The Family Reunion

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by T. S. Eliot


  I think. It seems I shall get rid of nothing,

  Of none of the shadows that I wanted to escape;

  And at the same time, other memories,

  Earlier, forgotten, begin to return

  Out of my childhood. I can't explain.

  But I thought I might escape from one life to another,

  And it may be all one life, with no escape. Tell me,

  Were you ever happy here, as a child at Wishwood?

  MARY

  Happy? not really, though I never knew why:

  It always seemed that it must be my own fault,

  And never to be happy was always to be naughty.

  But there were reasons: I was only a cousin

  Kept here because there was nothing else to do with me.

  I didn’t belong here. It was different for you.

  And you seemed so much older. We were rather in awe of you—

  At least, I was.

  HARRY

  Why were we not happy?

  MARY

  Well, it all seemed to be imposed upon us;

  Even the nice things were laid out ready,

  And the treats were always so carefully prepared;

  There was never any time to invent our own enjoyments.

  But perhaps it was all designed for you, not for us.

  HARRY

  No, it didn’t seem like that. I was part of the design

  As well as you. But what was the design?

  It never came off. But do you remember

  MARY

  The hollow tree in what we called the wilderness

  HARRY

  Down near the river. That was the block house

  From which we fought the Indians. Arthur and John.

  MARY

  It was the cave where we met by moonlight

  To raise the evil spirits.

  HARRY

  Arthur and John.

  Of course we were punished for being out at night

  After being put to bed. But at least they never knew

  Where we had been.

  MARY

  They never found the secret.

  HARRY

  Not then. But later, coming back from school

  For the holidays, after the formal reception

  And the family festivities, I made my escape

  As soon as I could, and slipped down to the river

  To find the old hiding place. The wilderness was gone,

  The tree had been felled, and a neat summer-house

  Had been erected, ‘to please the children.’

  It’s absurd that one’s only memory of freedom

  Should be a hollow tree in a wood by the river.

  MARY

  But when I was a child I took everything for granted,

  Including the stupidity of older people—

  They lived in another world, which did not touch me.

  Just now, I find them very difficult to bear.

  They are always assured that you ought to be happy

  At the very moment when you are wholly conscious

  Of being a misfit, of being superfluous.

  But why should I talk about my commonplace troubles?

  They must seem very trivial indeed to you.

  It’s just ordinary hopelessness.

  HARRY

  One thing you cannot know:

  The sudden extinction of every alternative,

  The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.

  You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.

  You only know what it is not to hope:

  You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you,

  Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless

  Unrecognised by other men, though sometimes by each other.

  MARY

  I know what you mean. That is an experience

  I have not had. Nevertheless, however real,

  However cruel, it may be a deception.

  HARRY

  What I see

  May be one dream or another; if there is nothing else

  The most real is what I fear. The bright colour fades

  Together with the unrecapturable emotion,

  The glow upon the world, that never found its object;

  And the eye adjusts itself to a twilight

  Where the dead stone is seen to be batrachian,

  The aphyllous branch ophidian.

  MARY

  You bring your own landscape

  No more real than the other. And in a way you contradict yourself:

  That sudden comprehension of the death of hope

  Of which you speak, I know you have experienced it,

  And I can well imagine how awful it must be.

  But in this world another hope keeps springing

  In an unexpected place, while we are unconscious of it

  You hoped for something, in coming back to Wishwood,

  Or you would not have come.

  HARRY

  Whatever I hoped for

  Now that I am here I know I shall not find it.

  The instinct to return to the point of departure

  And start again as if nothing had happened,

  Isn't that all folly? It’s like the hollow tree,

  Not there.

  MARY

  But surely, what you say

  Only proves that you expected Wishwood

  To be your real self, to do something for you

  That you can only do for yourself.

  What you need to alter is something inside you

  Which you can change anywhere—here, as well as elsewhere.

  HARRY

  Something inside me, you think, that can be altered!

  And here, indeed! where I have felt them near me,

  Here and here and here—wherever I am not looking,

  Always flickering at the corner of my eye,

  Almost whispering just out of earshot—

  And inside too, in the nightly panic

  Of dreaming dissolution. You do not know,

  You cannot know, you cannot understand.

