Chapter
Seventeen
To the tune of 'Under the Bamboo Tree', to
the accompaniment of Timmy Williams's knowing laughter, again, again:
Probably
constip,
Probably
constip,
Probably
constipaysh ...
But, of course, it wasn't true. He had always known that it wasn't true.
There
was an awareness once more of an all-pervading silence that shone and was
alive. Beautiful with more than the
beauty of even Mozart's music, more than the beauty of the sky after sunset, of
the evening star emerging into visibility between the cypresses.
And
from these cypresses he found himself moving across the lattice to the
discovery of himself at
But
this wasn't Tintoretto's pale silhouette of a marbly and majestic nakedness. This was Mimi. Mimi as she squatted on the divan,
short-legged, opaquely white against the garish cushions.
And
suddenly he was participating once more in that relentless knowledge of an
absence so hideous that there could be nothing but self-abhorrence, nothing but
shame, judgement, condemnation.
To
escape from the pain he turned once more towards the parting of the
dressing-gown, towards the fondlings and the dandlings, the cigar and the laughter. But this time the light refused to be
eclipsed. Instead, it grew brighter,
impossibly; grew unendurably more beautiful.
Terror
modulated into resentment, into a passion of rage and hatred. And as though by magic he had, at one stroke,
repossessed himself of all his four vocabularies of obscenity - the native
English, the paintstakingly acquired German and
French and Italian.
The
uprush of his anger, the torrent of those words,
brought him immediate relief. The urgency
of the light diminished, and there was no more participation in the knowledge,
by which he was compelled to judge himself shameful. Nothing remained but that beauty, far off in
the background, like the sky after sunset.
But now he had seen through its loveliness, knew it was only a bait to
lure one on into some horrible kind of suicide.
Suicide,
suicide - they were all trying to persuade one to commit suicide. And here was the fragment of himself represented by Bruno in the bookshop, Bruno on the
way to the station. Looking at one with
those eyes of his, talking so gently about the need of allowing oneself to be
forgiven, even trying to hypnotize one. To hypnotize one into self-destruction.
Slipping
sideways, as it were, on to another plane of the lattice, he found himself all
of a sudden in contact with a knowledge which he knew immediately as
Bruno's. The knowledge, dim and
irrelevant, of a bare hotel bedroom and at the same time, overpoweringly, of the
light. Tenderly blue, this time. Blue and somehow musical. A systole and diastole of
radiance, singing voicelessly within the whorls of an unseen shell.
Beauty
and peace and tenderness - immediately recognized and immediately
rejected. Known, only
to be hated, only to be defiled, idiomatically, in four languages.
St Willibald saying his prayers in the bedroom of a fourth-rate
hotel. St Wunnibald staring at his naval. It was asinine. It was contemptible. And if the fool imagined that, by playing
these tricks, he could shame one into wanting to commit suicide, he was
entirely mistaken. Who did he think he
was, fooling about with that damned light. But whatever he might think, the fact
remained that he was just old man Bruno, just a scrubby little bookseller with
a half-baked intelligence and a gift of the gab.
And
then he was aware that Bruno was not alone, that Bruno's knowledge of the light
was not the only knowledge. There was a
whole galaxy of awareness. Bright by
participation, made one with the light that gave them their being. Made one and yet recognizable, within the
Universal Possibility, as possibilities that had actually been realized.
In
the hotel bedroom the knowledge of that tender and musical radiance was growing
more complete. And as it did so, the
blueness brightened up towards a purer incandescence, the music modulated from
significance through heightened significance into the ultimate perfection of
silence.
'Willibald,
Wunnibald. In a fourth-rate hotel.
And let's hope there's a couple of German honeymooners
in the next room.' Showing off what he
could do with the light! But that didn't
prevent him from being a silly little rag-and-bone merchant, a pedlar of mouldy rubbish.
'And if he seriously imagines he can browbeat one into feeling ashamed
...'
Abruptly,
Eustace was aware of what the other knew.
Was aware by acquaintance, not from the outside only,
but in an act of identification.
And in the same instant he became aware again of the unutterable
ugliness of his own opaque and fragmentary being.
Shameful,
shameful.... But he refused to feel ashamed.
He'd be damned if he'd let himself be dragooned into suicide. Yes, he'd be damned, he'd be damned!...
In
the brightness and the silence his thoughts were like lumps of excrement, like
the noise of vomiting. And the more
repulsive they seemed, the more frantic became his
anger and hatred.
Damned
light! Bloody little rag-and-bone
man! But now there was no longer any
rest or respite to be found in being angry.
His hatred blazed, but blazed in the face of an unobscured
radiance. The four vocabularies of
obscenity vomited themselves out in a silence with which in some sort he was
identified, a silence that merely emphasized the hideousness of that which
interrupted it.
