‘ “It was on an evening just like this,” said the little violinist, “I do not know how long ago, for time has ceased to have a meaning for me, that I came here to die. I have drained my little bottle of laudanum mixed with spirits of aconite, and, as I wait for the poison to work, a terrible thing happens: a nightingale begins to sing his song in a nearby brake. You might ask, signor, what is so terrible about the song of a nightingale. Well, in itself nothing. What I hear is a passionate trill of pure untrammelled beauty: the great maestro Paganini himself could not have produced such ecstasy. It ravishes me, but its beauty scorches my soul, for it makes me see the truth of what I have done. God made this little brown bird to give us a night song more exquisite than anything made by the mind and skill of man, and yet—and yet!—that little brown bird would never be aware of what he was doing. It would be his song, no more than that to him. Its loveliness would quite escape him, and I who perceived it could never tell him. The supreme gift that God gives to man, is not the gift of making beauty, like this nightingale, but the gift of appreciating it, and I have thrown it away. I could have lived out my entire life among the second violins of the San Carlo, and still triumphed because I could in my humble way have lived in beauty and for it. I have cast my life into the shadows, not for the sake of art, but for the sake of vanity. I thought I had taken revenge upon God but I have only taken revenge upon myself. And you, signor, have you lived for beauty?”
‘I told the wretch that I had, that I had drifted with every passion till my soul was a stringed lute on which all winds could play. I told him many wonderful things, but I doubt if he listened: the dead never do. I could have told him that I had lost everything for beauty, except for my life and perhaps my soul, but by that time the little cloud which was all that was left of Maestro Martini had gone. I myself was getting cold and weary and was about to rise when something huge and monstrous sat down beside me.
‘I wanted to leave but I felt transfixed by this cold and malignant presence: something told me that he was the one last vision to which I would be subjected. It was a man who had quitted his life in his sixties: I was in the company of a being bloated by experience.
‘ “Allow me to introduce myself, Signor,” he said. “I am the Count of San Gimigniano. My family is the ancient one of Contarini. When I was young I had wealth and position; more importantly I had the assurance to know what I wished to do with my powers. I determined to use them to experience everything, to drain, as you might say, the cup of pleasure to the dregs. I was a fine looking young man, made many conquests, and married well. Yet I was never satisfied. Was it Augustine who declared himself restless until he found rest in God? I too was restless until I could rest in the perfect enjoyment of pleasure. I counted myself a saint of sensuality, a mystic of the flesh.
‘ “My search took me to strange places, earning me the hatred and disapproval of many small-minded moralisers. My wife eventually refused to speak to me and I was shunned by my own people, but this did not matter to me. I was a seeker who was still wealthy, so I moved to Naples. There, as I grew old, my body was scarred by the scourges and diseases of my quest, but my appetite remained undiminished.
‘ “It is a fact that the older one becomes the more one seeks out youth, perhaps because it has properties that can revive the old. It is also a fact—a most regrettable one—that the young so seldom appreciate what the old can give to them in the way of wisdom and experience. All too often one is forced to pay heavily for what might previously have come to one joyously, freely given and freely taken.
‘ “I became in my latter years fascinated by the concept of purity; so I made it my mission to seek it out and capture it. There may be some foolish and mean-spirited people who would see this as a corrupt and corrupting thing, but I did not. I took to going to church—a practice which I took less than seriously in my youth—and found myself especially beguiled by the sacramental rite of the first communion in which young boys and girls dressed in virginal white come to taste of the body and the blood of Jesus for the first time.
‘ “I was in the Duomo one Sunday watching this adorable ceremony when I saw her. She was no more than twelve years old and her face was like a flower. I was captivated. To me she was the beatific vision to which the saints of old laid claim. Oh, she was pure and sweet, and I felt that I could be pure and sweet with her! I paid my old friend the sacristan a few scudi to discover the name of the blessed infant and where she lived.
