‘What’s this stuff about honeydew?’
‘Oh just that it’s so wonderful, it makes me so happy, just to think about it all. It’s as if one had manna to eat and didn’t want to spoil one’s palate.’
Thomas laughed, then roared with laughter, while Stuart continued to smile at him, observing his laughter with benign interest. ‘Stuart, you’re priceless! You’ve simply elected yourself out of the human condition of indelible selfishness. To remove a mountain is easy, to change any man’s temperament for the better is considerably more difficult. But you seem to assume you’ve done it already just by thinking!’
‘Well, what’s wrong with thinking,’ said Stuart, ‘that’s a sort of action too. And why should I bother about my temperament, a jolly unclear concept anyway. One soon comes to the end of psychology, and there’s no point in detailed theories about morals.’
‘That’s what your father said the other night!’
‘He meant it’s all nonsense. I mean talk about the “spiritual life” and all that is too abstract. It’s not a matter of “explaining”. All sorts of important things have no explanations.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. And mental activity is action too. But this thinking of yours isn’t theorising, it’s not systematic reflection — ’
‘Innocence is a strong idea, purity, holiness — Ideas are signals, or pointers, or refuges, or resting places — it’s hard to describe.’
‘Of course. You are fertile in metaphors. So you pray? Or sort of. You meditate?’
‘Yes.’
‘You invoke help, you invite grace — sort of?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you kneel down?’
‘Well — yes — sometimes.’
‘Am I being impertinent?’
‘Not yet!’
‘No one taught you?’
‘Of course not! Look, Thomas, these are ordinary natural things, nothing odd!’
‘And all this came naturally and painlessly out of your vague Anglican childhood. You weren’t religious at school.’
‘There’s such a thing as growing up.’
‘What about Jesus?’
‘Well, what about him?’
‘You said you didn’t want a master, but isn’t he one you can’t avoid?’
Stuart frowned. ‘Not a master. Of course he’s there. But he’s not God.’
‘All right. Am I tormenting you? Or are you loving it?’
‘You keep getting it wrong. I just want to grip onto the world directly, like — like a painter — ’
‘Like a spider?’
‘Like a painter. I don’t imagine I’m a sort of sage, I don’t believe in sages. And there’s no programme of action except that one has to earn one’s living and I do want to help people. It’s rather a state of being.’
‘A prolonged adolescence some would call it. Yes, just that blessed sense of growing up, that happy sense that some adolescents have, a conscious superior innocence. To keep that innocence and that vision of glory and that feeling of possibility and power still with you, to establish that light forever, simply not to let it dim — yes, that might seem easy. But oh you’ll be misunderstood!’
‘I already am!’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t hurt yet. And you’ll be hated. Perhaps you already are. You’ll be called timid and impotent and repressed and retarded and childish — never mind. But do you really think you can live by innocence alone?’
‘No — there’s more — ’
‘What?’
Stuart hesitated.
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘“Sink me the ship, master gunner, sink her and split her in twain, let us fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain.”’
‘What on earth are you talking about, Stuart?’
Stuart said in a low voice as if confessing a secret, ‘Courage, just sheer courage — being willing to die. It sounds awfully silly, but those lines of poetry somehow express it.’
‘Every adolescent’s favourite poem, or used to be. I’m sure your father loved it, certainly your grandfather did! Forgive me!’
‘I’m talking too much.’
‘You’re talking beautifully, please don’t stop. Since we seem to be listing the necessary things, what about love?’
‘What?’
‘Love.’
‘Oh — love.’
‘I don’t want to be what you might call abstract or literary or sentimental, but isn’t love supposed to be fundamental in the matters that concern you, your state of being, your honeydew?’
‘I’m not certain about that,’ said Stuart. ‘I think it has to look after itself, I mean it has to sort of cancel itself.’
‘Cancel?’
‘It has to un-be itself to be itself, so it can’t exactly be aimed at — ’
‘The subject embarrasses you.’
‘No, I just can’t think about it. I want to go in at the deep end as it were.’
‘Fall in love?’
‘No, not fall in love. That’s the shallow end.’
