CHAPTER XXVI

 

September 5^th 1933

 

It was after two o'clock.  Anthony lay on his back staring up into the darkness.  Sleep, it seemed, deliberately refused to come, was being withheld by someone else, some malignant alien inhabiting his own body.  Outside, in the pine trees the cicadas harped incessantly on the theme of their existence; and at long intervals a sound of cock-crowing would swell up out of the darkness, louder and nearer, until all the birds in the surrounding gardens were shouting defiance back and forth, peal answering peal.  And then for no reason, first one, then another fell silent and the outburst died away fainter and fainter into increasing distance – right across France, he fancied as he strained his ears after the receding sound, in a hurrying wave of ragged crowing.  Hundreds of miles, perhaps.  And then somewhere, the wave would turn and roll back again as swiftly as it had come.  Back from the North Sea, perhaps; over the battlefields; round the fringes of Paris and from bird to distant bird through the forests; then across the plains of Beauce; up and down the hills of Burgundy and, like another aerial river of sound, headlong down the valley of the Rhône; past Valence, past Orange and Avignon, past Arles and Aix and across the bare hills of Provence; until here it was again, an hour after its previous passage, flowing tumultuously shrill across the cicadas' loud, unremitting equivalent of silence.

      He was reminded suddenly of a passage in Lawrence's The Man who Died, and, thankful for an excuse to interrupt for a little his vain pursuit of sleep, he turned on the light and went downstairs to look for the  book.  Yes, here it was.  'As he came out, the young cock crowed.  It was a diminished pinched cry, but there was that in the voice of the bird stronger than chagrin.  It was the necessity to live and even to cry out the triumph of life.  The man who had died stood and watched the cock who had escaped and been caught, ruffling himself up, rising forward on his toes, throwing up his head, and parting his beak in another challenge from life to death.  The brave sounds rang out, and though they were diminished by the cord round the bird's leg, they were not cut off.  The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black orange cock or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of the fig tree.  They came forth, these things and creatures of spring, glowing with desire and assertion.  They came like crests of foam, out of the blue flood of the invisible desire, out of the vast invisible sea of strength, and they came coloured and tangible, evanescent, yet deathless in their coming.  The man who had died looked on the great swing into existence of things that had not died, but he saw no longer their tremulous desire to exist and to be.  He heard instead their ringing, ringing, defiant challenge to all other things existing …'

      Anthony read on till he had finished the story of the man who had died and come to life again, the man who was himself the escaped cock; then put away the book and went back to bed.  The foam on the waves of that invisible sea of desire and strength.  But life, life as such, he protested inwardly – it was not enough.  How could one be content with namelessness of mere energy, with the less than individuality of a power, that for all its mysterious divineness, was yet unconscious, beneath good and evil?  The cicadas sounded incessantly, and again, at about four, the tide of cock-crowing came sweeping across the land and passed on out of hearing, towards Italy.

      Life irrepressibly living itself out.  But there were emblems, he reflected, more vividly impressive than the crowing cock or the young leaves breaking out from the winter fig tree's bone-white skeleton.  He remembered that film he had seen of the fertilization of a rabbit's ovum.  Spermatozoa, a span long on the screen, ferociously struggling towards their goal – the moon-like sphere of the egg.  Countless, aimed from every side, their flagella in frantic vibration.  And now the foremost had reached their objective, were burrowing into it, thrusting through the outer wall of living matter, tearing away in their violent haste whole cells that floated off and were lost.    And at last one of the invaders had penetrated to the quick of the nucleus, the act of fertilization was consummated; and suddenly the hitherto passive sphere stirred into movement.  There was a violent spasm of contraction; its smooth rounded surface became corrugated and in some way resistant to the other sperms that vainly threw themselves upon it.  And then the egg began to divide, bending in its walls upon itself till they met in the centre, and there were two cells instead of one; then, as the two cells repeated the process, four cells; then eight, then sixteen.  And within the cells the granules of protoplasm were in continuous motion, like peas in a boiling pot, but self-activated, moving by their own energy.

      In comparison with these minute fragments of living matter, the crowing cock, the cicadas endlessly repeating the proclamation of their existence, were only feebly alive.  Life under the microscope seemed far more vehement and irrepressible than in the larger world.  Consolingly and at the same time appallingly irrepressible.  For, yes, it was also appalling, the awful unconsciousness of that unconquerable, crawling desire!  And, oh, the horror of that display of sub-mental passion, of violent and impersonal egotism!  Intolerable, unless one could think of it only as a raw material and available energy.

