“A French boat,” he said, “they’re running her in too close to the reef.” The old nurse shaded her eyes.
“It’s Mr. Felix steering. In a hurry he is as usual. It’s a nice way to bring his friend home.” Silence. A Russian brought over in a fishing-smack: in a hurry. The ketch made the channel (where the bluff hid it from the coastguards’ telescopes and the sooner the better), and Ross saw Felix and a sailor drop into a dinghy and pull fast for shore. In the stern sat another. They went down to the water’s edge to meet them. A few strokes out, Felix sprang thigh deep in the weed and dragged up the boat till her keel scraped the rocks. He embraced Ross, turned and gave the boy a hand to spring to shore.
“Ross, this is Boris.”
“But what made you come this way?”
He thought that he was looking at something at the same time old and young. A youth he understood. An age he did not. Also that it was worn and tired and sick. And that Felix’s eyes were like dark-blue coals, his step certain, his voice without petulance.
“I had no papers,” said Boris.
“We got into a row,” said Felix, “the police raided a café, and we did a bolt. We ran straight into two men up a back street and sent them spinning. One was hurt. Then I saw that it was no good, especially for Boris, and got a car to the coast. Paid up those chaps to bring us and cut back. There’s a third man below to replace Boris in case we were seen from the shore.”
Not bad for Felix. Ross looked again at what he had brought, standing on the tidemark, his back to the water, the ooze soaking his poor shoes. The sailors landed two suitcases.
“See here,” he said, “and excuse us. D’you mean you have no papers and no papers you can show—?”
“He’s a White,” cried Felix, “and he lost them.”
Boris said: “That is exactly so.”
“And you’re not running dope, or away from any crime worth mentioning?”
“On my honour, no—I need a holiday and your cousin was good enough—”
Ross saw that, so far as it went, this was true. The vistas opening were more oblique. He had only to look at that head in its sea-wide aureole, the high forehead and temple-thinned black hair, the slanted cheekbones, and observant green eyes. From the remote east. Out of the sea. Lovely, ugly, helpless, highborn thing. Whipcord and ice and worn out. Wangle him papers in London.
“Boris, our stranger,” he said. “Our nurse.”
Boris kissed her hand. They climbed the little cliff path. At the top he began to look around him.
Out at sea, it had been land, earth under his feet after a night and day’s pitching. Land: an interesting new place. Another people who might have no use for him. Why should they? No longer in doubt, soon there would be food and a bath and fresh linen and bed, he took a look at England. He saw a line of treeless hills, a puzzle of fields; under his feet a pattern of sweet herbs. An arrow of wood they entered, into a tunnel of light where birds broke cover, green even under the feet. A house where the windows were doors and stood open, in front of which a yucca, taller than a man, had opened its single flower-spike. Over the house, a hill turned wall. Into a room where air and bees whispered, honey smelt and the sea. And something he remembered: the smell of fruit bubbling in copper pans, in a kitchen—a child with his nurse—in a country-house, in Russia, in a pine forest.
Colophon
Armed with Madness
was published in by
Mary Butts.
Matthew D. Skinta
sponsored the production of this ebook for
Standard Ebooks.
It was produced by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in by
Al Haines, John Routh, and Distributed Proofreaders Canada
for
Faded Page
and on digital scans from the
HathiTrust Digital Library.
The cover page is adapted from
Composition III,
a painting completed in by
Ragnhild Keyser.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in and by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/mary-butts/armed-with-madness.
The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.
Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Copyright pages exist to tell you that you can’t do something. Unlike them, this Uncopyright page exists to tell you that the writing and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The United States public domain represents our collective cultural heritage, and items in it are free for anyone in the United States to do almost anything at all with, without having to get permission.
Copyright laws are different all over the world, and the source text or artwork in this ebook may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws before using this ebook. Standard Ebooks makes no representations regarding the copyright status of the source text or artwork in this
