CHAPTER XXIV
It was
'Private. Not to be opened,' was written in capital
letters on the cover. He raised his
eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one
wrote in one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's preparatory school.
'Black is the raven, black is the rook,
But blacker the thief who steals this book!'
It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled
to himself. He opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had
been struck.
Denis was
his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed. He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own
soul; he was Brown Dog to himself. His
weaknesses, his absurdities - no one knew them better than he did. Indeed, in a vague way he imagined that
nobody beside himself was aware of them at all.
It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear to other people
as they appeared to him, inconceivable that they ever spoke of him among
themselves in that same freely critical and, to be quite honest, mildly
malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see
them was a privilege reserved to him alone.
For the rest of the world he was surely an image of flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.
On opening
the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to the ground, and was
irreparably shattered. He was not his
own severest critic after all. The
discovery was a painful one.
The fruit
of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book
was upside-down). In the background a
dancing couple, recognizable as Gombauld and
Anne. Beneath, the legend: 'Fable of the
Wallflower and the Sour Grapes.'
Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre
appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed
aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body
and limbs, an attitude of studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the
fidgety pose of the turned-in feet - these things were terrible. And, more terrible still, was the likeness,
was the magisterial certainty with which his physical peculiarities were all
recorded and subtly exaggerated.
Denis
looked deeper into the book. There were
caricatures of other people: of Priscilla and Mr Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne and Gombauld; of
Mr Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light that
was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and Ivor. He scarcely
glanced at them. A fearful desire to
know the worst about himself possessed him.
He turned over the leaves, lingering at nothing that was not his own
image. Seven full pages were devoted to
him.
'Private. Not to be opened.' He had disobeyed the injunction; he had only
got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he
closed the book, and slid the rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out on to the
terrace. And so this, he reflected, this
was how Jenny employed the leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her a simple-minded,
uncritical creature! It was he, it
seemed, who was the fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing wasn't Jenny
herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her red book represented, what
they stood for and concretely symbolized.
They represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they symbolized something that in his studious
solitariness he was apt not to believe in.
He could stand at
Sitting on
the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this
unpleasant truth for some time. Still
chewing on it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby
finery across the turf of the lower lawn.
Odious birds! Their necks, thick
and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless
heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks.
The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to
illustrate their tractates of human morality.
Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece of stick at the slowly
pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking
it was something to eat.
He walked
on. The profound shade of a giant ilex
tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden
octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.
'Under the spreading ilex tree ...'
He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn't.
'The smith, a brawny man is he,
With arms like rubber bands.'
Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller
exercises more regularly.
He emerged
once more into the sunshine. The pool lay
before him, reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the
summer day. Looking at it, he thought of
Anne's bare arms and seal-sleek bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.
'And little Luce with the white legs,
And
bouncing
Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his
own? Was there, indeed, anything in it
that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?
He walked
slowly round the water's edge. In an
embayed recess among the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the
pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some
nameless mason of the seicento, he saw
Mary pensively sitting.
'Hullo!' he
said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say something.
Mary looked
up. 'Hullo!' she answered in a
melancholy, uninterested tone.
In this
alcove, hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably
elegiac. He sat down beside her under
the shadow of the public goddess. There
was a prolonged silence.
At
breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of
On the back
of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor's
bold, large hand, a single quatrain.
'Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!
Like bright plumes moulted in an angel's flight,
There sleep within my heart's most mystic cell
Memories of morning, memories of the night.'
There followed a postscript of three lines: 'Would you
mind asking one of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades
I left in the drawer of my washstand.
Thanks - Ivor.'
Seated
under the Venus's immemorial gesture, Mary considered life and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from
bringing the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new
and hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor.... She couldn't do without him now. It was evident on the other hand, from the
poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at Gobley
now; so was Zenobia.
Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last verse of the song he
had sung that night in the garden.
'Le Lendemain, Phillis peu sage
Aurait donné moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
A Lisette donnait pour rien.'
Mary shed
tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her life before.
It was
Denis who first broke the silence. 'The
individual,' he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, 'is not a
self-supporting universe. There are
times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to
take cognizance of the existence of other universes besides himself.'
He had
contrived this highly abstract generalization as a preliminary to a personal
confidence. It was the first gambit in a
conversation that was to lead up to Jenny's caricatures.
'True,'
said Mary; and, generalizing for herself, she added, 'When one individual comes
into intimate contact with another, she - or he, of course, as the case may be
- must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.'
'One is
apt,' Denis went on, 'to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one's own
personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents itself to other people
as well as to oneself.'
Mary was
not listening. 'The difficulty,' she
said, 'makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact with
another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict
suffering. If, on the other hand, she
avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on
unnatural repressions. As you see, it's
a dilemma.'
'When I
think of my own case,' said Denis, making a more decided move in the desired
direction, 'I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people's mentality in
general and, above all and in particular, of their opinions about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally
opened to the outside world.' He made a
gesture that was faintly suggestive of the drawing off of a rubber band.
'It's an
awful problem,' said Mary thoughtfully.
'One has to have had personal experience to realize quite how awful it
is.'
'Exactly,'
Denis nodded. 'One has to have had
first-hand experience.' He leaned
towards her and slightly lowered his voice.
'This very morning, for example ...' he began, but his confidences were
cut short. The deep voice of the gong,
tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically, Mary rose to her feet, and
Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate anxiety for her
food and so slight an interest in his spiritual experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without
speaking.