I remember Peter telling this story. A girl asked him, “If your peacock flew into somebody else’s garden and laid an egg, whose egg would it be?” “Mine,” he said. “Ha ha, you silly, peacocks don’t lay eggs.” “But you said this one did,” he said. “But they can’t,” she said. “Then why did you say it did?” he said. “That is the point of the joke,” she said. “What joke?” he said.
Like peacocks then. A promenade of whores before their sultan. But it takes more than ten motionless men to make a sultan, and more than six raging women to make a whore. Nothing happened.
Peter did not understand. He never understood things that people did nor why they did them. He saw things emptily, in the desert, but he did not see the Sphinx. I believe that Marius did. Peter could not even find anything to ask him a riddle.
In the town, on Saturday evenings, there is an enormous advertisement, Let’s go to the pictures. There is nowhere else to go.
At the pictures it is very strange, before the lights go out hundreds of people sit in rows and whistle and stamp their feet upon the floor. This is a catching habit. The men keep their caps on. Toffees are passed around and girls collapse upon each others’ shoulders. Then there is darkness and everybody yells. Lovers sink downwards with closed eyes. They see nothing for the rest of the evening.
Impressions are reduced to a series of reactions. When a girl appears there is whistling again, when the funny man is spotted there is so much laughter that one never hears the jokes, when a love scene is enacted there is a dreadful upheaval like fox-hunting, and when the hero and heroine are married the audience at once gets up and leaves the cinema.
It is funny, this. In the music hall jargon of to-day the word marriage is a dirty word and the word wife is a dirty word and everyone laughs at these dirty jokes, but in the jargon of films marriage is just the end of everything and people get up and go. If ever they find out that it is not the end, then they have to come back and pretend that they have been to the lavatory.
They have a restless time anyway because they are always on the lookout for the ending—this is to show how experienced they are—and when they foresee it there is a terrible rush for the doors about three minutes before time and it is as if there was a fire in the house and everyone gets stuck in the doorway. By the time God Save the King is played they are struggling furiously and have made no headway and they are very angry at being caught by God Save the King so they pay no attention to it. It is a terrible decision for them to know what to do when they are caught by God Save the King.
It is funny also how a lot of young people cannot get through a doorway. Peter once made a study of this and he said it was because twice as many people went into a doorway as ever came out of it.
After the film there is the milk bar. After dinner there is the port.
In the houses of the rich something dreadful happens to the men when their women leave them. There is the drawing-up of chairs and the moving of glasses and then the disinterment of dirt from the death of adolescence. Moustaches, cigars, mauve dinner jackets and walnut, an elegance of candles around a warmth of silver, and the stories that creep like rats from frozen holes. What is said is unrepeatable. But if marriage is a dirty word, and wife is a dirty word, are then what are usually called dirty words clean? Words from the private school playbox, words from the dressing-room, words scratched on whitewash, words which on the tongues of boys are aged and in the mouths of men are rotten. Do they look into each other’s eyes when they tell their stories? The honourable men, the barristers, the generals, the princes of the stock exchange, they write their words on plastered walls with the ink of napoleon brandy.
In the milk bars of the poor, the fish shops of the homeless, you grow up quicker. There you become a cowboy at fifteen. Your cowgirl with her great cow eyes and moue of gum. You become a gangster at twenty. But you are happier, still, really, when the women have gone.
Rich schoolboys and poor cowboys, a padded dinner jacket with facings of silk or a slouch-capped studied flounce of ties, it is all the same, all over England, black knees crossed discreetly or grey knees spread diffusely, it is all the same. Draw the chair up softly over the carpet and pierce the cigar with the golden pin at your watch-chain, snatch a stool or perch on a table and pick the cigarette delicately from the lips between forefinger and thumb and spit fastidiously with the smoke coming down through the nostrils. Play the schoolboy with your lavatory words or play the tough guy with your cinematic teaching. In a thousand milk bars all over England young would-be gangsters giving each other the brush-off and taking each other for a ride, thousands of jerking young would-be cowboys pushing each other around among the teas and cakes and pineapple sundaes quick on the draw with their coca-cola pride. And in the dining room the dirt and despair of laughter. The men of England segregated from their women in a masculine ease of corruption.
