Was it any wonder I knew a surge of optimism, like wonderful fire through my system? While I took Hever’s threats seriously, I knew in the end I should be vindicated. I had no need to be gone long from my new home. My affairs were in order. They would run themselves until I returned. I had never known such a solid sense of security. But History was never much of a friend to me. Over the ensuing months all I had won would vanish. Only now, in the tranquillity and wisdom of age, do I understand how God had certain plans for me. Die Fledermausen in der Turm? Der Dampf in der Darm? Das Haupt is Hauen! Sie brechen ihr Wort. Is that my fault?
¡Tengo fiebre! ¡Estoy mareado! ¡De’jeme tranquila!
SEVEN
HISTORY RARELY REPEATS ITSELF and usually offers us no more than an occasional metaphor; but events will, I think, somehow find an echoed chord. Such echoes help us reach a better understanding of the world. Gradually a significance sometimes emerges. I saw the Goat. I saw Him in Odessa. I saw Him again in Oregon where the dead live in caves hidden amongst the crags. I saw Him in Death Valley where I pursued the badmen. I saw the Goat and He tempted me. He put a piece of metal in my stomach. He showed me His sister Esmé. He told me she was my daughter. He said He would make her my wife. He promised me power over them all. He assured me that He welcomed and celebrated the rise of Science. Why should He fear Science? Why should He care if we disputed His existence?
By indulging in such disputes, He said, we always gave Him additional strength. Where He was not recognised was where He was strongest. He spoke in a hollow, weary voice and each breath was a torment to Him. Once I saw the entire Triumvirate: the Goat, the Cow and the Ram. I saw them in the shadows of that terrible temple. Rosie! Rosie! There is metal in my womb. He reached out with that cold claw and seized my heart.
I met a brother in Odessa. He was a good Jew; he is probably dead now. The wideboys sprawl in the alleys; the little birds sing untruthful songs. The synagogues are burning. And in Orange County the ashes of executed Japanese are stirred by the feet of tourists to rise on a wind that blows from Nagasaki where the steel hulls of great battleships are tormented into the ikons of our victories, rising and falling as the water turns to steam around them and their crews die unquiet deaths. And the air is like mother-of-pearl and your skin turns scarlet, stretches upon volatile flesh, then bursts and your blood blends with the sun and you and your city die in a single violent convulsion. But this was not the fault of America. It was the fault of those who, without understanding its institutions, would take advantage of our Enlightenment, our old Law, and grab at the trappings, the obvious wealth which it had gained for us. The Goat whispered to them in Odessa. It whispered to them in Memphis and Carthage and in Los Angeles. They bled me. They drank my blood. I follow no flags. I am myself. I waited for him to touch me but he never touched me. He went with me to the tram-stop. I never saw him again. Fanatic man denies the universe and apes a cruelty which is no cruelty at all but sublime equilibrium. The cities breathe and are themselves. Identity and the city fuse together. They will fly. They will fly, my cities. I am a child of my century and as old as my century. I am one of the great inventors of my age. I am the voice and the conscience of civilised Europe. My achievements are a matter of history. A record.
Thoth, disguised as a bird, was our guide through that House of Death; and Nekhbet, the vulture-crowned, was our protectress. At night we waited in the sands by the oasis and there were some who argued that the palms themselves were weeping or that the water whispered alien names, yet I saw only the face of God, benign but unapproving, looking down on me through the stars. Those stars were like little pricks of truth, like so many epitomous points which I could gather in my hands and bring together as a blinding, illuminating whole, truth in singularity, truth in simplification. My truth. My reconciliation. And my death. I was never afraid of that. Only they would not let me die with dignity. A hawk which flings himself on sudden currents and, embracing random Nature, hurtles into mystery, cares not what crushed his body while his spirit’s free. And I was to be called the Hawk. I was to be loved and called the Hawk. By the one they’d named Al War’d.
Kull al-medina, al-medina kulliha. Fi ‘l-medina di buyut ketire: Al-lela di hiya tawila tawila. Safirt min America ila hena we-ma’i sahibi we-sayisna. Bashayrt? Maybe. Suddenly I knew the release and the escape of sea travel. I was leaving all our anxieties behind me, I became my old ebullient self in no time!
‘Are we not halves of one dissevered world, whom this strange chance unites once more?’ Captain Quelch asked me as we sat together in his comfortable cabin celebrating, at his suggestion, the fact that, with Panama behind us and Haiti dead ahead, we had left American waters once and for all. He was given to such fanciful language when relaxed, and admitted that it was a habit of all his family to quote poetry. The others tended to prefer Greek, Latin or old French. He was really the only modern. He got on with me, he confided, because I preferred the present to the past and, like himself, seemed inclined towards contemporary or near-contemporary artists. I was quick to protest that I was no Futurist or faddist of any kind. I enjoyed the good, solid poetry and tales to be found in the higher type of English magazine. He agreed with enthusiasm and added, a little mysteriously, that Browning was actually his limit in that direction. ‘Although, to tell the truth, Peters, the lines seemed rather apt, you know. It does appear to me that we have a certain bond. As if we’d been pals in former lives, sort of thing. Actually, I’m a great believer in reincarnation.’
I was not surprised by this. Frequently I have found the most practical of men - soldiers, sailors, engineers - to reveal a spiritual side not out of place in a cleric and which is often noticeably absent in a man of the cloth. Captain Quelch’s education had been impeccable - Haileybury, Cambridge and, for a term or two before he decided on the Navy as his career, Doncaster - ‘Where I developed a greater interest in the racing than the ritual’ - and he was fully conversant with the classics. But his thirst for knowledge had not stopped at Cambridge. His library, testifying to a broad range of interests, showed that he lacked the prudish streak common to most Englishmen. Baudelaire and Laforgue kept company with Wilde, Swinburne and Dowson, while Meredith and Hardy rubbed shoulders with Balzac and Zola. I was especially pleased to find a small volume of Wheldrake’s Posthumous Poems which Captain Quelch said, in some delight, was amongst his favourites. He felt that, while Wilde and Wheldrake had both suffered terribly for their sexuality, only Wilde had ever fully been reinstated in the public taste. I could not agree with him more. Homophobia, I assured him, was never one of my vices.