The Man Within

was at school. My mother died a couple of years before. I think he broke her heart, if there’s such a thing as a broken heart. He broke her body anyway.” Andrews’s face grew white as though from the blinding heat of an inner fire. “I loved my mother,” he said. “She was a quiet pale woman who loved flowers. We used to go for walks together in the holidays and collect them from the hedges and ditches. Then we would press them and put them in an album. Once my father was at home⁠—he had been drinking, I think⁠—and he found us. We were so busy that we didn’t hear him when he called. He came and tore the leaves out of the album and scrumpled them in his fists, great unwieldy fists. He was unwieldy altogether, large, clumsy, bearded, but with a quick cunning brain and small eyes.”

“Why did your mother marry him?” Elizabeth asked.

“They eloped,” Andrews said. “My mother was incurably romantic.”

“And when your father died?”

“That was more than three years ago,” Andrews continued in a tone as tired as though he were speaking of three centuries. “I was finishing school, and Carlyon brought the news. I was glad. You see it appeared to me to mean the end of fear. My father used to beat me unmercifully, because he said it would put courage into me. I think he was a little mad towards the end. My mother’s death frightened him, for he was superstitious. When I heard that he was dead, I thought it was the beginning of a life of peace.”

“And why not?” Elizabeth asked. “Why this?”

He bent his head sullenly. “I was alone,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what to do. Carlyon asked me to come back with him and I went.” He raised his head and said fiercely, “Can’t you understand? You’ve seen the man for yourself? There’s something about him⁠ ⁠… I was a boy,” he added as though he was an old man discussing a far distant past. “Perhaps I was romantic like my mother. God knows I ought to be cured of that now. He was brave, adventurous and yet he loved music and the things which I loved, colours, scents, all that part of me which I could not speak of at school or to my father. I went with Carlyon. What a fool I was. How could I be such a fool?”

She screwed up her mouth as though at a wry taste. “Yes, but the betrayal?” she said.

He drew himself up, moving a little away. “I don’t expect anyone to understand that,” he said. He gave a momentary impression of great dignity, which he spoilt by an immediate capitulation. “You can’t realise the life I came to,” he said. “There were storms and I was seasick. There were periods of nightlong waiting off the coast for signals which did not come and I could not help showing my nerves. And there was no hope of any change, of any peace at last except death. My father had left his boat and every penny he had saved to Carlyon. That was why Carlyon came to me in Devon. He was curious to see the neglected son, and then I suppose he took pity on me. I believe he liked me,” Andrews added slowly and regretfully with another painful twist at the heart.

“I thought my father was dead,” he continued, “but I soon found that he had followed me on board. The first member of the crew I met as I was hauled, pushed behind and pulled in front, on to the boat, was Joe, a fat, big, clumsy, stupid creature, a prize bull of a man. ‘You’ll soon get your sea legs, sir,’ he said to me, ‘if you are your father’s son.’ They worshipped my father, all except a little wizened half-witted youth called Tims, whom my father had made his personal servant. My father, I suppose, had bullied him. He used to watch me slyly from a distance with a mixture of hatred and fear until he realised that I wasn’t ‘my father’s son,’ when he began to treat me with familiarity, because we had both suffered from the same hand.” Andrews paused, then began again with an exaggerated irony which did not disguise his own sense of shame. “They all soon realised that I wasn’t like my father, but they remained kind and only told me about six times a day what my father would have done in such and such a case. I used to take refuge with Carlyon. He never mentioned my father to me.”

Andrews had been speaking calmly, but with a strained note in his voice. Now he lost control of himself. “If I’m a coward,” he cried, “haven’t I a mind? Wasn’t my brain of any use to them that they should treat me like a child, never ask my opinion, have me there on sufferance only, because of my father and because Carlyon willed it? I’m as good as Carlyon. Haven’t I outwitted the fool now?” he ejaculated in hysterical triumph, and then fell silent before Elizabeth’s quiet passivity, remembering how she had lifted the cup to her lips and filled him with humility, as he crouched in the dark. Now he wished that she would speak, accuse him in so many words of ingratitude, rather than arraign him in silence before peaceful eyes. He grew resentful of her silence and fidgeted with his hands. “I’ve shown them that I’m of importance now,” he said.

Elizabeth raised her hand to her head as though she felt an ache there. “So it was hate again,” she said in a tired voice. “There seems to be hate everywhere.”

Andrews stared at her in amazement. On what had seemed the illimitable peace of her mind had appeared the cloud small as a man’s hand. For the first time a sense reached him of an unhappiness which was not his own. Watching the white face propped up