In the country there are no women. Population only increases in the cities.
In the cities there are girls. A girl is not a classification of age, a girl can be anything from twelve to fifty, a girl is someone to whom men can go in the holidays. A sister or a mother in whose lap masculinity can be repented.
I left the country. In London, among the smoke, it seemed that always I was asleep and sometimes dreaming. The remains of consciousness upon which I had lived in the country—remains held together by a view of absurdity—in the fog of solitude now lost a dimension and it was as if I were flat in a world of static deepness. This illusion, observed at first dispassionately like some assumption of geometry—that having only length and breadth I could not have existence—later became so powerful that I felt it as a fact: and sitting on a bus or stepping off a pavement I did not believe, since I lacked the depth that was necessary for solidity, that people could see me. When they did I was surprised; and I sometimes feared that I must possess some other faculty of which I was not aware, a faculty of madness such as voicing my thoughts without hearing myself speaking, and that people were being polite in not objecting to my oddity. With appearances so unmanageable it was only in dreams that there was a refuge. Life went to sleep and I cradled it.
Perhaps men are often machines, but never so much as when they are dreaming. The study of man’s mechanism begins with the study of dreams, and then the question is put—Are they always sleeping? When I asked this of myself I could give myself no answer, but I should always like to believe that for a month I had been awake. A month with Annabelle which others would say was illusion, which I extolled in despair as the moment of reality. The despair, now, since I had opened my eyes for the moment, was in sensing the difference between this condition and that.
When old men say that something terrible is happening to the young people of to-day they are quite right, it is, young people are beginning to realize that they and the world are sleeping. And when this is realized the old dreams, the old attitudes, become ridiculous. Fifty years ago youth was presumed to be a time of ecstasy, and enormous words were used to describe the passion of the passing moment. Harlequin met Columbine and they danced among the fruit trees, by Mediterranean waters huge flowers were pledged like prayers. Lovers languished beneath windows, duels were fought at dawn, poets dripped with lyrics like the tears that they described. Now it is only the old that are passionate. Romance is a dead man’s sickness. And the effacement of the young, like the disappearance of flies in winter, is a mystery that is observed with a scarcely anxious wonder.
And the young, wherever they are, know that they are flies and cannot do much about it. From the ceiling, upside down, the view of ancient heads is not a pattern to inspire any confidence. Like a film that is projected backwards every scene jerks horribly into ridicule,—the great lover is a great joke, success waddles quickly to failure, ambition becomes absurd with the regress to nonentity. Even the artist, attempting to see things clearly, finds that he has to make an enigma of himself, to laugh at himself, to contradict himself, in order that he may pay his respects, as it were, to ri
dicule. And amongst the graying heads themselves there is an air of pathos about existence. At any moment the world may cease, or at least become so disintegrated that the processes of normality will not apply. Illusion is out of control: assurance is abandoned. For the first time for centuries Europe is adopting the doctrine that in words it has accepted. The world is lost; but what is saved is not apparent.
This is the age of the man without passions, the man without poetry, the man without a past. Tradition is poetry, the myth is poetry, and now the myth and traditions are dead. The powers of the subconscious that have pulled the strings of the world for thousands of years, the power of passions, they now do not apply. Oedipus is irrelevant: Hamlet is irrelevant. In the age of psychoanalysis for the first time psychoanalysis is nonsense. It explains the past but it has nothing to do with the present. The end of the world is the end of the dark powers of humanity. The past is meaningless. Now for the first time man is faced with eternity and with nothing else.
