"His basket's in the kitchen, and I'm there, kneeling beside it. And I'm stroking him-but his fur feels quite different from what it felt like before he was sick. Kind of sticky. And there's a bad smell. If I didn't love him so much, I'd run away, I couldn't bear to be near him. But I do love him, I love him more than anything or anybody. And while I stroke him, I keep telling him that he'll soon be well again. Very soon-tomorrow morning. And then all of a sudden he starts to shudder, and I try to stop the shuddering by holding his head between my hands. But it doesn't do any good. The trembling turns into a horrible convulsion. It makes me feel sick to look at it, and I'm frightened. I'm dreadfully frightened. Then the shuddering and the twitching die down and in a little while he's absolutely still. And when I lift his head and then let go, the head falls back-thump, like a piece of meat with a bone inside."
Will's voice broke, the tears were streaming down his cheeks, he was shaken by the sobs of a four-year-old grieving for his dog and confronted by the awful, inexplicable fact of death. With the mental equivalent of a click and a little jerk, his consciousness seemed to change gear. He was an adult again, and he had
ceased to float.
"I'm sorry." He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. "Well, that was my first introduction to the Essential Horror. Tiger was my friend, Tiger was my only consolation. That was something, obviously, that the Essential Horror couldn't tolerate. And it was the same with my Aunt Mary. The only person I ever really loved and admired and completely trusted; and, Christ, what the Essential Horror did to her!"
"Tell me," said Susila.
Will hesitated, then, shrugging his shoulders, "Why not?" he said. "Mary Frances Farnaby, my father's younger sister. Married at eighteen, just a year before the outbreak of the First World War, to a professional soldier. Frank and Mary, Mary and Frank-what harmony, what happiness!" He laughed. "Even outside of Pala there one can find occasional islands of decency. Tiny little atolls, or even, every now and then, a full-blown Tahiti-but always totally surrounded by the Essential Horror. Two young people on their private Pala. Then, one fine morning, it was August 4, 1914, Frank went overseas with the Expeditionary Force, and on Christmas Eve Mary gave birth to a deformed child that survived long enough for her to see for herself what the E.H. can do when it really tries. Only God can make a microcephalous idiot. Three months later, needless to say, Frank was hit by a piece of shrapnel and died in due course of gangrene. . . . All that," Will went on after a little silence, "was before my time. When I first knew her, in the twenties, Aunt Mary was devoting herself to the aged. Old people in insti tutions, old people cooped up in their own homes, old people living on and on as a burden to their children and grandchildren.
Struldbrugs, Tithonuses. And the more hopeless the decrepitude, the more crotchety and querulous the character, the better. As a child, how I hated Aunt Mary's old people! They smelt bad, they were frighteningly ugly, they were always boring and generally cross. But Aunt Mary really loved them-loved them through thick and thin, loved them in spite of everything. My mother used to talk a lot about Christian charity; but somehow one never believed what she said, just as one never felt any love in all the self-sacrificing things she was always forcing herself to do—no love, only duty. Whereas with Aunt Mary one was never in the slightest doubt. Her love was like a kind of physical radiation, something one could almost sense as heat or light. When she took me to stay with her in the country and later, when she came to town and I used to go and see her almost every day, it was like escaping from a refrigerator into the sunshine. I could feel myself coming alive in that light of hers, that radiating warmth. Then the Essential Horror got busy again. At the beginning she made a joke of it. 'Now I'm an Amazon,' she said after the first operation."
"Why an Amazon?" Susila asked.
"The Amazons had their right breast amputated. They were warriors and the breast got in the way when they were shooting with the long bow. 'Now I'm an Amazon,' " he repeated, and with his mind's eye could see the smile on that strong aquiline face, could hear, with his mind's ear, the tone of amusement in that clear, ringing voice. "But a few months later the other breast had to be cut off. After that there were the X rays, the radiation sickness and then, little by little, the degradation." Will's face took on its look of flayed ferocity. "If it weren't so unspeakably hideous, it would be really funny. What a masterpiece of irony! Here was a soul that radiated goodness and love and heroic charity. Then, for no known reason, something went wrong. Instead of flouting it, a little piece of her body started to obey the second law of thermodynamics. And as the body broke down, the soul began to lose its virtue, its very identity. The heroism went out of her, the love and the goodness evaporated. For the last months of her life she was no more the Aunt Mary I had loved and admired; she was somebody else, somebody (and this was the ironist's final and most exquisite touch) almost indistinguishable from the worst and weakest of the old people she had once befriended and been a tower of strength to. She had to be humiliated and degraded; and when the degradation was complete, she was slowly, and with a great deal of pain, put to death in solitude. In solitude," he insisted. "For of course nobody can help, nobody can ever be present. People may stand by while you're suffering and dying; but they're standing by in another world. In your world you're absolutely alone. Alone in your suffering and your dying, just as you're alone in love, alone even in the most completely shared pleasure."
The essences of Babs and of Tiger, and when the cancer had gnawed a hole in the liver and her wasted body was impregnated with that strange, aromatic smell of contaminated blood, the essence of Aunt Mary dying. And in the midst of those essences, sickeningly or intoxicatedly aware of them, was an isolated consciousness, a child's, a boy's, a man's, forever isolated, irremediably alone. "And on top of everything else," he went on, "this woman was only forty-two. She didn't want to die. She refused to accept what was being done to her. The Essential Horror had to drag her down by main force. I was there; I saw it happening."
"And that's why you're the man who won't take yes for an answer?"
"How can anyone take yes for an answer?" he countered. "Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!"
Tiger exuberantly alive and joyful and full of God. And then Tiger transformed by the Essential Horror into a packet of garbage, which the vet had to come and be paid for removing.
And after Tiger, Aunt Mary. Maimed and tortured, dragged in the mud, degraded and finally, like Tiger, transformed into a packet of garbage-only this time it was the undertaker who had removed it, and a clergyman was hired to make believe that it was all, in some sublime and Pickwickian sense, perfectly O.K. Twenty years later another clergyman had been hired to repeat the same strange rigmarole over Molly's coffin. "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advan-tageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die."