“But how?” Peter said. “That is your question.”
“I don’t know,” Marius said.
“You do,” Peter said.
“I don’t.” He was still looking at Annabelle.
“The old love that you have been talking about has never been love at all,” Annabelle said. “And the old love that I am talking about did not make the statement ‘Love thy neighbour’ on its own.”
“No?”
“No,” Annabelle said. “But go on with what you were saying.”
“Go on,” Peter said.
“I was going to say this,” Marius said. He spoke slowly, as if his mind were only half on his words, and half on a problem that lay somewhere beyond them. “I do not know what love either has been or will be, but I know what it is not. It is not the statement of desire. It is not the behaviour of the imposition of desire. It has nothing to do with the self at all. The means haven’t. It is the means that I am talking about. For the means of loving the self must be dissolved.”
“Into what?” Peter said.
“Look,” Marius said. “This.” He spoke more quickly now, as if the problem beyond him, which lay somewhere in the distance between him and Annabelle, had now come into sight. “Into what you have created. This is similar to the creation of an artist. There is no communion between the artist himself and his audience. The artist has to create something beyond himself in order that there may be communion. When a great dancer dances he is not himself, he is his part, he becomes his part in order that he may project himself upon his audience. He loses himself, and he creates something new;—and this created part is the only meeting-ground between audience and dancer. Once this meeting-ground has been created, then, and only then, will there be communion. And it is the same with love. A lover must lose himself in order that his love may be communicable. He must create something out of the loss of himself in order that his love may be acceptable. What his technique is—how it may be defined—I do not know. It may be different in every instance. But I know this:—that every successful creation is a reflection of eternity: the technique will deal in symbols which are reflections of reality. Reality is what one desires—it is not what is. To create it there has to be movement which is in awe of eternity. One has first to be aware of the tragedies of eternity, and then to reflect them. So that two things are necessary:—to have the eyes of a man who sees these tragedies and the technique of a craftsman who can create their symbols in terms which will reach to others. Then what is becomes what one desires. Technique is the throwing of reality across the ground that separates loneliness. Perhaps, in memory, in the loss of self which is execution, one could throw communion across these spaces like one throws a ball.”
Annabelle said: “The meeting ground has already been created. What is needed is the technique of finding it, not the technique of creating it oneself.”
“Of finding it then. It doesn’t matter. The act of creation has to be created again in each individual before he can find it. It doesn’t matter. Lose yourself and draw your symbols from the subconscious or the super- conscious or call it God, if you like, it’s all the same—any old tragedy will do. I know that you must have your God. I know what you mean by your first commandment. Have it then. But I will tell you this, that the technique is something different to that of the churches. The churches have never answered the question of technique. But art has tried to, and dancing has tried to, and we must go back to the savages for that. But savages have something of the technique without the desire to use it: or rather, they use it for fear. And we have the desire without the technique. It is this that one should study, perhaps—this subtlety of movement and attitude, this darkness of laughter, and use it for love. It is there, somewhere, hidden; and that is what will be new.”
There was a silence, and then Annabelle said: “Yes, but God is more than a word, and the first commandment is at least half of the technique, and although you may say what you like about churches there is another meaning of that word which might explain even more about the technique if it ever exists as more than a meaning.”
“Which it doesn’t,” Marius said.
“I don’t know. But it exists as a symbol, and that is my symbol. Whether it exists as more I don’t know because I have never tried it.”
“Tried what?” Marius said.
“Tried to lose myself in the meeting-ground which is not just a word but which is the first commandment.”
“Oh hell,” Peter said. He sat up suddenly. “And I’ll tell you this, that it is easier to get lessons in dancing that it is to love God. Three guineas in Oxford Street and you can jump like a bloody savage. But three prayers to God and all you get is a crick in the back. And a kick too, most likely. I know because I’ve tried it.”
“You haven’t,” Annabelle said.
“I have. And I tell you that I can jump but I can’t love God, and I don’t always hit my head on the ceiling, either.”
“It was you who asked the question,” Annabelle said. “How to help others and how not to be alone.”
“And it is you who have not answered it. You say you must lose yourself, Marius says through dancing and you say through God, and I say that if I have to choose between being a savage who cuts up his children and an ascetic who cuts up himself, then I would rather stick to my donkey and try to train it into a horse. I stick to that symbol, and to hell with the rest.”
“As a matter of fact,” Annabelle said, “you do not stick to your donkey, and you do care about other people, and you could not bear it if you were on your own.”
“To hell with the rest,” Peter said.
“You said at the beginning that you are not living if you stick to your donkey. You know that that is true and that you yourself would always live for other people and in fact do more for other people than you will ever admit or imagine.”
“To hell with everything,” Peter shouted. “And to hell with me. If you dare to flatter me I shall cry.”
“I suppose we shall behave now as we should have behaved anyway,” Marius said, “whatever are the words that we have used.”
“Then give me the brandy,” Peter said, “and to hell with words.”