      Yes, raw material and a stream of energy.  Impressive for their quantity, their duration.  But qualitatively they were only potentially valuable: would become valuable only when made up into something else, only when used to serve an ulterior purpose.  For Lawrence, the animal purpose had seemed sufficient and satisfactory.  The cock, crowing, fighting, mating – anonymously; and man anonymous like the cock.  Better such mindless anonymity, he had insisted, than the squalid relationships of human beings advanced halfway to consciousness, still only partially civilized.

      But Lawrence had never looked through a microscope, never seen biological energy in its basic undifferentiated state.  He hadn't wanted to look, had disapproved on principle of microscopes, fearing what they might reveal; and had been right to fear.  Those depths beneath depths of namelessness, crawling irrepressibly – they would have horrified him.  He had insisted that the raw material should be worked up – but worked only to a certain pitch and no further; that the primal crawling energy should be used for the relatively higher purposes of animal existence, but for no existence beyond the animal.  Arbitrarily, illogically.  For the other, ulterior purposes and organizations existed and were not to be ignored.  Moving through space and time, the human animal discovered them on his path, unequivocally present and real.

      Thinking and the pursuit of knowledge – these were purposes for which he himself had used the energy that crawled under the microscope, that crowed defiantly in the darkness.  Thought as an end, knowledge as an end.  And now it had become suddenly manifest that they were only means – as definitely raw material as life itself.  Raw material – and he divined, he knew, what the finished product would have to be; and with part of his being he revolted against the knowledge.  What, set about trying to turn his raw material into life, thought, knowledge into that – at his time of life, and he a civilized human being!  The mere idea was ridiculous.  One of those absurd hangovers from Christianity – like his father's terror of the more disreputable realities of existence, like the hymn-singing of workmen during the General Strike.  The headaches, the hiccoughs of yesterday's religion.  But with another part of his mind he was miserably thinking that he would never succeed in bringing about the transformation of his raw material into the finished product; that he didn't know how or where to begin; that he was afraid of making a fool of himself; that he lacked the necessary courage, patience, strength of mind.

      At about seven, when behind the shutters the sun was already high above the horizon, he dropped off into a heavy sleep, and woke with a start three hours later to see Mark Staithes beside his bed and peering at him, smiling, an amused and inquisitive gargoyle, through the mosquito net.

      'Mark?' he questioned in astonishment.  'What on earth …?'

      'Bridal!' said Mark, poking the muslin net.  'Positively premième communion!  I've been watching you sleeping.'

      'For long?'

      'Oh, don't worry,' he said, replying not to the spoken, but to the unspoken question, implied by Anthony's tone of annoyance.  'You don't give yourself away in your sleep.  On the contrary, you take other people in.  I've never seen anyone look so innocent as you did under that veil.  Like the infant Samuel.  Too sweet!'

      Reminded of Helen's use of the same word on the morning of the catastrophe, Anthony frowned.  Then, after a silence, 'What have you come for?' he asked.

      'To stay with you.'

      'You weren't asked.'

      'That remains to be seen,' said Mark.

      'What do you mean?'

      'I mean, you may discover it after the event.'

      'Discover what?'

      'That you wanted to ask me.  Without knowing that you wanted it.'

      'What makes you think that?'

      Mark drew up a chair and sat down before answering.  'I saw Helen the night she got back to London.'

      'Did you?'  Anthony's tone was as blankly inexpressive as he could make it.  'Where?' he added.

      'At Hugh's.  Hugh was giving a party.  There were some uncomfortable moments.'

      'Why?'

      'Well, because she wanted them to be uncomfortable.  She was in a queer state, you know.'

      'Did she tell you why?'

      Mark nodded.  'She even made me read your letter.  The beginning of it, at least.  I wouldn't go on.'

      'Helen made you read my letter?'

      'Aloud.  She insisted.  But, as I say, she was in a very queer state.'  There was a long silence.  'That's why I came here,' he added at last.

      'Thinking that I'd be glad to see you?' the other asked in an ironical tone.

      'Thinking that you'd be glad to see me,' Mark answered gravely.

      After another silence, 'Well, perhaps you're not altogether wrong,' said Anthony.  'In a way, of course, I simply hate the sight of you.'  He smiled at Mark.  'Nothing personal intended, mind you.  I should hate the sight of anyone just as much.  But in another way I'm glad you've come.  And this is personal.  Because I think you're likely – well, likely to have some notion of what's what,' he concluded with a noncommittal vagueness.  'If there's anybody who can …' He was going to say 'help': but the idea of being helped was so repugnant to him, seemed so grotesquely associated with the parson's well-chosen words after a death in the family, with the housemaster's frank, friendly talk about sexual temptations, that he broke off uncomfortably.  'If anybody can made a sensible remark about it all,' he began again, on a different level of expression, 'I think it's you.'

