The Dark Labyrinth

by Lawrence Durrell

  Francesca paid no attention whatsoever to him. She remained sitting on the chair, rocking slightly and whimpering like a spoiled child over a broken toy. Campion took up his beret and dusted it, tightened the thong of his sandal, and hoisted his rucksack on to the table. As he was getting his arms through the straps a sudden gust of compunction passed over him. It was cruel enough to leave her there alone like this; he had, after all, taken her from her family, made her pregnant, detached her from her ordinary life. Her family would never take her back. And she had been a fine mate for him—not like one of those English girls whose reactions to sex were, medically speaking, ear, nose and throat only. Francesca was a nymph compared to so many other women he had loved. He really ought to consider her. But already an obstinate part of his mind had begun insisting that the Europa would dock in half an hour, and his agent friend had warned him not to be late. He stood at last, pack on back, bundles in hand, and looked at the girl, who had not moved from the chair though her tears seemed to have abated. She sat with her back to him, hands in her lap, her shoulders round with dejection. What should he say? Campion cleared his throat and then decided that there was nothing very illuminating to be said. He had promised to come back. It was wonderful how women could tell at a glance when one was lying or not. In his pocket there was some loose money—about a thousand francs: quite a lot, in fact. He put it on the table saying: “There, I have left some money to carry on with till I get back. I shall telegraph you from London, Francesca.” The girl said nothing. She did not move. She seemed to be in a trance. He moved the door with his hand in order that its creaking should wake her, but it did not. “Good-bye then,” he said, with such accents of relief that he was ashamed of the sound of his own voice. “Good-bye.” He was down the long staircase in a flash and to the corner of the street. Going down the cobbled side-streets in the direction of the port he began to whistle, filled with an exaggerated sense of freedom and independence. His eyes drank in the streets, their colour and shape, as if they were the eyes of someone newly born. Under his breath he sang:

  Aux bidets noirs

  Gros comme des poires

  Du Languedoc, du Languedoc

  Les couillons d’un cocu cocu cocu

  Tirra lirra lirra bim bim bim …

  The Medium

  “Mr. Fearmax?”

  Fearmax detached himself from those absorbing preoccupations which kept him for the greater part of the day lying down in his bunk, and turned slowly to find that Campion had entered the cabin. “Yes,” he said.

  “I learned your name from Baird. I wonder if you can be the same Fearmax who used to give séances in the Euston Road before the war?”

  Fearmax fixed a confused eye upon his visitor. Campion went on, with the utmost politeness. “Not that I ever came to any of them, but I saw them advertised in the weeklies; and some time afterwards I read a series of articles in a paper called The Occult which seemed to me to be quite extraordinary.”

  Fearmax made a gesture of the hand and Campion obediently sat down. “Are you the same?” he said.

  Fearmax made an attempt to sit up, but his lassitude was too great. He turned, therefore, on his side and rested his head upon one elbow. His voice was hoarse. “I am the Olaf Fearmax,” he said slowly. “No doubt you’ve read about my exposure as a common fraud. I wrote those articles and I gave séances in the Euston Road.”

  Campion said crisply, “My name is Campion. I am a painter. I carried those articles about with me for years. The idea of reality you put forward in them was something for which I owe you a great debt.”

  Fearmax frowned and then smiled; a polar smile of indifference and apathy. “I’m glad,” he said. Campion lit a cigarette. “At the time I read them”, he said, “I was coming out of what you call the First Astral State and entering the second. I felt that I knew so clearly what you were talking about, that I wanted to meet you. I wrote you a letter.”

  Fearmax knitted his brows once more. “One gets so many letters,” he said, “I’m sorry if I didn’t answer it.”

  Campion brushed the idea aside summarily. His face had become animated and his eyes sparkled: “The theory of the life-death polarity is something which I’ve actually proved for myself—in my own life. You remember? That when the death-principle asserts itself in our lives reality itself gets turned inside out, so that instead of being detached from it—watching it happen as an extraneous thing—one begins to manufacture it, like a silkworm manufactures its own cocoon?”

