The Dark Labyrinth (29 page)

The woman smiled now for the first time—a smile of relief mingled with enlightenment. “Thank God,” she said in a voice which was harsh, but which carried in it some quality of distinction and self-possession that reminded Truman at once of Graecen. “Thank God. I thought you were from Evan—you'd come to take me back.” She relaxed all of a sudden, and bending forward the better to accommodate her body to the laughter, laughed aloud, patting her thighs with her hands. “You speak English, then?” said Truman, rather nettled at having been forced to debase his tongue with pidgin. “Well,” she said, taking up the fishing-rod, and drawing the handle of a wicker pannier over her arm, “I am American actually. My name is Adams, Ruth Adams.” She walked downstream for twenty paces in order to ford it upon a series of stepping-stones, talking as she did so. “I haven't seen a stranger in years,” she said, with the small harshness of tone, but with the same note of authoritative self-possession that made her voice pleasing and musical to listen to. “You must forgive me. When you don't see strangers you forget how to be polite to them.” She crossed the stream and walked down the bank towards them. Elsie Truman saw that in place of shoes she was wearing a number of pairs of khaki stockings, with the soles padded in some way. At close range she looked even older; and yet in some curious way the proportions of her face retained an almost childish smoothness of contour. Yet it was deeply wrinkled. She stood before them now in her brown corduroy trousers much patched, and stretched out a shy hand as they introduced themselves. Her wrists were small and finely formed, but her finger-nails were unkept and broken, and her palm was as hard to the touch as that of a ploughman. “Ruth Adams,” she murmured to each in turn. “You must”, she said, “have come up through the labyrinth.” The word restored to Truman the sense of urgency and danger which the last few minutes in this landscape had all but dispelled. “Yes,” he said quickly, “and there are several others down there. We want to get help to them as quickly as possible.” The stranger turned and walked slowly beside them, saying: “You must be tired out. Come along with me and we'll see if I can't fix you something to eat.” Elsie Truman walked beside with a feeling that something was wrong; she had shown no trace of hearing her husband's words about the others. “There are,” she said carefully, with an almost academic correctness (she felt that perhaps the difference in American and English idiom might have led to a misunderstanding), “there are no less than four or five people lost in those caves.” The stranger looked quickly up at her for a second, smiling, and then said: “I'm sorry. I did hear your husband. But there's nothing we can do, you see. There's no other way up here except through the labyrinth.”

“No other way!” Truman tripped himself—by the very force of his own exclamation it seemed—recovered and halted to confront her. “What did you say?”

“No other way,” repeated the woman, pushing her hands into her pockets, having first placed the pannier on the ground carefully so as not to displace the three small fish which they could see, peeping through a screen of fig leaves. She made a vague gesture at the horizon and carried it round until it all but circumscribed the whole visible landscape. “It's all enclosed,” she said vaguely, her voice a little off-key; and then, seeing the incredulity on their faces mixed with the consternation, she added: “Please listen to me.” She said it with earnestness, but with the faint note of self-assurance that made it almost a command. “Listen to me.”

“No other way,” repeated Truman angrily, as if the words had been an insult to him, to all the energy and determination he had put into their escape from the labyrinth.

“It's true,” she said stubbornly.

“Well, what happens over there?” He pointed vaguely ahead of them to where the mountains rose, turned rose-red and bitumen-coloured in the waning sunlight.

“Cliffs,” she said. “All round. I know you can't believe it easily. I couldn't when I first came here. We tried so often to find a way down.”

She walked on a few paces, having picked up her basket, and then called over her shoulder: “Follow me and I'll show you the house.”

The Truman couple exchanged glances. Once more that feeling of unreality, of having become entangled in a web, took possession of them. “Do you think she's all right?” asked his wife, making the vague gesture of screwing a nut into her temple with her forefinger. He did not answer. “At any rate there's a house,” he said. “Come on.” They walked on, like characters in a dream, and caught her up as she reached the corner of a meadow.