All
the elation of anger and hatred, all the distracting excitement, died away, and
he was left with nothing but the naked, negative experience of revulsion. Painful intrinsically and at the same time a
cause of further pain. For the unobscured light and the uninterruptible silence, which were
the objects of his loathing, compelled him once again to know himself, to sit
in judgement, to condemn.
Other
fragments of himself made their appearance. Ten pages of Proust, and a trot round the Bargello;
St Sebastian among the Victorian ornaments, and the Young Man of Peoria. Fascinatio nugacitatis. But all the trifling which had once enchanted
him was now not only profoundly wearisome, but also, in some negative way,
profoundly evil. And yet it had to be
persisted in; for the alternative was a total
self-knowledge and self-abandonment, a total attention and exposure to the
light.
So
now it was Mimi again. And in the
brightness, with which he was now unescapably
identified, those too had to be persisted in - those long afternoons in the
little flat behind Santa Croce. Interminable cold frictions, the strigil
rasping and rasping, but without titillation. Adesso comincia la tortura. And it never stopped, because he couldn't
allow it to stop, for fear of what might happen if he did. There was no escape, except along this path
which led him yet further into captivity.
Suddenly
Bruno Rontini stirred a little and coughed. Eustace was aware, at one remove, of a
heightened awareness of the bleak little bedroom and the noise of the traffic
climbing in low gear up the steep approaches to
Or
was there perhaps another path? A way
that would lead one around these excremental clots of old experience and the
condemnation they imposed? The silence
and the brightness were pregnant with the unequivocal answer: there was no way round, there was only the way through. And of course he knew all about it, he knew
exactly where it led.
But
if that way were followed, what would happen to Eustace Barnack? Eustace Barnack
would be dead. Stone
dead, extinct, annihilated.
There'd be nothing but this damned light, this fiendish brightness in
the silence. His hatred flared up again;
and then, almost instantly, the delightful and exhilarating heat was
quenched. Nothing was left him but a
frigid and frightened revulsion, and, along with the revulsion, the
excruciating knowledge that his hatred and his revulsion were equally
disgusting.
But
better this pain than its alternative; better this knowledge of his own hatefulness than the extinction of all knowledge
whatsoever. Anything rather than
that! Even those
eternities of empty foolery, these eternities of a lust devoid of all pleasure. Ten pages of Proust, and the juxtaposition of wax flowers and St
Sebastian. Again
and again. And
after that the repetitions of those corpse-cold sensualities, the fondlings, the dandlings, the
endless obligatory fumblings to the accompaniment of
'Probably Constip' and 'The Young Man of Peoria'. Thousands of times,
hundreds of thousands of times.
And the little joke about St Willibald, the little joke about St Wunnibald. And Mr Cheeryble with his thurible, Mr Chatterjee with his Mr Chatterjee
with his Mr Chatterjee with ... And again the same
ten pages of Proust, the same wax flowers and St
Sebastian, the same blind brown breast-eyes and the torture of compulsory lust,
while the Young Man of Peoria kept on murmuring the Credo, murmuring the
Sanctus, murmuring a string of flawlessly idiomatic obscenities in a luminous
silence which made each one of their million repetitions seem yet more
senseless than the last, yet more drearily disgusting.
But
there was no alternative, no alternative except giving in to the light, except
dying out into the silence. But anything
rather than that, anything, anything....
And
then suddenly there was salvation. A knowledge, first of all, that there were other knowledges. Not like
Bruno's beastly conspiracy with the light.
Not like that galaxy of awarenesses within the
knowledge of all possibility. No,
no. These other awarenesses with cosily similar to his own. And all of them were concerned with himself,
with his own beloved and opaque identity.
And their concern was like the fluttering shadow of a host of wings,
like the cry and chatter of innumerable agitated little birds, shutting out
that insupportable light, shattering that accursed silence, bringing respite
and relief, bringing the blessed right to be himself and not ashamed of the fact.
He
rested there in the delicious, twittering confusion, of which he had become the
centre, and would have been happy so to rest for ever. But better things were reserved for him. Suddenly and without warning there dawned a
new, more blissful phase of his salvation.
He was in possession of something infinitely precious, something of
which, as he now realized, he had been deprived throughout the whole duration
of these horrible eternities - a set of bodily sensations. There was an experience, thrillingly direct
and immediate, of the warm, living darkness behind closed eyelids; of faint
voices, not remembered, but actually heard out there in front; of a touch of
lumbago in the small of the back; of a thousand obscure little aches and
pressures and tensions from within and from without. And what an odd kind of heaviness in the
lower inwards! What curiously unfamiliar
sensations of weight and construction out there in front of the chest!
'I
think she's gone under,' said the Queen Mother in a harsh stage whisper.