‘ “I found to my joy that she was an orphan, a foundling, that her name was Maria and that she was cared for in a convent by the Sisters of San Pancrazio. This was the most infernal good luck, because I happened to know one of the Sisters, a certain Sister Marta. Our past association was such that, by means of bribery and threats of disclosure, she was persuaded to obtain access for me to this Maria. I was in Paradise, but the girl was to be my crucifixion and downfall.
‘ “I presented myself to the Convent of San Pancrazio as a benevolent elderly gentleman of means who wished to do something good for the girl, to aid her prospects in life. And so I would have done, had fate given me the chance. I visited her several times in the convent and managed to gain her trust, even, I think, her love. I then initiated legal proceedings to adopt her as my daughter, but the Mother Superior, a cursed, meddling old woman must have made enquiries as to my reputation, and she suddenly denied me all access to my Maria. By this time, you must understand, Maria had driven me half mad with passion. I swear she had encouraged my feelings, but it was then—I freely admit it—that I made a tragic mistake. Instead of biding my time and slowly regaining the trust of all, on a reckless impulse I hired a pair of ruffians to seize the girl on her way to confession and bring her to me.
‘ “They succeeded, but Maria had been put into such a state of shock by their clumsy violence that she resisted all my efforts to calm her. Perhaps I tried too hard to pacify her, but she was overwhelmed by it all. In short—I will not burden you with the details, signor—she perished in my arms. I had crushed the flower which I longed to nurture. Then, of all the outrageous acts of hypocrisy, those guttersnipes I had hired to capture the girl suddenly became full of remorse, and unknown to me, they went to the authorities.
‘ “The morning after Maria had died—I had spent a virtually sleepless night on her account—I woke to the sound of a hammering on my door. I looked out of my bedroom window to see the Carabinieri at the head of a rabble howling for my blood. Fortunately I was still fully dressed and I had a way of leaving my house secretly through a passage in my cellar which let me in to the next door house. I had not a moment to lose though, so seizing a loaded pistol from a drawer—I always kept one by me for such eventualities—I made for the cellar and the secret passage. Barely had I bolted the cellar door behind me when that stinking rout of rogues and Pharisees burst into my house.
‘ “In the event I was only a few minutes ahead of them. I knew by this time that there was only one means of escape, so I climbed the hill towards the Garden of Strangers. I heard their baying behind me and knew fear, but also a strange kind of exhilaration. At least my death would not be a slow descent into neglect and debility. I was past sixty, with all the ills that attend such an age, but for a while the chase put blood and fire into my old limbs. I gained the gate of the Garden with the rabble still a few hundred paces behind me.
‘ “Even in death I won a victory. I cheated them. I reached this very bench with the mob hard on my heels. My old legs had begun to give way so that my pursuers had all but caught up with me. I showed them my gun, which held the cowards at bay, but my time had run out, and I prepared to die. I placed the muzzle of my pistol behind my left ear, slightly pointing upwards into the cranium. It was how an old Austrian General had once told me I should perform the act. That had been in my youth after the first of my disgraces, and I had repaid the General for his kind advice by using my pistol on him rather than myself. Then, as my persecutors closed in, I pulled the trigger. There was a momentar
y flash of agony, then I was dead and laughing at my persecutors with their shirt fronts and faces filthied by my blood and brains. So I remain, beyond them all, for ever.
‘ “I am not like the others here in this Garden of Strangers. I am one of the elect. I am not miserable like them; I am in ecstasy! I have an eternity to myself in which I can remember every twitch of pleasure, every gradation of the exquisite corruption of the flesh, every touch of my wrinkled finger on soft skin, every convulsion of pain, every scarlet scratch on the smooth white surface of youth, every hot tear that scalded the innocence of heaven. My soul still runs like fire through the lilies of God and scorches them with my everlasting lust!”
‘What else that monster shrieked in my ear—vile things that I will carry with me to my grave—I dare not repeat. I, Oscar Wilde—I, who thought he had plumbed the depths of sin!—could take no more of this. I knew that I must leave that garden at once; because, whereas my first two visitants had been sad creatures drifting through limbo, this last thing was a soul in Hell. I knew that I must escape him or risk eternal damnation.