‘But can you get to the deep end without starting at the shallow end?’
‘Yes, why not. But I’m probably talking nonsense. I just mean I don’t want ordinary attachments, intimate friendships or relationships, what’s usually called love. Perhaps just the word bothers me, the name, like “God”, it’s got so — ’
‘Degraded?’
‘Messy. Messed up.’
‘If it can’t be aimed at you can’t decide where you’ll “go in”. It’s dangerous, Stuart. I liked your image of falling into the hands of God — oh, I know you didn’t mean him — but it’s a deep place, an ocean heaving and giving birth to itself, melting and seething in itself and into itself, interpenetrating itself, light in light and light into light, swelling inwardly, flooding itself, every part interpenetrating the rest until it spills and boils over.’
‘What’s that, sex, the unconscious?’
‘A description of God by a Christian mystic.’
‘He must have been a heretic.’
‘He was. All the best are. There are principalities and powers, fallen angels, animal gods, spirits cut loose and wandering in the void, they have to be reckoned with, St Paul knew that, he was the first heretic.’
‘Thomas, do stop making jokes. I’m against fallen angels like I’m against dramas and mysteries and looking for masters and fathers and — ’
‘Fathers?’
‘I mean, I’ve got a perfectly good ordinary one and I don’t regard it as an important symbol.’
‘Since we’re on fathers, what about mothers? What about yours?’
Stuart flushed a little, looking almost annoyed. ‘You want to explain me through my mother.’
‘Nothing so simple. I just want to know what you’ll say.’
‘I don’t see why I should say anything. I’m not your patient. I’m sorry I didn’t know my mother.’
‘Do you think about her, dream about her?’
‘Sometimes. But it’s not your sort of thing at all and I’d rather you didn’t touch it.’
‘All right, I won’t.’
There was a silence. Thomas thought, he’ll go now. Can I stop him, do I want to? He looked down, arranged pens and blotting paper upon his desk, his face assuming a cat-like mask of benign detached self-absorption. Stuart looked at Thomas and smiled in a secretive way, began to rise, then sat back. He said, ‘It would be ungrateful of me, after this conversation, during which you’ve been making me talk so, not to ask if you have anything special to say to me.’
‘Advice? I thought I’d been giving some — ’
‘You’ve just been provoking me, as you admitted, to see what I’d say! Come on, Thomas, you’re thinking!’
‘Of course 1 think a lot of things, but I don’t see any point in uttering them at this stage. Later on perhaps. I’m still puzzled. You are extraordinarily full of yourself.’
‘You mean conceited?’
‘No, solid,
articulated, full of being. I just wonder — you seem to have two aims, one to be innocent and self-subsistent, the other to help people. I wonder whether these will not seriously conflict.’
‘Oh maybe,’ said Stuart. He got up and resumed his post by the window. He looked at his watch.
‘Also, there is more in you than you know of. You are not lord of yourself. Put it this way, your enemy is stronger and more ingenious than you seem to imagine.’
‘You and your mythology, how you love these pictures! You think I ought to go to hell and back, you want me to fall and learn by sin and suffering!’
Thomas laughed. ‘You want to be like the Prodigal Son’s elder brother, the chap who never went away!’
‘Exactly — except that he was cross when his brother was forgiven!’
‘Which you wouldn’t be.’ It’s time to stop this, thought Thomas. We’re tired, and we’ve both done well, considering what a mess we might have made of it. And here’s another dangerous topic. Better leave it at that for now. We’ve certainly made a start. He rose to his feet.
‘I must be off,’ said Stuart. Thomas refrained from asking where he was going, what he was going to do, how he proposed to spend the evening. He had begun to feel an intense curiosity about all Stuart’s activities and mode of being. He said, ‘Stuart, thank you for coming, I enjoyed talking to you. I hope you’ll come again when you feel like it, and we could continue this conversation.’
‘Oh, I don’t think we’ll ever talk like this again,’ said Stuart, ‘it wouldn’t do. Things can get spoilt by being talked about. But thank you, you’ve helped me get clearer about some things. Would you tell Meredith I’ll expect him about ten on Saturday at the usual place?’