'She
certainly seems to be breathing very seriously,' Paul De Vries
agreed. 'Snoring is always indicative of
relaxation,' he added instructively.
'That's why thin nervous people so seldom ...'
Mrs
Gamble cut him short.
'Kindly
let go of my hand,' she said. 'I want to
blow my nose.'
Her
bracelets tinkled in the darkness. There
was a rustling and a snort.
'Now,
where are you?' she asked, clawing for his hand. 'Ah, here! I
hope everybody's holding tight.'
'I
certainly am,' said the young man.
He
spoke gaily; but the squeeze he administered to the soft hand on his right was
lingeringly tender. To his delight the
pressure was faintly, but quite perceptibly, returned.
Ambushed
in the darkness, Mrs Thwale was thinking of the
shameless essence of love.
'And
what about you, Sebastian?' she asked, turning her head.
'I'm
all right,' he answered with a nervous giggle.
'I'm still holding on.'
But
so was the stinking De Vries! Holding on and being held to. Whereas if he were
to squeeze her hand, she'd probably announce the fact to the rest of the
company, and they'd all simply howl with laughter. All the same, he had a good mind to do it in
spite of everything. As
an outrage - just as she had said.
De Vries was in love with her and, for all he
knew, she was in love with De Vries. Very well, then; the biggest non sequitur
possible in the circumstances would be for him to say or do something to show
that he was in love with her. But
when it came to actually committing the outrage of squeezing her hand,
Sebastian found himself hesitant. Did he
have the nerve or didn't he? Was it
really worth it, or wasn't it?
'They
say that holding hands does something to the vibrations,' announced the Queen
Mother from her end of the row.
'Well,
it's not impossible,' said Paul De Vries
judicially. 'In the light of the most
recent researches into the electric potentials of the various muscle groups
...'
In
five seconds, Sebastian was saying to himself, with the imaginary pistol barrel
pressed once again to his temple, in five seconds, the world would have come to
an end. Nothing mattered any more. But still he didn't act. Nothing mattered, nothing mattered, he was
still despairingly repeating, when all at once he felt her hand coming to life
within his own. Then, startlingly, her
fingertips began to trace little circles on his palm. Again, again, deliciously,
electrically. Then without
warning she dug her pointed nails into his flesh. For a second only, after which the fingers
straightened out and relaxed, and he found himself holding a hand as limp and
passive and inert as it had been before.
'And
then,' Paul De Vries was saying, 'one has to consider
the possibility of mitotic radiations as a factor in the phenom
...'
'Sh-sh! She's saying
something.'
Out
of the darkness in front of them came a squeaky childish voice.
'This
is Bettina,' it said. 'This is Bettina.'
'Good-evening,
Bettina,' cried the Queen Mother, in a tone that was intended to be gay and
ingratiating. 'How are things over on
the other side?'
'Fine!'
said the squeak, which belonged, as Mrs Byfleet had
explained before the lights were turned out, to a little girl who had passed on
in the
'Yes,
we're all so sorry that Mrs Byfleet shouldn't
be feeling well.'
'Not
feeling good at all.'
'Most
unfortunate!' replied the Queen Mother with hardly disguised impatience. It was she who insisted on Mrs Byfleet's giving the séance in spite of her
indisposition. 'But I hope it won't
interfere with the communications.'
The
squeak said something about 'doing our best,' and tailed off into
incoherence. Then the medium sighed
profoundly and snored a little. There
was a silence.
What
did it mean, Sebastian was wondering. What on earth could it mean? His heart was beating like a
sledgehammer. Once again the barrel of
the revolver was pressed against his forehead.
In five seconds the world had come to an end. One, two, three ... He squeeze her hand. Waited a second. Squeezed it again. But there was no responsive pressure, no
indication of any kind that she had even noticed what he had done. Sebastian felt himself overcome by the most
excruciating embarrassment.
'I
always like to have my first séance as soon after the funeral as possible,' the
Queen Mother remarked. 'Even before it,
if the thing can be arranged. Nothing like striking the iron while it's hot.'
There
was a pause. Then, eager but
monotonously flat, Paul De Vries's voice broke in.
'I
keep thinking,' he said, 'of Mr Pewsey's address at
the graveside this afternoon. Most
touching, didn't you think? And so felicitously worded.
"Friend of the arts and artist in
friendship." He couldn't
have phrased it better.'
'Which
doesn't prevent him,' rasped the Queen Mother, 'from having the most disgusting
habits. If it weren't for Veronica and
that boy, I'd tell you a few things I happen to know about Tom Pewsey.'
'There's
somebody here,' the squeak startlingly announced. 'He's very anxious to get in touch with you
folks.'
'Tell
him we're waiting,' said the Queen Mother in the tone of one who gives orders
to the footman.
