The Dark Labyrinth

by Lawrence Durrell

  The next day the Abbot received a present of a whole lamb, and, despite Baird’s protests, the mountaineers set to work to spit it and set it to turn on the huge fire which blazed in the fireplace. “German patrols?” said the Abbot loftily. It would take more than that to keep him from having some real meat to eat for a change. It was perhaps the smoke that gave them away.

  At dawn a German patrol opened fire on the guard who was manning the light machine-gun on the outer rock-face. Wakened by the sharp scream of lead thrown off the rock-face and the hoarse winnowing noise of tommy-guns, the whole party awoke and found that their secret headquarters—not to mention the whole plan of operations—was in danger.

  The only hope was to retreat further into the labyrinth along the main tunnel, which was known to two of the men who were shepherds. In a small rock chamber, too, was housed the transmitting set which kept Cairo informed of their activities. Böcklin could not go with them. In the confusion and the shouting Baird made his decision.

  Böcklin must have followed his reasoning perfectly, for he sat at the entrance of one of the caves, trying to register a pathetic indifference, his thin hands in trouser-pockets. Laird came up to him at a run. In his hand he held a heavy captured Luger. Pressing the muzzle to the head of the boy he fired. The report was deafening in that confined space. The body, knocked from the old ammunition box on which it had been sitting, was thrown against the side of the rock, and fell back artfully like a character in a play, upon its back. His thick blond hair hid the wound. As Baird looked down at him he heard him draw one long and perfectly calm breath.

  Now the hunt was up, and the whole party raced into the labyrinth, the Abbot holding a large leg of lamb in his left hand as he uttered terrible threats against the “cuckold bastards” who had interrupted their sleep. He was also laughing, for excitement always made him a little hysterical.

  Later in the day the enemy patrol withdrew and they were able to return to their headquarters. Nothing had been touched and it seemed as if by some chance the enemy had missed the narrow entrance to the grotto. Böcklin’s body lay where it had fallen and they set about burying it in a shallow grave under the single cypress tree. The Abbot was angry that the German had had to be killed, but he said nothing. Two days later a signal recalled Baird to Cairo to prepare for another theatre of war, and the whole incident passed from his mind. He was glad to leave Crete. He had become stale.

  The war unrolled itself gradually; an infinity of boredom settled down over him which even the goads of action could not make him forget. He became more than tired now. He was losing his nerve. He felt around him the gathering unrest of armies which had realized at last that this war was only to be a foundation-stone for a yet bigger and more boring war—the atomic war. Peace came so late as to be an anti-climax. Baird found himself once more at home in the dirty constricted industrial suburb that England had become. His father was very old and very worn. He was glad to see him again, but their long estrangement had widened their common interests. They had nothing to say to each other.

  It was during the ice-bound January that followed the year of the peace that Baird began to dream of Böcklin. He saw him one night holding a lighted match to his cigarette. He saw himself place the revolver to his temple and press the trigger. For a time it took quite an effort of memory to disinter Böcklin from among his other memories of dead friends and enemies. Then he remembered. After that he dreamed of him frequently. Sometimes he had just fired the shot and Böcklin was falling away from him towards the rock—almost as if he had taken flight. At others he simply saw the white face detached from its surroundings and, as he watched, the nostrils slowly brim with blood from the shattered brain-case, and noiselessly spill over into the surrounding darkness. He awoke always in great anguish of mind and could not go to sleep again. As a conscious recollection it meant nothing to him—he had seen plenty of uglier scenes. Why, then, should his memory select this particular scene with which to trouble his sleep?

  This is why he found himself one day in Hogarth’s consulting-room, facing not only the problem of Böcklin’s dream, but also the other—the pre-occupation which seemed somehow bound up with it—his Gleichgultigkeit: that feeling of dreadful moral insensibility and detachment which is the peculiar legacy of wars. It seemed then bizarre to imagine that psycho-analysis should have anything to say to him, but he liked Hogarth, with his massive Baconian cranium and his blunt hands. And he felt that at least the insomnia might have a mechanical reason.

  In those days Hogarth was not, as he is now, the chopping-block for débutantes with palace nerves; he was not, as he is today, consulted upon the sexual maladjustments of earls and financiers. His reputation, which was still growing, rested upon a lengthy hospital practice and two volumes on the nature of the subconscious which the Medical Year had characterized as “too daring by far in their sweeping assumptions”. Their author’s appearance belied any suggestion of daring, however; if his mind was a reflection of his physiognomy, then it must have been a blunt and heavy weapon—by no means a scalpel.

  Hogarth was immense and of heavy build, with the clumsiness of a water-buffalo in movement. His thick brown hair, chopped off short and clipped round the ears, fell upon a low white forehead which topped off the coarse blunt nose and immature chin of a Neronian bust. One of his eyes was blue; the other was flecked with a honey-coloured spot towards the outer part of the iris. His hands, too, were of different sizes—an acromegalic feature which one did not easily notice since he kept them for preference buried in his trouser-pockets. His clothes were as baggy as a Dutchman and smelt strongly of tobacco. As he rose to shake hands Baird saw that his ears, which were prominent and covered with a fine blond fur, were set away from his head, giving him a curious and slightly comical expression. His voice too added in some measure to this impression, for it was displeasing, and had odd variations in it. If he tried to raise it too suddenly it broke disconcertingly.