‘The Count went on whispering his carnal litany in my ear as I tried to rise, but something physical was holding me there. I looked behind me and saw what looked like the black web of a great spider which had been woven onto the back of my coat, binding me to the seat of the bench. I tried to detach myself from it but my hand became ensnared. It stuck to me, this black and viscous horror.
‘Ah, you will say, it was merely pitch or black paint which I had inadvertently sat down upon. You Americans are irreconcilably prosaic, but that is because you are young. Youth is the oldest tradition of your nation, and the young are always prosaic. The young believe that poetry is only a beautiful way of telling lies; whereas the old know it to be the sole medium of bitter truth. Where was I?’
‘Still in the Garden of Strangers.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, I believe that I might have been caught forever in that dreadful web, but just then the sun broke from behind the hills overlooking the bay of Naples, and it was at last a new day. With the dawn all my spirits fled from me, their mist burned up by the sun’s morning rays. So I wrenched my coat off the seat, quitted the Garden of Strangers and never returned. My coat was ruined which saddened me because we had become attached to one another. After all, I owed my tailor a great deal of money for it.’
He broke off wistfully and stared into space for a moment. ‘The really precious things in life are those for which one cannot pay. Would you care for another brandy, or does your soul revolt against such excess?’
I shook my head.
‘I should not have asked. One should never try to lead others astray: it is the one unpardonable sin and a privilege one must reserve for one’s self. I was once very nearly tempted into playing a game of football. Fortunately I was able to plead successfully that I had a feverish intellect, so they let me off. But had I succumbed, only think what dreadful consequences would have ensued. I might have become respectable.’
‘What is so wrong with that?’ I asked, hoping, I guess, to provoke him once more, but I got more than I bargained for.
‘My dear Ellwood,’ said Oscar, now without a trace of melancholy or languor in his voice, ‘respectability is the only crime because it is the betrayal of the self. Respectability is the taking up of moral attitudes and the denial of morality. It condemns the sinner in public, but in secret condones the sin. How could I, its most notorious victim, defend respectability? It prefers the simple lie to the bewildering truth. It is the comfort of cruel men, the ice on the mirror, the cloak that hides the dagger. It was the crucifier of Christ; it is the suicide of the soul. If I had murdered myself that day in the Garden of Strangers I would have become respectable because, in the eyes of my fellow countrymen, I would have “done the decent thing”. And there is no more indecent act in this world than to do the decent thing for the sake of respectability.’
When Oscar had finished there was a silence while the fire slowly departed from his eyes. He sighed as if suddenly exhausted by his own conversation; then summoned the waiter to order another cognac for himself. I asked him if, since his adventures in the Garden of Strangers, he had ever been tempted again to take his own life.
‘No. I was cured of that. You see, I knew that all three of those shades had killed themselves in vain. And when I thought that such would be the fate of my soul too, the temptation to kill myself left me and has not come back.’
‘And after all, how could you have imagined spending all your after-life in Naples?’ I said.
Oscar laughed: ‘No, the cooking is really too bad. At least I shall be dying in Paris where the cuisine approaches that which one can expect from the after-life at its best. When one is about to feast with the dead, it is as well to know what is on the menu.’
‘And who pays for that particular feast?’ I asked, as the waiter entered the room. Oscar settled the bill with an extravagant tip. As he struggled to rise from the table, he grimaced with pain, so I helped him to his feet. He acknowledged my assistance with a smile and a movement of the hand that was like the blessing of a dying pontiff.
‘My dear Ellwood,’ said Oscar, ‘a gentleman knows but never tells.’ Absently he patted the waistcoat pocket in which reposed the sad remnants of my one thousand francs.
AMONG THE TOMBS
‘I don’t think the Church of England will ever take kindly to the idea of sainthood,’ said the Archdeacon. ‘No. It won’t do. It’s not in our nature.’ The Archdeacon is one of those people who has decided views about absolutely everything, a useful if exhausting quality.