  Fearmax sat up and yawned. “I was much younger then,” he said. “I thought I was being original. I had not read the Chinese then, or even the medieval people of the Caballa. Did you say you were a painter?”

  “Yes,” said Campion. “I am putting everything I’ve got into painting—and yet it is the least part of me.” He put his hands upon his knees carefully, cautiously, almost as if to balance himself as he talked of these vertiginous things. “I’ve followed out the cycle you mentioned,” he said, “but I’m beginning to wonder whether your theory covered the whole of experience—or only a part. When one begins, you say, reality is everything that is outside; when the principle of death germinates, first as a conscious idea, then as a fugitive subconscious premonition, finally as something beyond these: when that happens the fundamental nature of reality is changed. The individual gets fixed in his destiny and irresistibly begins to manufacture his own personal myth, his reality. Around himself there gradually accumulates a kind of mythological ectoplasm—it informs his acts and his words. The cocoon forms in which his—for want of a better word—immortal self is enshrined. Meanwhile his stance vis-à-vis life and society becomes as irrevocably fixed as an atrophied bone. What he does he is forced to do by the very nature of his mythopaeic role; like Luther saying, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’” As he said the words Campion threw his arms wide and an expression of pain seemed to settle on his features. Fearmax felt suddenly ten years younger. His eyes cleared and a smile settled upon that harsh mouth, in those eyes in their charred orbits. “How well,” he said, “how very well you put it.”

  Campion went on like a river in spate almost unconscious that he had an audience. “Then it is that you begin to loosen the ties of duty and obligation. If you have been a husband or a lover or a banker you renounce the role in order to withdraw more fully on to the stage of your own personal myth. You condense and refine. And when people you knew come up and take your hand, recalling incidents of ten years back, you wonder if they realize that they are talking to a corpse.”

  He licked his lips and stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. “Or else”, says Fearmax, “you accept dutifully, joyfully, the demands made upon you by obligation, secure that your world is your own even if it is bounded by a nutshell, circumscribed by monogamy or the calendar. Joyfully, Mr. Campion, joyfully. But what has all this to do with painting, may I ask?”

  “Exactly,” said Campion. “It has nothing to do with it—and everything. Painting by the power of the hand and eye is one thing. Painting with the lust of the soul is quite another. I am spinning a myth about myself in a series of canvases. It is so lucid and clear that it scares me. I am not troubled now by what I might be unable to say. I am troubled by what I shall, unknown to myself, reveal. And yet the process is irresistible. I am forced to separate from people and conditions because, like a leper, I am afraid of infecting them with my own contrived disease.”

  He got up and walked up and down, striking his knee with a rolled-up newspaper from time to time. Fearmax watched him curiously. It reminded him of his own years of anguish and questioning in Exeter before he found what he thought would become his true métier. There was something very appealing about Campion’s fierce and uncompromising forthrightness.

  “Sit down,” he said slowly. “And if it doesn’t bore you I will tell you about my own life. You can ‘compare the experience, not the events, with your own. Perhaps we shall each see more clearly.”

  Fearmax was a remarkable type
of the provincial derailed by wide reading. An orphan, he had spent all the long years of a friendless youth working as a bookseller’s assistant in Exeter. His childhood, which was spent behind the rusting iron gates and faded shrubbery of a provincial orphanage, had been remarkable for nothing except a tendency to fits which were diagnosed as epileptic. He was a sickly child, and at the age of thirteen his wards were happy to be rid of him; the special food and treatment recommended for him by a humane district doctor was something that did not come into the terms of reference under which the institution worked. He suffered, indeed, not from any marked cruelty on the part of the guardians as from the neglect inseparable from the routine of all institutions. He never smiled during his childhood; the fact was borne upon him one day when he caught sight of his face in the long mirror of a Hastings hotel, after one of his early triumphs as a medium. He saw his face—parched and pale from those years of concentrated reading—twisted into a wolfish grin. It was a smile—a simulacrum of happiness—that he saw trying to break through the armature of lean skin and bone which was his face.