  At that time Hogarth’s theatre of operations was a small shabby room at the corner of Harley Street and Marylebone Road. He had, however, a private door which opened on to mews, and he also shared part of the building with other medical men. He travelled up every day from his suburb with a paper parcel containing his lunch and a green canister full of cold tea.

  From the moment Baird met him he realized that his habits and pretensions had come under a disturbing and steady scrutiny. He attempted a politeness, but he saw that Hogarth did not answer his smile; and indeed cut him short with a brusque question: “Why did you come to me?” It was not calculated to put him at his ease; nor were the other questions that Hogarth asked in his strangely varying voice, but he passed from annoyance to relief when he realized that his defences were being tested at all the obvious points. More than that. He was really being observed for the first time as a sort of specimen. Hogarth’s eyes were resting on his fingers. Following the direction of his gaze Baird found himself for the first time regarding his own hands as if they belonged to another man. What could one make of them? Were they the hands of an artist, a writer, a criminal?

  He noticed a great bull-nosed pipe which lay fully-charged on the desk before the analyst. On the bookshelf in the corner, upon a jumble of medical papers, he saw a soft green Tyrolean hat with a bright cock-pheasant’s feather in it tucked into the cord. “I notice”, said Hogarth idly, “that on your tunic there is a little green piece where you obviously have worn some medals—a faded spot there.” He delighted in the unconscious intention. “Did you leave them off before coming to see me?” It had been the merest whim that morning to put on his clean tunic; he had forgotten the campaign medals and the M.C. Hogarth put back his head and said rather sententiously: “In my job whims like that might count for a lot. Tell me why you did it.”

  As Baird began to talk in his deep and rather musical voice the elder man assembled himself to listen. As always, he was calling up all his long clinical experience and trying to marry it to that part of his mind which in his b
ooks he calls the “Inself”. He was busy attempting to record the outlines of this newcomer’s personality, recording the physique, the texture and colour of the skin; the determined short upper lip and the large forehead. His opening questions were really the merest gambits. It was necessary to see whether Baird could talk, could think about himself and objectify the thought in words. At the same time, the frailer side of his own mind was wearily thinking how little, at the most, one can know about another human being. Hogarth was full of that sickness which the faintest success breeds in a man of sensibility. He allowed the voice, with its pleasant modulations, to tell him more than the phrases it uttered. Its harshness was natural to it and not a reflection of an interior distress.

  “Do you dream much?”

  “I have a nightmare which keeps returning.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Regular army?”

  “I’ve signed on for another three years.”

  Slowly through these opening statements he seemed to see the type and colour of Baird’s anxiety opening like a paper flower in water. He slipped open the drawer of his desk and inserted a paw. He always kept a packet of boiled sweets to suck as he worked. He put one on his tongue with a quick gesture and settled himself further in his oak chair. It was hard and cruel work, he was reflecting, to bore down through the carapace of pride, self-esteem, apathy; dragging out the forgotten or the discarded from the rubbish-heap of another man’s experience. Particularly so when what he had to give was not a mechanical cure—a particular focus of trauma or anxiety, a particular fact or incident—but a technique and a stance. And how did this come about? Not through any will of his own—it was as if he had turned down his conscious self to the smallest bud of flame. No. It all happened by a fluke—by an extra-sensory awareness which was being called up now from inside him ready to penetrate and seize. He felt, as he listened, quite light and empty, quite devoid of will or ambition or desire—or even interest in his patient.

  Baird, it seemed, was well-read and familiar with the general theories of Freud and Adler. So much the worse. But, at any rate, he could express himself freely and without difficulty and he seemed honest enough. It was enough for the first “wax impression”, as he called it. It only remained to see what reciprocal impression he had made on the younger man.

  “Well, that’ll be a guinea,” said Hogarth with a sigh as the clock struck. “Now will you go away and think me over? If you decide that you want me to help you come back tomorrow at nine. Tonight I would like you to go out and get drunk, if possible. A hangover loosens up the mind no end, and makes you able to dissociate fluently. Will you do that? Good. If you don’t want to go on with me telephone me before half past eight tomorrow.”

  The sunlight suddenly shone in at the murky window and turned the lobes of his ears to coral as he stood up awkwardly on one leg. He had already placed his pipe between his teeth and was fumbling for a box of matches. Baird had not yet told him about the Böcklin dream; well, it could wait until tomorrow. He felt a tinge of chagrin to be thus dismissed at the striking of a clock. “Well, Doctor Hogarth,” he said. “Thank you very much.” Hogarth folded his cheque up and put it in his pocket. He nodded and blew a couple of puffs on his pipe.

