The Dark Labyrinth

by Lawrence Durrell

  Indeed a strangely disquieting sense of familiarity had begun to grow in Elsie Truman’s mind. It was as if the conversation had outlined hitherto undescribed blocks of experience lying within her. It was as if a part of herself had been an untenanted house, with all its huge furniture covered in dust-cloths of accepted prejudice, vague and shapeless. “I don’t know,” she said, afraid of making a fool of herself. “I feel uncomfortable and foolish.”

  “It is not important”, said the other, “to anyone but yourself. I thought I would try to explain why it is that I never sleep. And also why it is that I shan’t die until I really want to—until I’ve really explored this world to the full. Until I’m used up and, so to speak, emptied out of this world into the next.”

  Elsie Truman stared fixedly at a chip in the masonry and said: “I would like to know more about it. I feel I know what you mean, but I can’t express myself. How do you … did you … find it? I mean the feeling?”

  For a long time the woman said nothing, she arched her brows as if she were trying to locate within herself the sources of the spring. At last she said: “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. “There’s no positive way. It’s rather a negative business—becoming still enough inside to be receptive to it. You can’t seek for it, but if you prepare for it it will come and settle on you like an Emperor moth. In fact, not ‘seek and ye shall find’ as the Bible says, but ‘prepare and ye shall be found’. Oh, I can’t hope to make it any clearer.”

  “There was a man on the ship,” said Elsie Truman slowly. “A painter; he is lost too, by the way, in the labyrinth. He painted my portrait, and said a lot of things which sounded as if they were the same sort of feeling. I thought I was a bit in love with him. I went to his cabin one night and we slept together: he was furious afterwards because he said it was a betrayal of this thing. I thought it was silly, myself, but he maintained that it was not love I was looking for but that other thing he had got. And that by letting him make love to me, he was simply producing it in an inferior way. There was some truth in it for I soon found out that I did not love him. But he had a queer kind of life in him, and I was interested in that: he said I had duped myself by pretending it was love, and he had duped me by letting me think it was. Altogether it was very confusing and I felt miserable.”

  The woman said nothing. Elsie Truman suddenly felt as if she had committed a solecism. “I simply felt”, she said lamely, “that he was talking about the same sort of thing as you are.”

  “Yes,” said the stranger. “Obviously.”

  “He was furious with himself and me.”

  “It was silly of him on one plane.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “He was right about it on another.”

  Elsie Truman stood up and dusted herself down. “Well, which plane is one to be on?” she said peevishly. “One is in life after all, which is full of people and things and situations. There isn’t room for everything, you know.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  She did not turn her face away from the snows. “Perhaps not,” she repeated softly. Yet looking at that smooth childish face with its wrinkles, and the deep repose of the expression, Mrs. Truman felt a sense of inadequacy and panic: all the limitations of urban man in the shape of nails, clothes, teeth, seemed to press upon her as she stood in the shadow of the porch to say good night. As she climbed into bed a strange sense of anger and joy took possession of her. “It would take a helicopter exactly an hour to get us out of here,” she repeated to herself triumphantly, though from where she expected the helicopter to come, she did not specify. She lay awake for a long time, however, thinking of the silent figure outside the porch, in the light of the moon, awake.

  The adventure did not in any sense become real to them until they had been several weeks on the plateau. It was as if the shock had been delayed. They still carried in them, so to speak, the taste of their former lives: the only thing which constituted a term of reference to this elegaic existence among the ferns and the fruit trees on the little plateau that Godfrey had called Eden, and which Truman himself had called “The Roof of the Bloody World”. It was some time before Elsie Truman felt, with a sense of panic mixed with pleasure, that there was indeed no further continuity between all she had left and all she had inherited. How remote the past seemed: memories of a smoky house and garden in England, memories of holidays at Clacton, rides by bus or helicopter in the damp highways of the capital. Even the heavy battledress with its familiar shaggy cut of shoulder and bust (as a transport driver in the late war, she had been used enough to uniform) seemed now to be a new costume, a new treatment of her personality in terms of … what precisely? She did not know. Something vaguely connected with growth, development. Helping to lift out the crude wooden frames of the beehives, or to select salads from grass by the river, or to select edible mushrooms from the plot below the pine-wood, she would stop for a moment and try to bring the realization more clearly into focus, wiping her brown face upon her arm where the fine golden hair testified to the heat of the summer which was upon them. It was as if her nature, the inner elements of her nature, were composing themselves kaleidoscopically into some new pattern.

  Meanwhile, around the three of them the aerial landscape drew in neat formal shapes: supple strokes of cypress and pine, greeny grey parasols of olive. In the smaller life of the house things were also taking shape according to a plan. Three people eat more than one. Truman’s enjoyment at expending his energy and skill upon the crude little olive-press was something new to him. It was as if the work came from new centres of feeling. Happiness had been something positive before. It had become something negative now, but lucid, far more satisfactory. It made him more comprehensible to himself. Yet his energy was repaid only in olive oil from the frugal crop of last year.