      The other nodded without speaking, and thought how typical it was of the man to go on talking about sensible remarks – even now!

      'I have a feeling,' Anthony went on slowly, overcoming inward resistance in order to speak, 'a feeling that I'd like to get it over, get things settled.  On another basis,' he brought out as though under torture.  'The present one …'  He shook his head.  'I'm a bit bored with it.'  Then, perceiving with a sense of shame the ludicrous inappropriateness and the worse than ludicrous falsity of the understatement, 'It won't do,' he added resolutely.  'It's a basis that can't carry more than the weight of a ghost.  And in order to use it, I've turned myself into a ghost.'  After a pause, 'These last few days,' he went on slowly, 'I've had a queer feeling that I'm not really there, that I haven't been there for years past.  Ever since … well, I don't exactly know when.  Since before the war, I suppose.'  He could not bring himself to speak of Brian.  'Not there,' he repeated.

      'A great many people aren't there,' said Mark.  'Not as people, at any rate.  Only as animals and incarnate functions.'

      'Animals and incarnate functions,' the other repeated.  'You've said it exactly.  But in most cases they have no choice; nonentity is forced on them by circumstance.  Whereas I was free to choose – at any rate, so far as anybody is free to choose.  If I wasn't there, it was on purpose.'

      'And do you mean to say that you've only just discovered the fact that you've never been there?'

      Anthony shook his head.  'No, no, I've known it, of course.  All the time.  But theoretically.  In the same way as one knows … well, for example, that there are birds that live symbiotically with wasps.  A curious and interesting fact, but no more.  I didn't let it be more.  And then I have my justifications.  Work: too much personal life would interfere with my work.  And the need for freedom: freedom to think, freedom to indulge my passion for knowing about the world.  And freedom for its own sake.  I wanted to be free, because it was intolerable not to be free.'

      'I can understand that,' said Mark, 'provided that there's someone there who can enjoy the freedom.  And provided,' he added, ' that that someone makes himself conscious of being free by overcoming the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom.  But how can you be free, if there's no “you”?'

      'I've always put it the other way round,' said Anthony.  'How can you be free – or rather (for one must think of it impersonally) how can there freedom – so long as the “you” persists?  A “you” has got to be consistent and responsible, has got to make choices and commit itself.  But if one gets rid of the “you”, one gets rid of responsibility and the need for consistency.  One's free as a succession of unconditioned, uncommitted states without past or future, except insofar as one can't voluntarily get rid of one's memories and anticipations.'  After a silence, 'The staggering imbecility of old Socrates!' he went on.  'Imagining that one had only to know the correct line of conduct in order to follow it.  One practically always knows it -  and more often than not one doesn't follow it.  Or perhaps you're not like that,' he added in another tone, looking at Mark through the mosquito net.  'One's inclined to attribute one's own defects to everyone else.  Weakness, in my case.  Not to mention timidity,' he added with a laugh, that uttered itself automatically, so deeply ingrained was the habit of half withdrawing, as soon as it was spoken, anything in the nature of a personal confidence, of evoking in the listener's mind a doubt as to the seriousness of his intention in speaking; 'timidity, and downright cowardice, and indolence in regard to anything that isn't my work.'  He laughed again as though it were all absurd, not worth mentioning.  'One forgets that other people may be different.  Tough-minded, firm of purpose.  I dare say you always do what you know is right.'

      'I always do it,' Mark answered.  'Whether it's right or wrong.'  He demonstrated the anatomy of a smile.

      Anthony lay back on his pillows, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes half shut.  Then, after a long silence, he turned to Staithes and said abruptly: 'Don't you ever feel that you simply can't be bothered to do what you've decided on?  Just now, for example, I found myself wondering all of a sudden why on earth I'd been talking to you like this – why I'd been thinking these things before you came – why I'd been trying to make up my mind to do something.  Wondering and feeling that I simply couldn't be bothered.  Thinking that it would be better just to evade it all and go back to the familiar routine.  The quiet life.  Even though the quiet life would be fatal.  Fatal, mortal, but all the same anything for it.'  He shook his head.  'Probably if you hadn't come to shame me into some sort of resolution, that's what I would have done – escaped from it all and gone back to the quiet life.'  He laughed.  'And perhaps,' he added, 'I shall do it even now.  In spite of you.'  He sat up, lifted the mosquito net and stepped out of bed.  'I'm going to have my bath.'