  In the waiting-room Fearmax was waiting, walking up and down like a metronome with his hands behind his back. In his hand he held some folded papers. His hat and stick lay upon the sofa. He looked tired and ill. Baird went out into the rainy street wondering whether Hogarth could be of any use to him, and whether the Böcklin dream would return.

  His analysis progressed more slowly even than his friendship—for Hogarth, that dealer in sensibility often found that his best way towards a cure was to turn a patient into a friend. Baird found him a fascinating character with his ponderous medical equipment backed up by an intuition which was completely female and amoral. Between them they worked towards Böcklin’s ghost through the muddled debris of a life which Baird himself had never stopped to examine properly. Hogarth’s analytical technique was an uncompromising one; it not only combed out the purely factual data of a life, but it made the liver of it realize his responsibilities in regard to it. “Why do you think you are here?” “What sort of purpose do you imagine you have in life?” “Do you feel that you have ever contributed towards the well-being of another person?” Such were some of the questions which managed to get sandwiched in between others as cogent. “Why did you forget your latch-key?” “What do you think of when you see a spilled ink-pot?” “Do you enjoy pain?”

  Together they disinterred Böcklin from his unceremonious grave. They recovered, it seemed, every thought and action connected with the incident and with those hundred and one other incidents which appeared to be connected to it in his memory. They became great friends, and when the work became too painful to continue—when the big metal ash-trays were brimming with charred tobacco and cigarette-ends—they would put on their overcoats and walk for hours along the Embankment. Hogarth would explain his theories about the structure of the psyche and give him summaries of his own condition, which were not always comprehensible. And yet behind it all, Baird felt, there was design and purpose in what he said; he was a man trying to grapple with a philosophy not only of disease, but also of life.

  “All right. You kill Böcklin. It is a senseless and beastly murder; but then you are pressed into the service of murder. In the abstract, murder is being committed in your name all over the world. But this actual act shakes you. Now though killing him may be the source of a moral guilt, I’d like to know whether it illustrates merely the guilt for that act, or a much more deep-seated guilt about your role in society. Böcklin may simply be an illustration. But in point of fact your life indicates another, and—may I say?—more fruitful disturbance. You were unhappy before the war too, you say. As a puritan living unpuritanly you would have been. You found an inability to enjoy because your education, with its gentlemanly prohibitions, had taught you merely how to endure. Sometimes—” here Hogarth affectionately put his arm round the shoulders of the younger man. “Sometimes, Baird, I think there is only politics left for you—the last refuge of the diseased ego. You notice how all the young men are burning to reform things? It’s to escape the terrible nullity and emptiness and guilt of the last six years. They are now going to nationalize everything, including joy, sex and sleep. There will be enough for everyone now because the Government will control it. Those who can’t sleep will be locked up.”

  They walked in silence for a quarter of a mile along the deserted Embankment, their footsteps sounding hollow in the crisp night air.

  “And yet,” pursued Hogarth, “I think I see also symptoms of a purely metaphysical disturbance going on too; you are not alone, you know, in anything except the fact that it has chosen a single incident from your own life to illustrate what is common to the whole of your generation. I tell you everywhere the young men are sleeping with the night-light burning. You ask me about Böcklin and I say this is less interesting than that other feeling which you have been telling me about—what the old Abbot called ‘pins and needles of the soul’ and Böcklin himself called ‘Gleichgultigkeit’. It seems to me that this sharpening of focus, this aridity of feeling, this sense of inner frustration, must be leading to a kind of inner growth at the end of which lies mystical experience. Now you are laughing at me again.” He placed his pork-pie hat firmly on his head and walked a few steps in silence. “It seems to me that when you have exhausted action (which is always destructive) and people and the material things, there comes a great empty gap. That is what you have reached—the great hurdle which stands on this side of the real joyous life of the inside self. Then comes illumination—dear, oh dear. I know it sounds nonsense, but it’s the poverty of language that is at fault. What do you think the medical term for William Blake would be? A euphoric? A hysterical pycnik? It’s too absurd. The next few years will be a crisis not only for you but your generation too. You are approachin
g spiritual puberty—the world is. It is hard going I know—but there is always worse ahead, I have found. Yet there is a merciful law by which nothing heavier than you can bear is ever put upon you. Remember it! It is not the burden which causes you pain—the burden of excessive sensibility—but the degree of your refusal to accept responsibility for it. That sets up a stress and conflict. It sounds balls, doesn’t it? Well, so does St. John of the Cross, I suppose.”

  They stopped at an early coffee-stall and ordered the plate of sausage and mash that Hogarth so loved to eat before he caught his last tram back to Balham. They smiled at each other over a cup of steaming coffee and wrangled good-naturedly about who should pay.

  “Admit it,” said Hogarth. “I’m talking about something that you don’t understand at all. Gibberish, eh?”

  Baird shook his head. “It sounds like sense—with a fourth dimension added to it. It reminds me a good deal of the Californian prophets, Huxley, Maugham, et alia.”