  MARY

  I think I could understand, but you would have to be patient

  With me, and with people who have not had your experience.

  HARRY

  If I tried to explain, you could never understand:

  Explaining would only make a worse misunderstanding;

  Explaining would only set me farther away from you.

  There is only one way for you to understand

  And that is by seeing. They are much too clever

  To admit you into our world. Yours is no better.

  They have seen to that: it is part of the torment.

  MARY

  If you think I am incapable of understanding you—

  But in any case, I must get ready for dinner.

  HARRY

  No, no, don’t go! Please don’t leave me

  Just at this moment. I feel it is important.

  Something should have come of this conversation.

  MARY

  I am not a wise person,

  And in the ordinary sense I don’t know you very well,

  Although I remember you better than you think,

  And what is the real you. I haven’t much experience,

  But I see something now which doesn’t come from tutors

  Or from books, or from thinking, or from observation:

  Something which I did not know I knew.

  Even if, as you say, Wishwood is a cheat,

  Your family a delusion—than it’s all a delusion,

  Everything you feel—I don’t mean what you think,

  But what you feel. You attach yourself to loathing

  As others do to loving: an infatuation

  That’s wrong, a good that’s misdirected. You deceive yourself

  Like the man convinced that he is paralysed

  Or like the man who believes that he is blind />
  While he still sees the sunlight. I know that this is true.

  HARRY

  I have spent many years in useless travel;

  You have staid in England, yet you seem

  Like someone who comes from a very long distance,

  Or the distant waterfall in the forest,

  Inaccessible, half-heard.

  And I hear your voice as in the silence

  Between two storms, one hears the moderate usual noises

  In the grass and leaves, of life persisting,

  Which ordinarily pass unnoticed.

  Perhaps you are right, though I do not know

  How you should know it. Is the cold spring

  Is the spring not an evil time, that excites us with lying voices?

  MARY

  The cold spring now is the time

  For the ache in the moving root

  The agony in the dark

  The slow flow throbbing the trunk

  The pain of the breaking bud.

  These are the ones that suffer least:

  The aconite under the snow

  And the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood.

  HARRY

  Spring is an issue of blood

  A season of sacrifice

  And the wail of the new full tide

  Returning the ghosts of the dead

  Those whom the winter drowned

  Do not the ghosts of the drowned

  Return to land in the spring?

  Do the dead want to return?

  MARY

  Pain is the opposite of joy

  But joy is a kind of pain

  I believe the moment of birth

  Is when we have knowledge of death

  I believe the season of birth

  Is the season of sacrifice

  For the tree and the beast, and the fish

  Thrashing itself upstream:

  And what of the terrified spirit

  Compelled to be reborn

  To rise toward the violent sun

  Wet wings into the rain cloud

  Harefoot over the moon?

  HARRY

  What have we been saying? I think I was saying

  That it seemed as if I had been always here

  And you were someone who had come from a long distance.

  Whether I know what I am saying, or why I say it,

  That does not matter. You bring me news

  Of a door that opens at the end of a corridor,

  Sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure

  That every corridor only led to another,

  Or to a blank wall; that I kept moving

  Only so as not to stay still. Singing and light.

  Stop!

  What is that? do you feel it?

  MARY

  What, Harry?

  HARRY

  That apprehension deeper than all sense,

  Deeper than the sense of smell, but like a smell

  In that it is indescribable, a sweet and bitter smell

  From another world. I know it, I know it!

  More potent than ever before, a vapour dissolving

  All other worlds, and me into it. O Mary!

  Don’t look at me like that! Stop! Try to stop it!

  I am going. Oh, why, now? Come out!

  Come out! Where are you? Let me see you,

  Since I know you are there, I know you are spying on me.

  Why do you play with me, why do you let me go,

  Only to surround me?—When I remember them

  They leave me alone: when I forget them

  Only for an instant of inattention

  They are roused again, the sleepless hunters

  That will not let me sleep. At the moment before sleep

  I always see their claws distended

  Quietly, as if they had never stirred.

  It was only a moment, it was only one moment

  That I stood in sunlight, and thought I might stay there.