  Ruth Adams was obviously glad to have them with her, to temper her solitude. “I am so glad”, she said, “that when I die you will inherit it all. I like to think of the house being kept up, and things still going on. Don’t look like that. I have a feeling you won’t go away. You will pass through the restlessness and irritation you feel now. Evan and John were different. They were worldly in a weak way, they had nothing to learn: or perhaps I should say everything. They went off into the labyrinth to find the way back. They wanted me to go with them but it was too late by then. I often wonder whether they got through or not. It seems unlikely. And yet from time to time people and things get through from the other side. Once a donkey came loaded with geological equipment. Now you. But you are exactly right for this place.” They were sitting together before the fire after the midday meal. “Most people,” she said, warming to her favourite topic, and yet showing by the diffidence of her smile that she was at any moment ready to drop it in favour of anything more interesting to them. “Most people’s characters are like badly done-up paper parcels. And the outlines of the good personality, or the balanced one, are as simple and geometric as a problem from Euclid. I wonder why the world goes out of its way to drug itself—to retain the confusion? Of course, it’s easy to pronounce judgment when one is out of the world as we are: but surely things like pleasure and work should be dithyrambic? Not narcotics designed to retain the turbid confused state of one’s inner man. The things you were telling me, Mr. Truman, about the growth of the state as a concept, and the beginning of social conscience—all this is only a detour, a long and vicious detour through the material amenities towards a happiness that will continue to elude men just so long as they continue to elude themselves and each other. Look at those faces.” She pointed to where the firelight danced upon the charcoal portraits of her vanished companions. “Godfrey’s face is the only one which retains any traces of a noble human animal. His despair and suffering were of a fine order. There was literally nothing else for him to do save to fall to his death—indeed in one sense his false step was deliberate, as deliberate as his olive-press and his bath. He. belonged neither to the world outside, where he thought he prefe
rred to be, nor even to this little heaven. There have been great spirits of discontent like him before. But as for the others, John, my husband, and Evan.” She waved her small hand idly towards them. “Look at their features. They had to forfeit their place and start again at a lower level of growth. Like snakes and ladders. Accident brought them here, and all their energies went in trying to get back. Of course, in a sense they did belong outside. I feel released by their departure. I suppose there is a special world for them and people like them—it must resemble one of those mock-Tudor road-houses you used to see on the Great West Road. But in a sense Godfrey is always with me. He taught me what to recognize in myself: I learned from him that death doesn’t exist except in the imagination. Thus I was hardly sad when his discontent carried him through to the other side—like stepping into a mirror. I was sorry on another plane altogether. I missed his tea-time conversation: his flag still flutters from the rock—but I showed you. Ah, but I fear you think I’m talking nonsense again.”

  Very often it sounded like absolute nonsense; yet in the course of time the very boundaries of language themselves seemed to fall away, so that the meaning of what she said seemed to render up overtones and distinctions more clear to either than had seemed possible. It was as if they were being initiated into an entirely new vocabulary.

  One day while they were standing, paddling in the little basin where the icy water from the trout-stream curled about their ankles and whispered in the cresses they picked, Elsie Truman asked curiously: “Ruth, is there nothing you miss from your old life?”

  “Everything. If I were taken back tomorrow by force—if Evan came for me, I would go without a murmur. But that’s because I really know how to live anywhere now. I think I’m a person now, not a fog. Perhaps my influence would be helpful, beneficent. But when you say ‘miss’ you really mean ‘long for’. I don’t long for anything—not even for lunch, which is going to be late unless we hurry …”

  “It’s odd”, she said on another occasion, “that we live between the two accidents which might alter our lives completely. If we broke the burning-glass one day, for example, where should we be? If a helicopter such as you describe, Mr. Truman, were to come and settle on the meadow: we should have to choose between going and staying. Either accident is possible. Death or Life? Life or Death?”

  “Think of them all,” said Truman. “Cities, manganese mines, governments, clubs. India, China, Russia—makes you wonder what it all means. Cotton, iron, steel … where does it all lead?”

  “All parts of an unco-ordinated pattern. Man as a person looking for what I think I’ve found. The search throws up bright bits of gold and information which catch his attention and prevent him from looking deeper into himself. Yes, a staggering spectacle of a genus, engaged in a wasteful way of living. And yet every activity leading back like an arrow on the map to central metaphysical problems of the self. The wars of factories, of diplomats, of concepts—all hopelessly entangled in the opposites that created them.”

  “Could you teach them any different?” Truman spoke piously, enviously, as if there were nothing he himself might wish to do more than to alter humanity.

  “I would not try: any more than I try to alter you.”

  “What would you do then?”

  “Nothing. Pay my rent like everyone else.”

  Truman grunted with disappointment. He had hoped for something more simple: a formula, a maxim. “I bet”, he said, “you’d find a little hill covered with gorse and olive-trees and heather. And build yourself a house and some beehives. And keep a goat.”

  “Yes,” said his wife. “And wait for us to come along, with new ways of making hot bath water and milking the goat. I bet you would fetch up here just the same. It suits you.”

  “It suits you too, but you haven’t fully realized it yet.”

  “Well,” said Truman, “I never was one for grumbling. And the life is remarkably healthy in spite of the cooking.”