  At thirteen the bookseller’s shop seemed an exciting place. The only book he had seen was the institution Bible, which was kept chained to a wooden eagle in the chapel, and out of which the Rev. Dohgerty read the children pejorative and declamatory extracts on Sunday. His voice raged like a toothache across the visions of John or the fearful lists of prohibitions shored up in Leviticus. They did not understand, but they trembled.

  The bookshop was different. There were books full of drawings and engravings, books on history and science, on topography; there were children’s books and novels in bright wrappers. The bookseller was a kindly fattish man who disguised a sense of failure and depression, in a false Pickwickian benevolence and loquacity. He was kind to the boy, found him lodgings, trained him in the trade, and occasionally saw to it that he had somewhere to go on holidays and at Christmas. Fearmax was in heaven. Though he was so poor that his wages only just covered his board and lodging, the freedom of this new life stimulated him. He had no friends, but he had the streets of the town to explore, and as many books as he wished to read at his elbow. For five years he was contented with life; but by the time he had turned eighteen the restlessness of a delayed adolescence began to take possession of him. Was he to spend the whole of his life as a bookseller’s assistant in a provincial town? And yet he had no hopes, no plans, no shadow of a programme for a new life to replace this one which offered, it is true, few material difficulties. To a great degree it was the reading that had been responsible for this; his mind had begun to lead him down strange by-paths of literature, strange back-alleys of thought and speculation; tiring quickly of novels and romances, he had begun to feed upon the out-of-the-way, the speculative, the occult. Indeed, by the time he was twenty-one his reading was immense though sporadic. He had created around himself a jungle of ill-cultivated plants—philosophies, with their weird blooms and stunted systems, like Christian Science or Theosophy. It was a disinterested hunger for some illuminating text which would explain not only the mystery of the world around him, but also his existence in it. What was he doing on earth? Since he had no friends to ask these questions of, there remained only the dusty attics of the shop. Surely there among the thousand books there might be some product of illumination and reason mixed which would put him into focus with himself. It was at this time that he began to be conscious that he was lonely. All these years he had not recognized the numb anaesthetic feeling that filled so much of his life with an unexpressed—indeed an inarticulate—anguish. He walked about most of the night through the rainy streets of the town, wrapped in his old policeman’s cape and hood, absently trying empty cigarette-machines in shop-doors, or studying his own features reflected in the windows of shops. So great was the singleness of mind that moved him, that he never thought of wanting either money or a woman. His book-filled dusty lodging differed from his book-filled dusty office only in that it contained a hip-bath, a chamber-pot and an iron bedstead. Rising at five, he would sluice his lean body with the icy water from the jug, and be already taking down the shutters of the shop by seven o’clock, winter and summer. In his work he was punctual, diligent and uncommunicative. But every spare moment of his time was spent at the little desk under the grimy window, reading. He travelled into Tibet with Huc and Gabet; he tried to solve the puzzle of the Inca stone alphabet with Fédor; Froebenius excited him by his records of customs and parables; the raw images of Nostradamus assuaged and tantalized him with their beauties and half-concealed promises; the incunabula, the prophetic books, the books of ritual—everything promised, and everything disappointed. He sat absolutely motionless on his three-legged stool, his rounded shoulders letting his head rest upon the thin shank of an arm in its frayed cuffs, and read until he was dizzy. “Why”, said the bookseller one day, “are you reading so much? You don’t seem to enjoy it. It’s like you are studying for an exam. Books are for pleasure, you know.” The remark struck him. A pleasure! Did he get any pleasure, in the strict meaning of the term, from them? Did he, if it came to that, understand exactly what the word meant? What was pleasure? He read like a hungry animal. By his thirtieth year he seemed to have become a charnel house of blasted hopes and other men’s writings. What was he searching for? Neither pleasure nor instruction or even illumination seemed to be at the back of this hunger—but something that should combine, should synthesize all three; neither truth nor beauty, but a Something which would offer him a foothold. Something which would bridge the gap between the universe of light and matter, and the small circumscribed universe of the world he lived in—two book-filled rooms linked by streets ghostly with rain and mist.

