vision of the heaven of morality. I have learned from Marsden one truth: it takes more than the rubbing together of egoes to bare sins big enough to bear sons. And so, entirely satisfactory conclusion, I discover, to my puzzled convenience, that I cannot commit adultery with an adultress! The deceptions have converted me: I no longer know when I am lying to myself. You might be persuaded to think the truth quite simple, that I want to possess both Theresa and Marsden. If only it were as simple as that! No, Providence is my black beast. How dare she create them separate, these two who are so incontestibly one?
As I gazed out of the open window of the train I heard the murmur in the distance and then the rumbled tick-tocking and then the appalling cacophony all around as the approaching train swept up and past us; and intermittently, interrupted by blanks and shadows, I saw my own face flying opposite, transfixed on the train that raced backward to the place I had come from: the mindlessness of those three weeks, that, I concluded, was the moral paralysis; then I had experienced the immense demotion of being a dog.
* * * *
Theresa, lying on a coloured blanket in the little garden at the rear of the cottage, looked up slowly as I closed behind me the door that opened into the garden. Her concentration upon the knitting in her fingers had allowed an expression of abstracted dereliction to arise from her unguardedness and to appear in her face; but, as she looked up from her knitting, this expression, slowly, like the permutations of clouds, became one, first, of delighted incredulity and then she smiled and lifted up her left hand towards me. She said nothing. I felt that nothing could so properly express the spell-bound poignancy of our re-union as the silence, the glittering silence, of that meeting. I sat beside her on the blanket and held my arm about her shoulders: she rested her head against my cheek, and, discarding her knitting, locked her fingers in mine. And we watched the clouds, by this time foreshadowing the evening, conduct their chorus of ballet out towards the sea. It was the silence, the silence of the time and the occasion, of the clouds, of the countryside, and, most of all, of our own fulfilment, that overcame me: I lowered my head on my knee and the withheld tear burned in the corner of my eye like a flaring star.
* * * *
Was this, O Gabriel, the last that I shall ever know of natural happiness? What were you bearing so everlastingly away, evening that seemed to vanish over the horizon in the instant of my tear; You had taken my innocence. For those first moments, in their ineffable tenderness, blinded all other emotions with their brightness.
And for the last time, I knew, I felt at one with the world. This is the innocence of the pagan who is not deceiving or being deceived by life, but who is simply welcoming it with a ceremony of appropriate emotions. But the last act of a happy man is to know that he is happy. The sun fell out of the sky into the English Channel. I heard myself speaking from remote distances down corridors that invested my voice with an unrecognisable theatricality.
“ … delay … the swans … Selfridges … with a walking stick … handed the cheque to me in a quarto envelope and said … ”
Theresa, the pupils of her eyes enormously enlarged, seemed to be staring at me as one stares at an acrobat performing a dangerous trick, believing but not believing. I must have led her out of the garden into the kitchen, for I see her face, then, smiling in a glaze of pallor like a cracked plate, break and spin away as I heard myself shout, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let’s have tea.”
And after taking tea in silence she came and stood behind my chair so that her arms fell like a Hawaiian festoon about my neck and her hair flickered, when she lowered her head, at my cheeks. By this time the kitchen had filled with immense shadows, and on a
As I gazed out of the open window of the train I heard the murmur in the distance and then the rumbled tick-tocking and then the appalling cacophony all around as the approaching train swept up and past us; and intermittently, interrupted by blanks and shadows, I saw my own face flying opposite, transfixed on the train that raced backward to the place I had come from: the mindlessness of those three weeks, that, I concluded, was the moral paralysis; then I had experienced the immense demotion of being a dog.
* * * *
Theresa, lying on a coloured blanket in the little garden at the rear of the cottage, looked up slowly as I closed behind me the door that opened into the garden. Her concentration upon the knitting in her fingers had allowed an expression of abstracted dereliction to arise from her unguardedness and to appear in her face; but, as she looked up from her knitting, this expression, slowly, like the permutations of clouds, became one, first, of delighted incredulity and then she smiled and lifted up her left hand towards me. She said nothing. I felt that nothing could so properly express the spell-bound poignancy of our re-union as the silence, the glittering silence, of that meeting. I sat beside her on the blanket and held my arm about her shoulders: she rested her head against my cheek, and, discarding her knitting, locked her fingers in mine. And we watched the clouds, by this time foreshadowing the evening, conduct their chorus of ballet out towards the sea. It was the silence, the silence of the time and the occasion, of the clouds, of the countryside, and, most of all, of our own fulfilment, that overcame me: I lowered my head on my knee and the withheld tear burned in the corner of my eye like a flaring star.
* * * *
Was this, O Gabriel, the last that I shall ever know of natural happiness? What were you bearing so everlastingly away, evening that seemed to vanish over the horizon in the instant of my tear; You had taken my innocence. For those first moments, in their ineffable tenderness, blinded all other emotions with their brightness.
And for the last time, I knew, I felt at one with the world. This is the innocence of the pagan who is not deceiving or being deceived by life, but who is simply welcoming it with a ceremony of appropriate emotions. But the last act of a happy man is to know that he is happy. The sun fell out of the sky into the English Channel. I heard myself speaking from remote distances down corridors that invested my voice with an unrecognisable theatricality.
“ … delay … the swans … Selfridges … with a walking stick … handed the cheque to me in a quarto envelope and said … ”
Theresa, the pupils of her eyes enormously enlarged, seemed to be staring at me as one stares at an acrobat performing a dangerous trick, believing but not believing. I must have led her out of the garden into the kitchen, for I see her face, then, smiling in a glaze of pallor like a cracked plate, break and spin away as I heard myself shout, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let’s have tea.”
And after taking tea in silence she came and stood behind my chair so that her arms fell like a Hawaiian festoon about my neck and her hair flickered, when she lowered her head, at my cheeks. By this time the kitchen had filled with immense shadows, and on a
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