Beyond the brow of the hill they saw for the first time the signs of conscious cultivation—a small vineyard in a bowl, sheltered from the north by a low wall of rocks. “Yes,” said the woman catching Elsie Truman's eye, “our tenderest care is that little vineyard. The wine is indifferent, but that's because we are not experts in making it.” Truman came up beside her and said: “Who is ‘we', Mrs. Adams?” She turned up her grotesquely lined yet so childish face and smiled apologetically at him. “‘We'
was
my brother and me. But I'm alone now. I haven't talked English since …” She turned suddenly and walked on, without saying any more.

Several promiscuous hedges of cactus now came into view lining a rough track. To their surprise as they passed into a grove of dwarf-olive and holm-oak they caught sight of a small house, crudely made of stone, standing in a paddock from which, faintly, came the lazy slurring of bees. “There it is,” said Mrs. Truman, whose relief at this evident example of domestic architecture was manifest in her smile. “And you have bees,” she added.

“Yes. For honey. I'm afraid the bread hasn't been very good since Godfrey went. It's hard work grinding the grain up fine enough, you know, and I'm getting an old woman.” She nodded and smiled as she spoke.

Truman's face still wore an expression of troubled incredulity. He simply was not convinced. They approached the house, walking abreast, and he examined its workmanship with a careful professional eye; it was built of roughly-pruned rock laid together in blocks. Its corners were unpointed and the joints of the stone empty of any mortar that he could see. The porch was held upon saplings, and roughly boarded over with the grey wood of old ammunition-boxes. He could read the serial numbers and specifications in some places. The woman led the way in. “It took us six years to build this house. And, of course, Godfrey did a lot of work on it putting in improvements. He was a marvel of inventiveness. It was frightfully hard work. We were living in a cave up the hill before. But it's quite solid, and look how nicely he has finished the interior.” She threw open a heavy door and showed them a long low room, floored with crude staves of pine and cypress. The walls had been washed with some kind of crude earth-pigment to an uneven grey upon which somebody had drawn several large cartoons of human faces in charcoal. “Isn't it nice?” She crossed to the stone hearth in which a log fire was smoking and stirred it, placing some more logs upon it. On the hob stood a tarnished petrol tin half full of warm water. “Come in, do,” she said, turning to them with such pleasure on her face that they felt their constraint to be something churlish. “I never thought I should have the fun of showing strangers Godfrey's work. Godfrey is my brother.” She pointed to one of the faces sketched on the wall, a turbulent, good-looking face topped by a head of wavy hair, and smiled again.

Truman's eyes widened in admiration. There were no chairs in the room, but several simple cushions stood about, stuffed with some coarse grass. They were covered in what he recognized, after a moment, as fine parachute-silk. Two tables of smooth wood stood nearby, whose feet were contrived from roughly-pruned logs of wood. Warm in the mounting firelight gleamed three Red Indian blankets. The whole interior looked bare and clean—and yet, at the same time, essentially complete and inhabited.

“Before you wash”, said the woman softly, “I think I'll make you some tea—not real tea but almost as good. Cretan tea—
salepi
—you've probably heard of it. I won't be a moment.” She left them standing irresolutely in the middle of the floor, and they heard her busy in the next room. Elsie Truman sat down on one of the cushions and stretched out her feet to the fire. “Well,” she said, “what do you make of it?”

Truman did not know what to make of it. He reserved judgment. Presently the woman returned again with a look of anxious expectancy on her face. “Excellent,” she said, seeing Elsie Truman sitting before the fire, “I'm so glad.” It was as if she had been afraid that they were only figments of her imagination, waiting until her back was turned to disappear. She pressed upon them enamel mugs and poured the boiling water in a metalled pot. “Swamp orchis,” she explained. “Another piece of Godfrey's cleverness. I think you'll enjoy it.” Handing them their cups she apologized for not having any sugar to offer them. “Neither sugar nor salt can I get on this mountain,” she said, sitting down and peeling off her several pairs of socks before turning a pair of finely shaped feet to the fire. “There is a sugar-beet patch up the hill; but I don't know how to extract it, and it's tiresome just to chew it. But perhaps you can help me?”

