dare not lose face. Once the whole unit combined to comb me out—a very clever move it was—in broad daylight, of course, though it wasn't broad in the jungle. I poked my face through some creepers and a man saw me. He stood and I, quite motionless, looked at him. He decided—his expression grew uncanny with fear—that he daren't see me. He glanced here and there and made off.”

“Did you get the sergeant?”

“I left him wrapped in the white fabric. There were eight bullet holes in it. They must have thought it very mysterious because there was no bullet hole in the sergeant.”

Grant had nothing more to say. A curious malaise was getting the better of him; his body was sagging, slumping, but not in sleep. He felt the flask being put into his hands and took a swig. It revived him but with the effect of bringing the night and the storm about him in an unearthly way. “You still can use this power?” It was hardly a question, little more than a last politeness in conversation; for his mind fell beyond the question itself into the place where the horror lay.

“I dropped all that,” Martin said.

“Did you? . . . “

Martin sat quite still for nearly a minute. The storm, with death in it, might have been his flower. Then he looked at Grant and continued, “There are psychoanalysts who say that when the aggressive or destructive instinct in you is dammed up it injures you, and that you have to destroy other things, other people, in order not to destroy yourself, in order to protect yourself from self-destruction.”

“Good God,” said Grant, groaning.

“There is quite a lot in that—as far as it goes. You'll have noticed that the egomaniac in a big way always becomes a figure of public attraction, for he stirs up the unconscious urge in humanity towards destruction. Let the old be demolished, he shouts, so that new wonderful constructions may arise—
his
constructions. For all that opposes him, that might expose the pathological inferiority from which he suffers, must first be swept away in order that his prestige may then reign supreme. Psychiatrists have made the picture familiar; in the world today the
total
or totalitarian picture. They point in the recent war to a whole nation having come under the sway of such a psychopath or group of psychopaths—for men moved by the same mad urge are drawn to one another by a sort of psychic magnetism. Quite . . . . But . . . you only get to know the real motive—when you yourself have gone far enough in experience, in pure destruction.”

“What motive?” asked Grant out of a darkening stupidity.

“You have to go far enough,” repeated Martin quietly, “to know what happens when the destructive instinct has actually had its way.”

Grant met Martin's eyes for an instant. Their dark concentration had yet about them something like a smile, something that came out of so much experience that they could rest amid the infernal knowledge they evoked with an ultimate calm; and yet they directly conveyed this knowledge; it came from them; Grant felt it piercing into and pervading him. In a sense he was outwardly blinded, so that meaning now swelled up inwardly. It was as if he had been taken to that vast inland country where all conscious analysis ceases and the mad impulses are themselves seen at work, where passion is no longer passion but pure violence in action, where violence in action feeds on violence, feeds and grows ever more gargantuanly, until nothing ultimately is left to be destroyed but the destroyer himself; and then in a final upsurge the destroyer turns on himself and achieves his last obliterating triumph in a frenzy of self-destruction.

“In history it has taken many outward forms,” came Martin's voice. “You know about the old races. Didn't the Aztec civilization, for example, didn't the old Aztecs become so obsessed with human sacrifice that they were destroying themselves, were actually in process of committing racial suicide?”

Grant groaned. He could no longer think.

“However, it might be interesting for a start to take this simple picture provided by the psychoanalyst, with its concealed self-destruction motive, and lift it from the individual case to the European level——”

“Do you mean,” and Grant had the odd sensation that something was suddenly shouting the final question in him, “that humanity has got the wish to destroy itself, that—that the death instinct has got charge?”

He glared at Martin who considered him with the steady characteristic look which Grant had always felt as something palpable; it now came out of the jungle of cave and storm and sea.

Grant suddenly began to retch, as though the raw spirit was at last taking effect; but nothing came up. A wave of icy coldness went over him and he staggered to his feet. But his trembling was such that he could not stay on his feet and when he had stretched himself full length on the shingle, he let go.

Martin gathered all that was left of the fuel and built it into a final blaze. He took off his oilskin and threw it over Grant's body; went out and saw the clear light of morning on the sea. The tide had retreated a considerable distance. His weather-proof wristlet watch recorded 4.25. His eyes followed the waves and studied their impact, studied the formation of rock on the south side and the backwash. Then he went to the boat and began to examine the planking where the bilge had taken one or two heavy poundings. After bailing her out, he decided she was quite sound. She was only twelve feet long and even lightly built but of seasoned wood by a craftsman who had spared neither fine ribs nor copper rivets. He unhitched three wooden rollers, each about two feet long and ankle-thick, from under the forward thwart, and began clearing the shingle from under the after end of the keel.