Thomas opened the door and Stuart moved towards it, then closed it and turned back towards Thomas.
‘I know you asked me about Christ — I didn’t say properly about him.’
‘Isn’t he one of your signals or refuges? One of those non-degradable objects you say are everywhere?’
‘Yes — but also I — I can’t take the idea of the resurrection — it spoils everything that went before — ’
‘I think I understand,’ said Thomas.
‘I have to think of him in a certain way, not resurrected, as it were mistaken, disappointed — well, who knows what he thought. He has to mean pure affliction, utter loss, innocent suffering, pointless suffering, the deep and awful and irremediable things that happen to people.’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s another thing I sometimes think of in this connection, a particular thing. This may sound awfully arbitrary or bizarre or — ’ Stuart suddenly became crimson in the face.
‘What? Go on.’
‘Something a chap at college told me. He’d been to visit Auschwitz, the concentration camp, you know they’ve made it into a sort of museum now. And he said the most awful thing he saw there were plaits of girls’ hair.’
‘Plaits — ?’
‘They say how the Nazis used everything at those camps, at some of them anyway, like a factory — ’
‘Like lampshades made of human skin.’
‘Yes — and they cut off the hair of the people to use — to make wigs I suppose — and there was an exhibition there — ’ He paused, and for a moment Thomas thought he was going to burst into tears. ‘There was a great huge pile of people’s hair, and there were long plaits, girls’ plaits, beautifully carefully plaited, and I thought — that there was a morning — when a girl woke up from sleep — and plaited her hair — so carefully — and — ’ Stuart clenched a fist and fell silent, breathing deeply.
‘And you connect that with Christ on the cross — ’
Stuart said after a moment, ‘It’s a sort of — particular — absolute — thing.’ Then he said, ‘You know, sometimes I do look for signs, or a sign.’
‘Isn’t that a form of magic?’
‘Yes. I’m just reporting a weakness!’ Stuart smiled and the emotion of a moment ago was suddenly quite gone.
When Stuart had left him Thomas sat motionless at his desk while his mind performed some extremely condensed and intuitive thought-acrobatics. He thought, what an amazing thing such a conversation is, how ever do we do it? What is more extraordinary and inexplicable than human consciousness? Yet we all know what it is, we know what the word refers to, we aren’t in any doubt about it. And how surprising and moving his thing about the girls’ hair. That means so many things. What an outburst of emotion. And his connecting it with Christ. He really has a talent for — for what?
After a time Thomas relaxed. He pictured Stuart’s fair doggy cropped head, rather a large long head, and his amber eyes which were so naively trustful and yet so clever. He’s cleverer than I imagined, Thomas thought, is that a good thing? What is a good thing here? He pictured Stuart’s boyish smile. Then he pictured Mr Blinnet’s bland smile and his mocking ironical eyes with their deep crazy inner chambers. Then he saw Edward’s grimacing smile, the smile of the unconscious mind as it triumphs over the conscious. Would Stuart founder dreadfully somehow upon the rock of his own resolve? ‘Sink me the ship, master gunner — ’ What a touching motto, a schoolboy motto! Did Stuart secretly imagine he was an exceptional person destined to change the world? Would he end up sitting in some hospital garden, imagining he was Jesus? Or would he turn out to be dull, not divinely dull, but just a self-deluded common-place fellow? In fact, just like everyone else.
Oh let that not be so! thought Thomas. He was beginning to find Stuart immensely interesting, he wanted to chart his progress in detail. He was saddened by Stuart’s ‘never again’. He had feared something of the sort. Perhaps in spite of his delicately prescient anxiety not to, he had pressed him too far. More likely Stuart had coolly intended to have just one talk with Thomas; at least he must have felt he needed it. He had certainly come to talk about himself and not about Edward. So would they really never talk again? Thomas had looked forward to many such talks. More than that, he had looked forward to just that ‘close’ friendship with Stuart which Stuart had declared to be outside his programme!