'Only
just come over,' the squeak went on.
'Seems he doesn't rightly know he's passed on.'
For
Paul De Vries the words were like the fresh scent of
a rabbit to a nosing dog; he was off in a flash.
'Isn't
that interesting!' he exclaimed. 'He
doesn't know he's passed on. But they
all say that, from the Mahayana Buddhists down to ...'
But
the squeak had begun to mutter something.
'Can't
you stop interrupting?' said the Queen Mother.
'I'm
sorry,' he murmured.
In
the darkness Mrs Thwale sympathetically pressed his
right hand and, in the same instant, disinterested and platonic, crooked a
delicate forefinger and across the centre of Sebastian's left palm traced out
the four letters, L,O,V, E, and then another, unavoidable combination, and
another. An effervescence of soundless
laughter bubbled up within her.
'He's
so glad you folks are all here,' said the squeak, becoming suddenly
articulate. 'He can't say how happy it
makes him.'
'Not
that one would have expressed it with quite so much pathetic emphasis,' Eustace
was thinking. 'But substantially it's
the truth.'
That
damned light was now definitively out; and with these newly recovered
sensations hopping and twittering like twenty thousand sparrows, there was no
question any more of silence. And how
delightful even lumbago could be, even this obscure and unfamiliar
belly-ache! And the Queen Mother's
nutmeg-grater voice - no Mozart had ever sounded sweeter! Of course, it was unfortunate that, for some
reason, everything had to pass through the filter of this intermediate
knowledge. Or rather this intermediate
ignorance; for it was just a lump of organized imbecility, that was all. You gave it the choicest of your little
jokes, and four times out of five it came out with unadulterated nonsense. What a hash, for example, it made of the
things he said what that American fellow started talking about psychic factors,
or whatever it was! And when he wanted
to quote Sebastian's line about two buttocks and a pendulous bub, it kept on talking in a bewildered way about pendulums
- bucks and pendulums. Too idiotic! However, he did at least manage to get in one
good dig at the Queen Mother, to get it in almost verbatim; for even a half-wit
couldn't make a mistake about the word 'claws'.
And
then something very curious happened.
'Is
it true,' Mrs Thwale suddenly enquired in a tone of
excessive and altogether improbable innocence, 'is it true that, where you are,
there isn't any marrying or giving in marriage?'
The
words seemed to touch a trigger; there was a kind of mental jerk, an almost
violent displacement of consciousness - and Eustace found himself
aware, as though in vivid memory, of events which had not happened to himself,
events which, he somehow knew, had not as yet happened at all. Wearing a broad-shouldered fur coat and a
preposterous hat like something out of a Winterhalter
portrait of the Empress Eugénie, Mrs Thwale was sitting on a platform with a lot of naval
officers, while a man with tousled hair and a Middle Western accent bellowed
into a microphone. 'Liberty Ship,' he
kept saying, 'four hundred and fifty-ninth
'I'm
not the only one who's thinking about marriage,' he said jocularly.
But
what the imbecile actually uttered was, 'We don't think about marriage over
here.'
Eustace
began to protest, but was distracted from his irritation by the emergence of
another of those clear memories of what had not yet happened. Little Thwale on a
sofa with a very young officer, like those beardless children one used to see
during the war. And really, really, the
things she permitted herself! And always with that faintly ironical smile, that
expression of detached curiosity in the bright dark eyes, which always remained
wide open and observant, whatever might be happening. Whereas the boy, in his
effort to hold the pleasure in, to shut the shame and the embarrassment out,
kept his eyes tightly closed.
The
moving images faded into nothingness and, at the thought of De Vries's horns and the inevitable connection between war and
lust, between the holiest crusades and most promiscuous copulations, Eustace
started to laugh. 'Backwards and
downwards, Christian soldiers,' he said in the interval between two paroxysms
of amusement.
'He
says we're all Christian soldiers,' pronounced the squeak; and then, almost
immediately, 'Goodbye, folks,' it called, 'goodbye, goodbye.'
Laughter, a crescendo of laughter. Then, all of a sudden, Eustace realized that
the blissful experience of sensation was beginning to ebb away from him. The voices from outside grew dimmer and more
confused; the small obscure awareness of pressure, touch and tension faded
away. And at last there was nothing left,
not even the lumbago, not even the idiot interpreter. Nothing but the hunger for
what he had lost and, emerging again from its long eclipse behind the opacity
and the delicious noise, that pure, shining silence of the light. Brighter, ever more urgently,
ever more austerely and menacingly beautiful. Perceiving his danger, Eustace directed all
his attention to little Thwale and her uniformed
adolescent, to the enormous cosmic joke of crusades and copulation. 'Downwards and backwards, Christian soldiers,'
he repeated. Making a deliberate effort,
he laughed more heartily than ever.