Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

Pain and the howling of laughter.  Nightmares of cruelty and cold lust, and this irrepressible derision tearing relentlessly at the very substance of his being.  Without end; and the durations grew longer and progressively longer with each repetition of the ever-increasing agony.

      After an eternity deliverance came with a kind of jerk, as though by miracle.  Came with the sudden lapse out of mere incoherent succession into the familiar orderliness of time.  Came with the multitudinous twittering of sensation, the fluttering consciousness of having a body.  And out there lay space; and in the space there were bodies - the sensed evidence of other kindred minds.

      'We have two old friends of yours with us this evening,' he heard the Queen Mother saying in her ghostly petty officer's voice.  'Monsieur and Madame - what's the name, by the way?'

      'Weyl,' and 'Gabriel Weyl,' a masculine and a feminine voice answered simultaneously.

      And sure enough, it was the Flemish Venus and her preposterous Vulcan.

      '"Where every prospect pleases,"' he chanted, '"and only man is WEYL FRÈRES, Bruxelles, Paris, Florence ..."'

      But, as usual, the imbecile interpreter got it all wrong.  Meanwhile the dealer had begun to talk to him about the Chinese bronzes.  What taste in the collector of such treasures, what connoisseurship, what sensibility!  Then, with a solemn earnestness that was in ludicrous contrast with her naughty-naughty French accent, Mme Weyl brought out something about their calligraphic polyphony.

      Delicious absurdity!

      'He thinks you're funny,' the interpreter squeaked, and broke into a shrill giggle.

      But these Weyls, Eustace suddenly perceived, were much more than funny.  In some way or other they were enormously significant and important.  In some way and for some mysterious reason they were epoch-making - yes, there was no other word for it.  They were absolutely epoch-making.

      He seemed on the verge of discovering just how and why they were epoch-making, when the Queen Mother suddenly broke in.

      'I suppose you're beginning to feel quite at home now, on the other side,' she rasped.

      'At home!' he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.

      But it was as a rather gushing statement of fact that the imbecile brought out the words.

      'Sure, he feels quite at home,' she squeaked.

      Then the Queen Mother suggested that it might be nice for those who had never attended a séance before if he gave them some evidential; and she began to fire off a string of the most idiotic questions.  How much had he paid for those drawings he had bought from M. Weyl?  What was the name of the hotel he has stayed at in Paris?  What books had he been reading the day he passed on?  And then Mrs Thwale piped up, and both the Weyls; and the conversation became so incoherent, so senselessly trivial, that he grew confused, found it difficult to think straight or even remember the most familiar facts.  In self-protection he turned his attention away from the significance of what was being said to him, concentrating instead on the mere sound of the words, on the pitch and timbre and volume of the different voices.  And contrapuntal to these noises from without there were the muffled rhythms of blood and breathing, the uninterrupted stream of messages from this temporary body of his.  Warmths and pressures, moistures and titillations, a score of little aches and stiffnesses, of obscure visceral discontents and satisfactions.  Treasures of physiological reality, directly experienced and so intrinsically fascinating that there was no need to bother about other people, no point in thinking or trying to communicate.  It was enough just to have this feeling of space and time and the processes of life.  Nothing else was required.  This alone was paradise.

      And then, through the dark twittering aviary of his sensations, Eustace was aware, once again, of that blue shining stillness.  Delicate, unutterably beautiful like the essence of all skies and flowers, like the silent principle and potentiality of all music.  And tender, yearning, supplicatory.

      But meanwhile, the air slowly came and went in the nostrils, cool on the intake, warm to the point of being all but imperceptible as it was breathed out; and as the chest expanded and contracted, effort was succeeded by a delicious effortlessness, tension by relaxation, again and again.  And what pleasure to listen to the waves of blood as they beat against the eardrums, to feel them throbbing under the skin of the temples!  How fascinating to analyse the mingled savours of garlic and chocolate, red wine and - yes - kidneys, haunting the tongue and palate!  And then, all at once, by a kind of exquisitely harmonious and co-ordinated earthquake of all the muscles of the mouth and gullet, the accumulations of saliva were swallowed; and a moment later a faint bubbling trill from below the diaphragm announced that the processes of digestion were sleeplessly going forward.  That seemed to bring the ultimate reassurance, to perfect and consummate his sense of paradisal cosiness.  And suddenly he found himself remembering St Sebastian and the stuffed humming-birds, remembering the taste of cigar smoke on a palate warmed by old brandy, remembering Mimi and the Young Man of Peoria and his collection of facts about the ludicrous or disastrous consequences of idealism - remembering them not with shame or self-condemnation but with downright relish or, at the very worst, an amused indulgence.  The light persisted, ubiquitously present; but this feeling of being in a body was an effective barrier against its encroachments.  Behind his sensations he was safe from any compulsion to know himself as he was known.  And these Weyls, he now perceived, this Venus with her swarthy Vulcan, could become the instruments of his permanent deliverance from that atrocious knowledge.  There was a living uterine darkness awaiting him there, a vegetative heaven.  Providence was ready for him, a providence of living flesh, hungry to engulf him into itself, yearning to hold and cradle him, to nourish with the very substance of its deliciously carnal and sanguine being.

      Imploringly, the light intensified its shining silence.  But he knew what it was up to, he was forearmed against its tricks.  And besides, it was possible to make the best of Mozart and the Casino, of Mimi and the evening star between cypresses.  Perfectly possible, provided always one owned a physiology to protect one against the stratagems of the light.  And that protection could be had for the asking; or rather was being offered, greedily, with a kind of mindless frenzy....