  It was at this time that the old Methodist preacher took to calling at the shop for books. Fearmax would hear the stairs creak under his heavy frame, and the rap of his wooden leg on the linoleum of the top landing. He would put his book away and wait for the door to open and admit the portly, silver-haired figure. Snowden was a strange choleric old man, but an excellent buyer. He would stand leaning on his stick and look across at Fearmax in silence for a moment, while he took out his silver snuff-box and grabbed up a pinch in his knotted rheumatism-twisted finger and thumb. “I want everything on the following subjects,” he would announce, consulting a list taken from his waistcoat-pocket. He seemed to have plenty of money, and was able to buy himself complete sets of the books he wanted, without any hesitation. He too, seemed filled with a wayward discontent that impressed Fearmax as bearing a likeness to his own. “Young man,” he said once, “you no doubt think me mad. I am not buying books for a library. I read them. Yes, even the ‘Golden Bough’ and suchlike dullness. Reading is like a worm in the marrow.” He came a few steps nearer, peering at the younger man through his light blue, innocent old eyes. “A worm in the marrow,” he repeated in a whisper. Fearmax put a chair for him, and taking his list from his hand, ran up a ladder and started to hunt. As usual there were out-of-the-way things. Budge’s “Egyptian Book of the Dead”, Evans-Wentz, Férier’s pamphlet on the Hero Cult, Pamfrey on Prayer, Donne’s Sermons. The old man in the chair suddenly began to talk. “You will be thinking”, he said, “that it’s my faith I’ve lost, hunting in all these books. Yes, and you won’t be wrong. After fifty years in the Ministry too, and me surely near the edge of the grave.” Fearmax turned round on his ladder and gazed at him with his mouth open. Snowden seemed half-asleep. His hair twinkled in silver points as the faint rays of spring sunlight touched it. He smiled.

  “Here we are, in our old age, suddenly woken up with the feeling that there is something wrong. Suddenly it seems as if a whole tract of knowledge had been withheld from me; knowledge of the ordinary secular affairs of men. After all, what am I? What have I been preaching all these years? I am a doctor of souls, am I not? And therefore a specialist in sin? And do I know what sin is? Have I explored it? Have I entered into the real world at any point and transformed it, so that what I have is my own by right of experience, and no
t an algebraic incantation taught me when I was a child? These are the questions you’ll come to one day—I hope before you reach my age.” He stood up and tapped his way to the foot of the ladder. “Have you ever seen a Minister of God who discovered one day that prayer is useless?” he asked in a surprisingly gentle and naive voice. “Look upon him. Useless. Useless.” Fearmax came gently down his ladder with the books under his arm. He was too astonished to speak.

  Snowden took them from him and examined the titles slowly and with care. Then he tapped his way downstairs again to pay for them, without saying good-bye. Some weeks later his death was announced in the paper. The obituary notice told Fearmax only that his wife had died the year before, and that he had been living in retirement in a country cottage outside the town.

  It was at this period too that his own life took a turn for the better. During a sleepless summer night, when he was thirty-eight, his hand took up a pencil and began to write, he knew not what, in the margin of a book. In the morning he suddenly felt as he awoke that he had been granted, after all these years of searching, an outlet, a gift, a skill of his own.

  The phenomenon of automatic writing he had read about; and had not believed in it, except as a form of wilful autointoxication. Yet he saw, with numb apprehension one night, that his hand, without dictation, was writing upon the flyleaf and margins of Isaac’s Bookseller a series of disconnected words and phrases. He had been particularly tired that day, having made a bus journey to the country to buy up a collection of books belonging to a deceased lawyer. The next day and the next there was no sign on the part of his hand to perform anything beyond its normally dictated functions. But he put a writing-pad and pencil beside his bed, and on the third day found the phenomenon repeated. He began to write fluently and copiously in the notebook; and what he wrote made sense. It was a long, rather disjointed message from a woman to her husband. He puzzled over it all that day. It was not written in his own handwriting, yet in a hand that was quite consistent and well-formed.