Truman disclaimed any professional knowledge of the sort, with a preoccupied air. He was still convinced that it was possible to find their way back to Cefalû, and consequently resented the faintly proprietary air with which the stranger seemed to include him in her own activities. “Tell us more about Godfrey,” he said, feeling suddenly hopeful, for surely she had said that Godfrey was no longer with her?

“Godfrey,” she said, and sipped her tea. “After the other two had left, Evan and John, Godfrey stayed on with me. He was my only brother. He was nearest to me in resignation, at least, so I thought. He was happy when he was constructing things to make life here more tolerable. His house, his porch, his kitchen sink—you haven't seen it yet. Almost every good thing was Godfrey's. But somehow he began to get upset when year succeeded year and there seemed less and less to do. He was a victim of activity. At first he used to call this place a heaven; but he was the kind of man who would get discontented with heaven itself. He was in love with mountains—and well known as a climber in his day. To be marooned here and surrounded by unclimbable mountains was too much for him. He tried to climb out, back into the world, but lost his foothold. He fell a clear seven hundred feet. I'll show you the little pennant on the end of his pick. You can see it from above—we call it Ibex Point because John, my husband, once saw an ibex there. It waves when there's a wind—the pennant. Gives the oddest illusion of him being alive still—as if he were calling for help. He fell between two great slabs of granite. It was his own fault. There was a high wind. I was sitting watching him when it happened. It must be several years ago. I've been awfully lonely since he left, and sort of helpless too. Godfrey was never at a loss. But now you're here it's different. Perhaps your friends will find their way up too and join you. It's so much more fun with several people. That reminds me, I shall have to get you some blankets from the hollow. The nights are cold now.” She stopped all of a sudden, seeing the expression of discomfort and disbelief upon Truman's face. “I see you don't believe me.”

“Well,” said Truman, “you must admit it's a queer story.”

She put her cup down and rose, saying: “We still have an hour of light. Walk round the whole plateau with me and see for yourself that there is no way back. I'm sorry. I know how you feel. But it's useless.”

Elsie Truman settled herself like a cat before the blaze of the fire and drained her mug of
salepi
. “I can't believe it,” she said, in a voice so innocent and friendly as to be empty of any suggestion of insult. “I simply can't.”

“I have been here since 1926,” said the woman quietly. “It's written on that wall there; when we built the house we put up our calendar. It is now …”

“Nineteen-forty-seven,” said Truman.

“Twenty-one years.”

“A long time.”

“We came first,” she said, sitting down afresh beside his wife, “we came first to Crete because there was a dig my husband wanted to try—at Castro. He is, was, an archaeologist, and Evan was a student who was then his assistant. Godfrey came out for a holiday from England and joined us. We were staying at the village—Cefalû—you must know it. And for a joke Godfrey thought we should try and chart the labyrinth. He was so confident that it was safe. We went quite far in when one of the small tunnels fell in and so we couldn't turn back and follow the line we had laid. Fortunately we had food with us. It took us a week until we came out here.”

The Truman couple sat quite still listening. “But where's your husband,” said Truman at last, “and the other man?”

The woman put her hands up to her face and slowly rubbed her cheeks with her palms. “They went back,” she said absently, her voice now flat and without colour. She began to pull on her coarse stocking and thrust the padding which served her for soles into its proper place.

“Went back where?” said Truman sharply.

“Down the labyrinth?” he repeated in a voice of mingled perplexity and amusement.

“Yes,” she said. “You see, my husband got very upset at being locked up here. He hated it. He and Evan began to quarrel frightfully. It was only Godfrey that kept the peace. I don't know what would have happened if he hadn't been with us. I think Evan—no, that's a lie: I know Evan was in love with me. One day they decided to take a chance, to enter the labyrinth again and try to find their way through to the other side. I have never heard if they did. That was years ago.” She stood up and pointed to a date on the wall, and, with the other hand, opened the door. “Come”, she said, “and see it for yourselves.”