It was the first night of our annual Diocesan Clergy Retreat at St Catherine’s House. Most of the participants had gone to bed early after supper and Compline, but a few of us had accepted Canon Carey’s kind offer of a glass of malt whisky in the library. It was a cold November evening and a fire had been lit. Low lighting, drawn damask curtains, and a room whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with faded theology and devotion contributed to an intense, subdued atmosphere.
I suppose whenever fellow professionals get together there will tend to be a mood of conspiracy and competition, and clerics are no exception to the rule. Serious topics are proposed so that individuals can demonstrate their prowess and allegiances. The Archdeacon, in any case, does not do small talk.
‘But there are people in our tradition whom we do revere as saints,’ said Bob Mercer, the Vicar of Stickley.
‘Name them!’ said the Archdeacon belligerently.
‘George Herbert, Edward King of Lincoln. . . . What about the martyrs Latimer and Ridley? And Tyndale?’
‘Yes, yes. But these are figures from the past. Anyway, ask the average man or woman in the pew what they know about Edward King. I mean that we have no living and popular tradition, no equivalent to Mother Teresa or Padre Pio.’
‘What about Meriel Deane who started the Philippians?’ said Canon Carey.
A young curate who had just crept in confessed he had never heard of Meriel Deane. I would have said so myself had I been less timid about showing my ignorance. Rather condescendingly the Archdeacon enlightened us. Meriel Deane, he said, had founded the Philippian Movement to help the rehabilitation of long term, recidivist prisoners who had just left gaol. They could spend their first six months of freedom at a Philippian House, usually in a remote country spot, supervised by one or two wardens. The regime pursued there was at once austere and easy-going. Inmates could come and go as they liked, and had no work to do apart from minor household chores, but there were regular meals and periods of silence and meditation. People were given space to reflect on their lives. The charity was named after the town of Philippi where St Paul had been imprisoned. The Philippians were still in existence and doing good work though their founder was now dead.
The Archdeacon concluded his lecture by saying ‘I met Meriel Deane on several occasions. The woman was nuts. No doubt a good person in her way, but completely off her head, so not in my vie
w a candidate for sanctification.’
‘Oh, yes, she was rather disturbed at the end, but she wasn’t always like that,’ said a voice none of us recognised.
The speaker was an elderly priest whom I noticed had been placidly silent all through supper. He wore a cassock rather like a soutane which put him on the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church, an impression which was confirmed when I heard him being addressed as ‘Father Humphreys’. He must have been past retiring age, a small, stooped man with a wrinkled head, like a not very prepossessing walnut; but, as he spoke, his face gradually assumed character, even a certain charm.
‘So you knew her, Father?’
‘Very well, for a time. One of her first ‘Philippian’ houses was in my parish, Saxford in Norfolk.’
‘And she wasn’t potty?’
‘She was not potty then.’
‘So when and how did she go potty?’ asked the Curate. The Archdeacon was frowning. He obviously felt that repeated use of the word ‘potty’ was lowering the tone.
‘Well,’ said Father Humphreys, who had sensed the Archdeacon’s unease and seemed amused by it. ‘That’s not the adjective I would use, but something definitely went wrong. As things do. One wonders why, but there is no real answer. Not this side of the grave at any rate.’ The last sentence was spoken faintly, as if he had forgotten the presence of others and was talking to himself.
‘Do you know what exactly “went wrong”, as you put it?’ asked Canon Carey.
‘No. Not exactly. But I’ll tell you what I know if you like. It would be quite a relief. I’ve never told anyone before, and it might be good to unbosom.’
The rest of us began to settle into armchairs and sofas. A bedtime story! What a treat! That word ‘unbosom’ had marked him out in my mind as an unusual and interesting person. And yet—and I don’t think this is merely hindsight—I am sure I felt uneasy, even a little fearful about what Father Humphreys was going to reveal. Despite offers of a more comfortable seat he established himself on a low footstool in front of the fire. In that pose, crouched with his knees almost up to his chin, there was something in his appearance which made one think of a little old goblin out of a book of fairy tales. As he spoke he barely looked at us, but addressed most of his story to the pattern on the threadbare rug at his feet.
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 6