“It is you this evening who have danced and who have loved,” Annabelle said.
“I told you I should cry,” Peter said. “And now will you play the piano, please, very sadly, so that my tears may be mistaken, as they will always be mistaken, I hope, for the tears of either brandies or pianos. And let us behave, for a little, as you say, as we should anyway behave, but won’t, because of our symbols and our nonsense and the things that we can never understand and can never even hope to. You can play a psalm and Marius can croon like a negro and I will make a noise like a lonesome and tragic ass. Then, indeed, we will have created a reflection of eternity. And I still think that I know more about life than the whole bloody lot of you put together.”
Annabelle played the piano.
7
In the days that followed I was with them, often, meeting for coffee in the mornings as a substitute for breakfast, and buns in the afternoon as a substitute for lunch. I do not think we ever ate properly except in the evenings, when Annabelle would cook us large quantities of buttered eggs in the flat, or we would go to some foreign restaurant which Peter had heard was excellent, and there eat the chopped cabbage, the skewered gristle, the queer pancakes, in which such foreign restaurants excel. Meals are the standard by which the duration of the day is timed, so that with the neglect of eating the days themselves became haphazard, passing quickly, almost unnoticeably, and becoming muddled with the nights. Emerging from a door, or drawing the curtains of a window, it was often a shock to find that the dawn, or the dusk, had crept up on us without warning, and that the scene we had expected had been transformed into either the candle-light of evening or the pale arena-like glare of early morning. Marius usually was away during the day, engaged upon some business about which I never quite discovered, but he would join us a
t night wherever we were, and he had a fortunate faculty for interpreting the garbled and often contradictory messages that we left behind us at the flat. Whether we were with him, or away from him, it was always the same. I think that in all our lives this spring was a queer interlude in which time became a vacuum, and we were all waiting for something to happen, whatever it would be.
Of our lives before this time we never talked, although we seemed to talk of everything else, and it was not until long after that I learnt some of the details of Peter’s and Annabelle’s childhood. I never learnt much about Marius’s. He was older than us, and always mysterious. I think he was about thirty when we knew him. I learnt something about him, later, from his wife. But from the other people who knew him before he met Peter and Annabelle I never discovered a thing. They told me a lot about themselves, about how they reacted to Marius, but they never answered questions about Marius himself. He had that effect on people. He made them think about themselves, but never gave anything away.
He had lived most of his life in the West Indies, in a big house by the sea. He had come over to England in the war, as Alice had said, with his wife, and his wife was ill, and she had gone to hospital. Then he had lived alone, busying himself with a number of things that interested him, and being taken up by people who dropped him as soon as he disappointed them, and who usually returned at intervals to dig him up again only to retire in increasing bafflement when he would not submit to their plans. He intrigued people and at the same time infuriated them, for although they sensed that he was an extraordinary person they could not tell where his power lay. I have heard people talk of him as if he could have been anything, or again as if he were a wastrel without any power at all. But he was the kind of person who all his life is treated as a celebrity, although I do not think he was anything of a celebrity until the end.
When he had met Annabelle and Peter he went to live with them. I do not suppose that they talked much about this, either; he just stayed one night in the spare room of the flat that belonged to their parents and went on staying there on and off for the next six months. Their parents were away—their father was at that time the governor of some colony in Africa—and they had left their home in London for the use of their children. Annabelle was eighteen and Peter twenty, and Peter had come home previously to do his service in the army. This he had done, and Annabelle had come with him to look after the flat, and to be introduced to London by a series of relations.
When Annabelle had first moved into the flat these relations had done their best to move in with her, or at least to persuade her to move in with them. They had said that it would be more proper. But she had held out against them, and in this she was supported by her parents, who showed their regard for their children by letting them do as they wished. So Annabelle kept the flat and cleaned it and did the cooking with the help of a woman who came in each day, and it was there that Peter had come during his week-ends and his leaves from the army, and it was there that Marius came during the holiday that Peter had before he was due to go to Oxford.
For a while the three of them lived there together, and Marius stayed ostensibly as a friend of Peter’s. But when Peter went away there was talk about Marius staying on in the flat alone with Annabelle, so for a time Marius had gone away out of deference to this talk; but Annabelle’s scorn toward such scruples was so prolonged and vehement that eventually he moved back again out of deference to her. The talk had continued, anyway, even when he had gone: for people argued that he would not have left if he had not had something to hide. As Annabelle said, to run one’s life according to the theories of others is a business too contradictory to be considered even out of kindness. So Marius stayed, and the necessary attempts at explanation were made, and the parents had not minded. And anyhow, Peter was not away for long.