      Suddenly the squeaking of the imbecile ceased to be nothing but a sensation, and modulated into significance.

      'Goodbye, folks, goodbye.'

      And from out there in the darkness came an answering chorus of farewells that grew momently dimmer, vaguer, more confused.  And all the delicious messages from this body of his - they too were fading.  The aviary fell silent and motionless.  And suddenly there was a kind of wrench, and once again he was out of the comfortable world where time is a regular succession and place is fixed and solid - out in the chaos and delirium of unfettered mind.  In the vague flux of masterless images, of thoughts and words and memories all but autonomous and independent two things preserved their stability, the tender ubiquity of the light and the knowledge that there was a fostering darkness of flesh and blood in which, if he chose, he could find deliverance from the light.

      But here once more was the lattice of relationships, and he was in the midst of it, moving from node to node, from one patterned figure to its strangely distorted projection in another pattern.  Moving, moving, until all of a sudden there he was, carefully putting down his cigar on the onyx ashtray and turning to open the medicine cupboard.

      There was a kind of side-slip, a falling, as it were, through the intricacies of the lattice - and he knew himself remembering events that had not yet taken place.  Remembering a day towards the end of summer, hot and cloudless, with aeroplanes roaring across the sky - across the luminous silence.  For the silence was still there, shining, ubiquitously tender; still there in spite of what was happening on this long straight road between its poplar trees.  Thousands of people, all moving one way, all haunted by the same fear.  People on foot, carrying bundles on their backs, carrying children; or perched high on overloaded carts; or wheeling bicycles with suitcases strapped to the handlebars.

      And here was Weyl, paunchy and bald-headed, pushing a green perambulator packed full of unframed canvases and Dutch silver and Chinese jade, with a painted madonna standing drunkenly at an angle where the baby should have been.  Heavy now with the approach of middle age, the Flemish Venus limped after him under the burden of a blue morocco dressing-case and her sealskin coat.  'Je n'en peux plus,' she kept whispering, 'je n'en peux plus.'  And sometimes, despairingly, 'Suicidons-nous, Gabriel.'  Bent over the perambulator, Weyl did not answer or even look round, but the little spindly boy who walked beside her, preposterous in baggy plus-fours, would squeeze his mother's hand, and when she turned her tear-stained face towards him would smile up at her encouragingly.

      To the left, across a tawny expanse of stubble and some market gardens, a whole town was burning, and the smoke of it, billowing up from behind the towers of that sunlit church in the suburbs, spread out as it mounted through the luminous silence into a huge inverted cone of brown darkness.  A noise of distant gunfire bumped against the summer air.  Nearby, from an abandoned farm, came the frantic lowing of unmilked cows and, overhead, suddenly there were the planes again.  The planes - and almost in the same instant another roaring made itself heard on the road behind them.  Dimly at first.  But the convoy was travelling at full speed and, second by second, the noise swelled up, terrifyingly.  There were shouts and screaming and a panic rush towards the ditch - the frenzy and blind violence of fear.  And suddenly here was Weyl howling like a madman beside his overturned perambulator.  A horse took fright, whinnied, reared up in the shafts; the cart moved back with a sudden jerk, striking Mme Weyl a glancing blow on the shoulder.  She staggered forward a step or two, trying to recover her balance, then caught one of her high heels against a stone and fell face downwards into the roadway.  'Maman!' screamed the little boy.  But before he could pull her back the first of the huge lorries and rolled across the struggling body.  For a second there was a gap in the nightmare, a glimpse between the trees of that distant church, bright against the billowing smoke, like a carved jewel in the sunshine.  Then identical with the first, the second lorry passed.  The body was quite still.

      But Eustace was alone again with the light and the silence.  Alone with the principle of all skies and music and tenderness, with the potentialities of all that skies and music and even tenderness were incapable of manifesting.  For an instant, for an eternity, there was a total and absolute participation.  Then, excruciatingly, the knowledge of being separate returned, the shamed perception of his own hideous and obscene opacity.

      But in the same instant there was the memory of those epoch-making Weyls, the knowledge that if he chose to accept it, they could bring him deliverance from the excess of light.

      The lorries rolled on, identically grey-green, full of men and clanking metal.  In the gap of time between the fourth and fifth, they managed to pull the body out from under the wheels.  A coat was thrown over it.

      Still crying, Weyl went back, after a little, to see if he could find any more fragments of the madonna's broken crown and fingers.  A big red-cheeked woman laid her arm round the child's shoulders and, leading him away, made him sit down at the foot of one of the poplar trees.  The little boy crouched there, his face in his hands, his body trembling and shaken by sobs.  And suddenly it was no longer from outside that he was thought about.  The agony of that grief and terror were known directly, by an identifying experience of them - not as his, but mine.  Eustace Barnack's awareness of the child had become one with the child's awareness of himself; it was that awareness.

      Then there was another displacement and again the image of the little boy was only a memory of someone else.  Horrible, horrible!  And yet, in spite of the horror, what blessedness it was to feel the waves of blood beating and beating within the ears!  He remembered the warm delicious sense of being full of food and drink, and the feel of flesh, the aromatic smell of cigar smoke ... But here was the light again, the shining of the silence.  None of that, none of that.  Firmly and with decision, he averted his attention.