The tears of the lyricists are dry; the shouts of the propagandists are empty. The words of progress, words with capital letters, have become more ridiculous than any because their sense is quite consciously nonsense. The world of the politicians has effaced itself even beyond ridicule, it has joked itself towards horror like the clown that becomes obscene in despair of failure. A Capital Letter may be put anywhere, may stand for anything. Freedom can mean Slavery, Peace stands for War, Democracy is inseparable from Intolerance. There is no laughter left for this absurdity. Big words are dirty, the car is running downhill, the smallness of the situation is in each man’s chance of survival. And his chance, as Peter had said, depends for nothing upon time or events or circumstances, but merely upon his ability to jump.
Passive, lonely, it is only a Sphinx because it is blind that can smile at a desert. The Sphinx does not dream because it knows. But for others there are still eyes for the sun to weary, mouths to breathe dust, ears to ache in the wind. Impotent among the sunsets a man receives the impressions that his machinery gives him—snapshots along the pavement, sound-effects at night, the touch of dull sensations like a pattern stamped on wax. Instead of ecstasy there is a perspective of rottenness: Columbine is a harlot with grease-paint in the rain, Harlequin holds a lily and grins and strokes its stem. They are the same people: it is the viewpoint that has changed. A machine can only record what is inanimate and deathly. And if at the centre there is still a spark of life, a spark of humanity, it is only in fantasy that this flame creates. The light that the fire engenders is sometimes fond and sometimes pathetic and sometimes filthy, but always it is pointless and often touched with shame.
In the city the machinery that possessed me received its impressions and mixed its dreams and I observed my fire dying with a vague despair. The shadows it cast were the company I lived with, shapes in the gutter like the temptation of trees. When I went to eat there would be a girl at the counter before me, a girl with long hair and a fox-face and a memory of apples. I watched her. In the crowds at night there would be many; fairy feet beneath the palms of candelabra, tails that brushed against the undergrowth of knees, a hunt of hounds in the woods of degradation. If I spoke my breath would destroy the dying candle, shadows were better than the darkness of night. I did not speak. Music appeared to comfort the silence, and in the circling of leaves the wind was dispelled. Serpents jerked upon the dance floor, branches of arms were supported in smoke, the dark garden wept. Then one evening in a weary promenade I saw the bald men who were the same as I and I was one of them. Our noses were pressed against desire like prisoners. That is what I could not bear, being one of them. A hound with its tongue out, silent because it was strangled. After that I did not go out any more.
Often I dreamed about Annabelle.
Living in one room, in a cage, like a monkey, the faces outside that I cannot bear to see, that must not see me, there are no minutes to the days and it is the nights that are terrible. Love is a cage in which a monkey crouches and there is nothing human in the vision outwards nor in the vision inwards, there is nothing but waiting for what will never arrive. Love is this in which I had never believed, of which I had acted in defiance—a condition of failure and the absence of life. When love is returned it is not love, it is living, and when love is real it is the desire to die. This love is worship and you do not get what you worship, if you get what you worship your life will cease. There were times when I thought that if I had possessed Annabelle, had held her even, if I had come so close as to touch her then something so dreadful would have happened that I could not have borne it. In all our days together I did not remember having touched her except once when we had danced. In dancing touching is unreal, it is not hearts that you touch. If our hearts had touched we should have died.
A room at night with life nowhere near to me. Around me the objects that are close are waiting in the shapes of people that should use them, chairs that are never sat in, beds that are never lain in, wood and stuffing that will always remain. If I sit I do not sit because for hour after hour it is not I who forget myself, chairs and tables are more real than my mind. If I should recreate Annabelle in words I do not know what I should say except that I tried to love her without desire and without covetousness and without jealousy and that now I find I am without myself. I should say that it would have been possible if she had stayed close to me, but sacrifices are useless if the idol is away. There is nothing that I want. If she came into my room I do not suppose that it would please me, I have no eyes that would see her nor any heart to touch. There is a corner of the ceiling that might speak to me. That is more real to me, containing more hope.