Of course I am a professional meddler, thought Thomas, but this is a special case. If indeed Stuart were to fade into the dullness with which Thomas menaced him, perhaps that would be his success? Or would he be overwhelmed, ruined by the forces which he so calmly imagined he could simply reject? Thomas had to admit that the idea of such a collapse interested him; he was already imagining himself coming to the rescue. The dark powers, as the ancients knew, were essentially ambiguous; and thus, as Stuart instinctively perceived, enemies of morality. Blindly, he recognised them; perhaps they recognised him. He would never game for their favours. But I do, thought Thomas, I have to, I do it daily, trying to make benignant allies out of the most dangerous things in the world. When calm resolve and rational morals seem to fail, can not they, vehicles after all of spirit, be invoked and charmed into friendliness, before their exasperation with that very failure leads them to destroy the whole structure? I have to try, thought Thomas, I have to play this dangerous game, because I am that sort of healer, and — oh heavens — because I love it! Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.
A little loud wren was singing. The sun was shining. Edward was walking along the edge of the river, the other side of the river. He had now been at Seegard for nearly two weeks, and Jesse had still not come home. During this time Edward had said nothing to the women about the dromos, which he had continually wished to revisit, but in vain because the river had risen so as to make the hurdle bridge impassable and submerge the stone bridge completely. The weather had turned very cold and he did not fancy swimming across carrying his clothes. On several occasions he secretly made his way past the greenhouses and the vegetable garden, along the overgrown but quite authoritative little path which led to the river. Who trod that path? The sight of the rushing stream, now well above the precarious ‘footway’ of the wooden structure, shaking it and almost carrying it off, made Edward shudder wit
h a kind of fearful almost sexual excitement. Today however (it was ‘rest time’) it was with a more purposive thrill that, finding the river a little abated, he set his foot on the leaning structure, tested it, and, with the water splashing his feet, edged his way across. And now he was, the word came to him as he walked along, free; yet not really free, but upon a different ground where, perhaps, other enchantments reigned.
The nervous guilty qualms which he felt at, not for the first time, absenting himself for longer than he was ‘supposed to’ were proof that he was after all a prisoner, a prisoner with the kindest, most beautiful, most loving captors, captors who set him tasks. He found satisfaction in his tasks, the weariness they caused and his sense therein of being a slave and needing to have no thoughts. He slept promptly and well; yet of course thoughts came. He wondered if, perhaps unconsciously, the women were trying to ‘sweat his misery out of him’. They had still not questioned him about Mark. Edward did not raise the subject, and they showed so little awareness of it that he sometimes thought that they had either forgotten it or had never realised how terribly he had been wounded. Nor did they seem aware of how intensely and anxiously Edward was awaiting his father, how dreadful this meeting would seem from which he also so irrationally hoped for healing. These women, Mother May and his strange sisters, hardly sisters but rather as he now saw them elf maidens, they could not set him free, and he no longer even desired to unburden his heart to them.
They, as the days went by, began to appear different to him. They were still, as he had first apprehended them, taboo, holy women, and endowed with arcane skills. They had not healed his wound but they had a little soothed it. He sometimes wondered whether he were being affected by the diet, so monotonous and so pure: apples, cabbage, herbs, rice, bran, nuts, beans, lentils, oats, especially oats. (‘It’s oats with everything here, you know,’ Ilona said.) There had been no reappearance of the home-made wine; but Mother May sometimes produced herbal draughts which smelt and tasted of flowers and were said laughingly to produce ‘benign thoughts’ and ’happy dreams‘. Edward felt healthier, stronger, and wondered whether this were a true and proper and natural — a word often used at Seegard — recovery; or whether, by some magic alien to it, his most precious possession, the wound, the guilt, the thing itself, were being wrongfully taken from him. Was he being quietly deprived of his sense of reality? He remained convinced that for his true well-being, and so that all this at Seegard so far should not seem a dream interlude or worthless demoralising holiday from his real task, he needed Jesse: Jesse’s wisdom, Jesse’s authority, Jesse’s love. Nothing else would do. And yet as he thought this deep thought he realised too the frailty of his hope. Perhaps he should now be quite elsewhere, doing something quite else.