Peter had gone to Oxford and had hated it with all the fury of which he was capable, and had walked out before the end of his first term. He said to me once: “Oxford is like a flea-circus: you can suspend a flea from wires and pretend that its struggles are acrobatics, but it can never get off the wires and it can never stop being a flea.” In all this talk of Oxford he used phrases like these, as if the only people he had met there were either parasites or puppets, and the pride that drove them only the parade of greed. But his talk was always exaggerated, and I do not know what was in his heart. In the army he had been happy, because he had expected nothing from it, and yet in spite of the drudgery he had found something, with surprise—the simplicity of simple people doing things that are supposed to be unpleasant. And at Oxford he had expected something, because he had been told to expect it, and he had found only the complications of complicated people doing things that are supposed to be pleasant. He had been taken up by the societies, by the clubs, by the serious young men with portfolios: he had sat in the junior common room and had been smothered by smoke and tea: he had felt the heaviness of the jokes and the lightness of the discussions: he had written his essays as judgments and been told that he was not in a position to judge: he had studied other people’s judgments and decided that there was no one in a position to judge. He had gone to some lectures and had not heard them, to others and had not understood them, others again and had wished that he had neither heard nor understood. At first he had tried to work, but in his mind all the time was the conviction that his work was irrelevant, that it was a fraud, that several thousand people were playing logical acrostics and were claiming that they were dealing with philosophical truth. This was what obsessed him—the knowledge that what he wanted was judgment and truth, and the fear that what he was getting was instruction in crossword puzzles. He wouldn’t have minded, perhaps, if this had been admitted. But it wasn’t. The instruction was solemn, circumlocutory, and ceaseless. The instructors were as grandiloquent as emperors or saints. He even heard, one evening, during a sermon by the Master, his college described as a temple in which men’s souls were kept pure by the bright virginity of scholarship. This was a schoolroom where they played lexington and lotto! A barrack-room housey-housey fitting numbers into squares! He walked out of the sermon, because he felt ill, and then he stopped trying to work.
He shared a room with a man of thirty, who was married, and who could not afford to stop working. This man made noises in his throat while he worked; and when he was not making noises in his throat he was knocking his pipe out on his boot or blowing through it like a whistle. So Peter went out. He would have had to have gone out anyway, he said, because the room was so cold, and because the only arm-chair had a loose spring in it that hummed like a harmonium. Also the ugliness was aggressive: the wallpaper brown, the carpet green, the upholstery muddy. So he went out to parties, and he gave parties himself, and he was quite taken up by the party-going people.
He gave gramophone parties that were stopped by the Dean, river-boat parties that were stopped by proctors, dance-hall parties that were stopped by the police. He climbed up over walls, along across roofs, down through windows. He fell through buttery skylights into bursars’ arms. At tea time he picked up girls with their evening dresses tucked up beneath their coats, at breakfast time he returned them re-tucked to their colleges after a celibate night in the streets. If he was locked out after midnight he could not get in before dawn, if he tried to sleep in the daytime he was disturbed by traffic and bells. Indeed, he said that it was the bells that finally drove him to leave. There was one that exploded just outside his window every quarter of an hour, and he claimed that it broke his tooth glass and did not even give accurate time.
And throughout all this period there was the gossip, and the intrigues, and the jealousy;—the strain of social pleasure revolving like bicycle wheels in the street. Bicycles whizzing up Broad Street, whizzing down St. Giles, with the gossip whizzing secretly on tyres of whispered words. Peter played, pedaled, and went faster than the rest. For a time he was rumoured to be engaged to three girls at once, and men spent sleepless nights explaining his success in terms of snobbery. He b
ought a car, and they said he was a millionaire; he sold it, and they said he was bankrupt. They followed him to Woodstock, they followed him down the Thames; they followed him voraciously, in a swarm, and then suddenly he stopped. The bells, for the last time, had broken his tooth glass.
So he left Oxford, and he came away hating things, for he felt that Oxford was a microcosm of the world. His memories of the army were no use to him, for he knew that what one finds in the army does not exist outside its ranks. He hated in general, in theory, the work, the play, societies and systems—but he never really hated individuals. I think that individuals were too precious to him; and there was too much love in him also beneath the fury, and it was this that made him so violent. There was more love in him than in most of the people I have known and it was always trying to come out, so that his indignation had to fight to squash it. His indignation won because the world in which he found himself invites more indignation than love on the surface, and he could not get beneath the surface because he felt so uncompromisingly about the evidence of his ears and eyes. He judged himself on his actions, and so he judged the world on its actions, and he judged fiercely, ruthlessly, with a desperate overworking of his conscience that could not tolerate mistakes. This, of course, was the biggest mistake of all; as he had been told at Oxford, one is not in a position to judge the world. Also, if he had paid more attention to his own shortcomings, as Annabelle had told him, instead of those of the world, he might have made fewer mistakes himself and thus eased the strain on his conscience. But with all his feelings turned outwards from himself, outwards towards evidence about which he felt so strongly that he had to judge it, he had to rage against it or else the strain upon his conscience would have broken him. He could not accept things. He was a sensitive person, and in his way an unselfish one. That is what gave him his talent for funniness, his talent for laughter and making other people love. But I think that the only people he ever loved himself were Annabelle and Marius.
A Garden of Trees Page 12
