“No,” I said.
“You should try it. It is a very extraordinary feeling. And when you miss it, you see, it hits the ground and bursts, and that is tragedy.” Annabelle was making so much noise that he had to stop.
“And when you catch it?” I said.
“Why, you catch it,” he said, putting his hands together gently. “Like this. It is so soft and heavy. And the sound it makes is like love.”
“Love!” Annabelle said, indignant.
“And you had plenty of grapefruits?” I said. “Then where did you live?”
“Where you did,” he said. “On an island in the West Indies.”
I had not imagined this. For an instant it was as if I had a premonition of disaster. In the moonlight Marius’s face had almost assumed the features of a negro or a half-caste — the queer brooding stillness of them that lies at the centre of their laughter. “Which island?” I asked.
He told me. I remembered it. I remembered the dead-smelling town beneath the dead volcano, the deep green of the vegetation that was deeper than seaweed, the tall ruined sugar-cane factories that waited among the trees like monoliths. I had stayed there for a while and had been disquieted by it. It seemed alone among the islands. It was all softness there, all untouchable, the sea deep and dark, unfathomable, alarming to swim in; no boats on it, no slanting square sails to give it colour, no fish; just the deep unending stillness of rottenness among the mountains, and in the town the static garbage smell around the twisted people and above them the bells of the cathedral.
“But there,” he said, “I agree with you. It is impossible to live.”
“How strange that I should never have asked you where you were born,” Annabelle said.
“You don’t ask many questions.”
“No.” She sat down and shivered for the first time in the cold.
“And will you ever go back there?” I said.
“I shall go back when there is something to do. I should not know what to do there at the moment.”
“What is there that you do here?” I said.
“Not much,” he said.
“No.”
Peter came towards us across the grass. “I have been talking to a beggar,” he said.
“I thought he was a dustman.”
“He was a beggar,” Peter said. “He is selling shoe-strings. I asked him why he did not work and he said why should he? He was standing at the entrance to some fashionable club from which bachelors were emerging after their evening’s game of squash. Well, why should he?”
“Why do you call them shoe-strings?” Marius said.
“Because shoe-strings are what one tries to lift oneself up by when there is nothing else to lift with. No one bought his shoe-strings. Do you suppose it is possible to lift oneself up by one’s feet?”
“No,” Annabelle said.
“It is true that there is no reason to work. There is not even the reason of making money if one can get it by begging. He said he made ten pounds a week. I am sure if one tried hard enough one could lift oneself up by one’s feet.”
“Try it,” Annabelle said.
“I’m always trying it. I am a nonconformist. Sooner or later I shall do it or I shall break my back.”
“And what will you do when you have done it?” Marius said.
“I will be God. What more need I do? Those bachelors, now, why do they not try it instead of playing squash? It would be better exercise. Why does no one try it except me?”
“I knew you would be talking of the moon,” Annabelle said.
“No one is serious. I cannot bear that no one is serious. There is only one thing in life that is of any importance, and that is to get oneself off the ground. If there is nothing to lift you you must lift yourself. That is what I mean by shoe-strings. He realized that. He was a poetic beggar. He realized the enormous importance of doing nothing but dealing in shoe-strings. He is going home to-night to practise getting himself off his feet.”
“He will be wasting his time,” Annabelle said.
“Why?”
“Because he won’t know whether or not he has done it.”
“I knew a man,” Marius said, “who tied himself to a towel-rail.”
“When you try to lift yourself there is nothing to judge it by, you will end by pretending and not knowing that you pretend.”
“What happened to him?” I said.
“He was burnt,” Marius said.
“What is there to judge it by? Pretending is a disease, you do not know when you have got it. Does it matter so long as you try?”
“Disease can be cured.”
“How?”
“By other people.”
“Oh love, love, you are always talking about love. Will you cure me, Annabelle?”
“Yes,” Annabelle said.
Peter took off his shoes and socks and sat down on the parapet with his back to us so that his feet were in the water. He began to sing, and then stopped. He said: “The world is diseased, the disease is infectious, the infection is pretence. Should one not isolate oneself from infection? Everywhere there is madness. The people in the streets are no less mad than the people in palaces. The world must be changed or be renounced.”
“What do you remember?” Annabelle asked.
“Man must be changed or be destroyed. If he is not changed he must change himself. If he is not destroyed he will certainly destroy himself. I remember the future.”
“I remember the present,” Marius said.
“One day something will happen. We will get off the ground for a moment. It is only a moment that matters. Then we will be changed. It is the future that matters.”
“In the future,” Marius said, “we will break our backs and die.”
“There are four of us,” Peter said. “We will put strings under each other’s feet and pull. We will stand at the four corners of a circle and we will build a totem pole in the middle and the pole will have pulleys and we will raise ourselves. Is that what you call love?”
“Yes,” Annabelle said.
“You are right,” Peter said. “We must have a pole. The world has given up its totems, that is why it is on the ground. The world is too solitary. Will you tell us when our pole is built and we can pull?”
“If it were we who built it we still should not know where we were going.”
“You would,” I said.
“We still should not know what we were.”
“You would,” I said.
“We never know about ourselves.”
“A totem does not work unless a sacrifice is made to it,” Marius said.
“Then make a sacrifice,” Peter said. He looked to the sky. “One day I will jump off that roof and will either fly or be a sacrifice.”
“You know about yourselves,” I said.
“There are sacrifices in the present, always,” Marius said. “Then tell us when to honour them. The world must be changed. Annabelle, what do you judge things by?”
“By not judging,” she said.
“How do you know what you are without pretending?”
“By not knowing.”
“How do you know where you are going?”
“By believing.”
“And that is what you judge things by. Now, now, a star, and then it is you who we can believe in.”
“We are still children,” Annabelle said.
“Will you tell us when to begin?”
“Yes,” Annabelle said.
We all looked to the sky, but the stars had become veiled with clouds. It was as if we were alone on top of a mountain. Peter splashed, the water touched us, it might have been rain that fell upon us equally. I felt, suddenly, that I might have been any one of them. “I must go,” I said.
“Must you?” They looked at me.
“Yes,” I said.
“You will come back and see us?” Annabelle said.
“You will come back and stay?”
“I will come back soon,” I said.
“Good.”