And then before death the flame that is dying cries for a minute and I say I will do something I will do anything I will make the last use of this will that is left to me, I will go out into the street and I will walk until I have done something and then it will be done. I will choose to do this and there is nothing easier to do and if I don’t I shall go mad. I get up from the chair in which I have become as dust and I walk to the door through the tomb of centuries and on the stairs I have to become savage so that the violation will be done. I step down pitifully knowing that this is pitiful, treading as if in fury past the objects that deride me and on the threshold of the sun I must stop to decide. I stop on the pavement with the street on either side of me, a direction stretching to the right and to the left and a road to cross with railings in front of me. I can go this way or that and it is I who must choose and then I know that I am mad. I cannot choose. There is nothing I desire.
There is a donkey, theoretically, who starves to death when he is placed between two bundles of hay which are equidistant from him. He has no means of deciding which way to turn. Now there was no hay, no hay in the world, and the effect was the same. The donkey could not move, I could not move, and I was the donkey.
There was nothing I desired. I stood on the edge of the street in which there was nothing, between the ends of perspective at which nothing belonged, and it was no use thinking, This or that will lead me to intention, and no use turning my head in hope. I knew I was the donkey. As a lunatic I waited while the emptiness of the world drained me and drop by drop I was emptied too. Now I am mad, I thought; I am finally in Hell. I stood in the sunlight while no one looked at me and nothing was part of me and I did not belong. It is no use trying, I thought. It is no use waiting even for the police to come and arrest me and to lead me away. There is not really enough of me for that.
V
FUGITIVES
14
It was another year before I saw them again. They wrote to me, once or twice, without saying much. Peter was working in an office, Annabelle was with her mother, Marius was not mentioned. In their letters there was a suggestion that they were as listless as I. Yet I did not believe this, I could not imagine them failing. Then at Christmas I had a postcard saying that they might soon be returning to England. For a while I revived, my dreams became a possibility. But they did not come. Time went slowly ag
ain; the winter dragged. At times I wondered what the year would have done to them, if it would have changed them so that when they returned we would still be apart. It seemed that this was what we had intended—that we should all change, perhaps—and it would surely only be I who had gone backwards into futility. When I thought this I was frightened that their return might be worse than their absence. Yet I hoped for them, always, as my only means of awakening from nightmare. And when they did return it was not as I had feared. Things had changed, but from the outside, not from within. Perhaps it was just that we were all a year older. One makes certain contacts with oldness in a year, even if what is contacted still tries to remain the same.
I felt I myself had grown older. There was still, however, something of which to be afraid.
On the first day of spring there was a procession going down the road with its brass bands its soldiers and its children with their tiny toy flags. The visit of some foreign royalty or the commemoration of a dead event, I forget what it was, but the people were there waving their sleeves and taking their hats off just in case (a funeral perhaps or something to do with the Cenotaph?); the horses trotted in trappings of silver with sad sightless men on top of them and the band thumping out the heavy blaring music that goes on and on in circles ceaselessly like the revolutions of the word or the roll of the universe, a line coming up the street swinging in step and the people cheering as they always cheer at the beginning of war or at the symbol of death because war is deliverance and what they want is a holiday. The symbol of death on a bright spring day and a child upon the pavement. I saw Peter on the other side of the road and I waved at him.
Everyone was waving. I jumped up and down and was doing no more than paying my exaggerated respects to the carriage which, approaching from the direction of Trafalgar Square, contained two bowing personages who acknowledged my efforts. Peter’s fair head arose like a sunflower above the opposite border of bodies, but he was not as he had been once, the child leaning forwards flipping his pennies to the circus, he was older and tired as if he had watched a circus each night of his life until it had betrayed him. “Peter!” I yelled. He stood as if he were waiting to remove the debris. The pageant passed. He was like a shifter of cages who works in the dust.
A Garden of Trees Page 20