  MARY

  Look at me. You can depend on me.

  Harry! Harry! It’s all right, I tell you.

  If you will depend on me, it will be all right.

  HARRY

  Come out!

  [The curtains part, revealing the Eumenides in the window embrasure.]

  Why do you show yourselves now for the first time?

  When I knew her, I was not the same person.

  I was not any person. Nothing that I did

  Has to do with me. The accident of a dreaming moment,

  Of a dreaming age, when I was someone else

  Thinking of something else, puts me among you.

  I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,

  Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks

  Incriminate, but that other person, if person,

  You thought I was: let your necrophily

  Feed upon that carcase. They will not go.

  MARY

  Harry! There is no one here.

  [She goes to the window and pulls the curtains across.]

  HARRY

  They were here, I tell you. They are here.

  Are you so imperceptive, have you such dull senses

  That you could not see them? If I had realised

  That you were so obtuse, I would not have listened

  To your nonsense. Can’t you help me?

  You’re of no use to me. I must face them.

  I must fight them. But they are stupid.

  How can one fight with stupidity?

  Yet I must speak to them.

  [He rushes forward and tears apart the curtains: but the embrasure is empty.]

  MARY

  Oh, Harry!

  Scene III

  HARRY, MARY, IVY, VIOLET, GERALD, CHARLES

  VIOLET

  Good evening, Mary: aren’t you dressed yet?

  How do you think that Harry is looking?

  Why, who could have pulled those curtains apart?

  [Pulls them together.]

  Very well, I think, after such a long journey;

  You know what a rush he had to be here in time

  For his mother’s birthday.

  IVY

  Mary, my dear,

  Did you arrange these flowers? Just let me change them.

  You don’t mind, do you? I know so much about flowers;

  Flowers have always been my passion.

  You know I had my own garden once, in Cornwall,

  When I could afford a garden; and I took several prizes

  With my delphiniums. In fact, I was rather an authority.

  GERALD

  Good evening, Mary. You’ve seen Harry, I see.

  It’s good to have him back again, isn’t it?

  We must make him feel at home. And most auspicious

  That he could be here for his mother’s birthday.

  MARY

  I must go and change. I came in very late.

  [Exit.]

  CHARLES

  Now we only want Arthur and John.

  I am glad that you'll all be together, Harry;

  They need the influence of their elder brother.

  Arthur’s a bit irresponsible, you know;

  You should have a sobering effect upon him.

  After all, you’re the head of the family.

  AMY’S VOICE

  Violet! Has Arthur or John come yet?

  VIOLET

  Neither of them is here yet, Amy.

  [Enter AMY, with DR. WARBURTON.]

  AMY

  It is most vexing. What can have happened?

  I suppose it’s the fog that is holding them up,

  So it’s no use to telephone anywhere. Harry!

  Haven’t you seen Dr. Warburton?

  You know he’s the oldest friend of the family,

  And he's known you longer than anybody, Harry.

  When he heard that you were going to be here for dinner

  He broke an important engagement t
o come.

  WARBURTON

  I dare say we’ve both changed a good deal, Harry.

  A country practitioner doesn't get younger.

  It takes me back longer than you can remember

  To see you again. But you can’t have forgotten

  The day when you came back from school with measles

  And we had such a time to keep you in bed.

  You didn’t like being ill in the holidays.

  IVY

  It was unpleasant, coming home to have an illness.

  VIOLET

  It was always the same with your minor ailments

  And children’s epidemics: you would never stay in bed

  Because you were convinced that you would never get well.

  HARRY

  Not, I think, without some justification:

  For what you call restoration to health

  Is only incubation of another malady.

  WARBURTON

  You mustn’t take such a pessimistic view

  Which is hardly complimentary to my profession.

  But I remember, when I was a student at Cambridge,

  I used to dream of making some great discovery

  To do away with one disease or another.

  Now I’ve had forty years’ experience

  I’ve left off thinking in terms of the laboratory.

  We’re all of us ill in one way or another:

  We call it health when we find no symptom

  Of illness. Health is a relative term.

  IVY

  You must have had a very rich experience, Doctor,

 

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