  He made his way slowly from the house whistling softly and crossed the meadow. “I have no more idea of what everything is all about,” he said to himself gravely in an undertone. “I’m fogged. That’s what it is. Completely fogged.” Yet he felt remarkably clear-headed in that blue air. “Fogged,” he insisted from time to time as he milked the goat and wandered off for a walk. “Bloody well fogged.”

  He stopped upon the bluff and stared across the vast bluish plains towards the distant hills tremulous in mist. “Someone must come out one of these days,” he thought, “to prune those orchards. I wonder whether we could signal.” He put the thought carefully aside as if it were something fragile and breakable. In the kitchen Elsie had already lit the wood fires. She was about to start cooking some wood-pigeons for lunch. “Hunger,” said Truman trenchantly, “that’s all I feel. Hunger. You keep your philosophy, my girl, for after meals.”

  His wife was smelling her hands carefully, inhaling the faintly musty odour of the dead birds. “You go away,” she said. “It won’t be ready for hours yet.”

  He stood irresolutely and watched her moving about. “Are you happy?” he said at last with peculiar diffidence, standing on one leg and folding his arms across his chest. She looked at him smiling.

  “I never stop to consider,” she said. “I mean, really contented,” he continued.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Are you?” “I’m fogged,” he said, exploring his teeth with his tongue. “I’m absolutely fogged. I don’t know what I feel about anything any more. I feel as light as a feather. I feel absolutely fogged.” It gave him a peculiar sense of relief to confess himself; and at the same time he was irritated not to be able to define his feelings more clearly.

  He left her and went for a walk by the stream, with his hands thrust deeply into the. pockets of his battledress. He had intended to carry this feeling of confusion with him and to try and clear it up, but his hand closed about his beloved knife, and soon he was whittling at a branch of walnut, whistling through his teeth as he worked. He presumed that this must be happiness. He raised his eyes and looked across the valley. Below them he saw birds making their short elliptical flights, busy upon errands whose purpose was like his own, but more mysterious, more beautiful. An almost damnable sense of the mysterious nature of the world took possession of him. He would have smoked if he had had any cigarettes left. Instead he went, still whistling, and mended the rough parapet of the little trout pool into which the stream overflowed, working slowly like a beaver. Looking down into the wrinkling water he saw the sunlight freckling the smooth pebbles of the stream’s bottom; it reminded him of the freckles upon his wife’s nose. She had become swarthy and more beautiful, with brown face and arms always bare to the sunlight. He had changed also: was bearded now. He regarded his image in the flowing waters with curiosity and humorous indulgence. His eyes stared back at him shining with strange watery lights. “It’s rum”, he told himself, “for an ordinary bloke like you. Very rum.”

  The season moved towards its centre—towards autumn and the pressing of the little grape yield: towards winter with its rude terrors of wind from Tartary. Their function became more absolutely defined by the work demanded by the season. Yet there was no sense of calendar time left in either of them. They gathered the barley and the wild corn; they gathered the burst vessels of fig from the trees, full of the cloying honeyed richness of summer. Day after day the great fireplace had to be stacked with logs against the cold. There was work to be done. Ruth Adams, gentler, less communicative now, shared these labours with them, working in a quiet enjoyment of the time which as yet neither knew properly how to share.

  The small orchard gave them fruit. The old woman taught them how to make wine from flowers. From the little marshy hollow below the cliffs—the last point at which the stream bent suddenly in upon itself and rushed through a sill of rock—they gathered the bulbs of swamp orchis for their tea; or nearer the house camomile, sage, vervain. It seemed as if very little were lacking—though both wine and bread w
ere of a crude quality as yet.

  Autumn came and with it the first rain—millions of silver needles bounding from the rocks and concavities around them. They worked on in a peasant frenzy of determination not to let the rain steal their barley, or to let the old woman find them inferior to herself in the tasks of existence. They were learning. Elsie Truman’s hands had become hard and calloused from the work, but her face and her carriage had been improved. She was serener, yet more alive. “You’re like a gipsy,” her husband told her, as she lay in bed beside him. Her body had filled out, become firm and round. “I almost feel as if I were going to have a child,” she told him. “Doesn’t seem likely somehow or possible at my age, does it?” She did not add any reflections upon her private conviction that the child, when it came, would be Campion’s. That could wait for futurity—the futurity of comprehension and tranquillity when, by the terms of self-knowledge, such small offences against defined loyalties could be added up and probably forgiven. The child, too, in a sense, still belonged to the old world of troubled relationship; had as yet no place in this quiet house.

  Tenderly he put his arms about her shoulders and laid his bearded face beside hers on the pillow. Their love too had suffered a metamorphosis, for he regarded her now with something like admiration and surprise. She had changed; was less approachable, more withdrawn into herself—and by consequence infinitely more desirable than the shadowy companion whose journey through the labyrinth he had made easier by his jokes and his courage. “A savage,” he said sleepily, thinking of the easy naturalness of her demeanour, her warmth: as if passion itself were the last point of communication between them. As if in everything else she had become possessed by herself, gradually excluding him—her dependency on him—for something richer, deeper, more intimate.