His father’s letter—
It lay on the floor between his feet, the phrases of it looked up at him like round eyes — he had flung it there to forget it, flung it down in anger and hatred, but now it watched him. The phrases had of course stuck in his mind, only because they had so sickened him with anger and disgust — the typewritten phrases of a typical businessman’s smoothness and complacency. I do not presume to advise — as you are doutbless aware — far be it from me — I can only report that the writer of this anonymous letter says — tired of your irresponsible behavior — dragging my name into the police courts — not enough that you were a continual worry to your mother — and so on and so on.
Somebody had written to him, obviously — probably Sandbach. And Gerta must have given him the address.
And they were threatening police action?
He looked down at it, pushed it farther under the table with his toe. The hard, firm, coarse signature, written with large open letters and a heavy pen, lay there like some ugly relic of his own past, something hateful and obscene, something to be destroyed. The angry energy of hypocrisy—
To find this waiting for him in the letter box, with its menacing special delivery stamp, had undoubtedly made its contribution to his increasing sense of evil and ugliness, it had at once occurred to him — so right was his intuition — that it might be better to destroy it unread; but also it had occurred to him that it might actually contain something in the way of news. It was as if, even through the unopened envelope, he had been able to feel a threat, the encroachment of something: perhaps, however, only because the arrival of a letter from his father was in itself so unusual. He had waited, called up Jones first — keeping the letter in his pocket — and it was odd now to consider the intimate and by no means accidental connection between the two things. So intimate, in fact, that had he read the letter first he might not have telephoned to Jones at all. At any rate, it would have been necessary to consider it, to consider whether in the light of this threat the immediate project had not better be abandoned, the meeting with Jones postponed; perhaps even to consider the substitution of some one else for Jones, since it was now possible that Toppan knew who Jones was. The letter lay in his pocket speaking of this, while he himself spoke with Jones; just as later, in his room, the conversation with Jones spoke softly and disconcertingly through the curt phrases of the letter. It was peculiarly right that the two things should thus have coincided in time — but it was also peculiarly unpleasant.
He teased a cigarette from the opened packet on the red table, lit it, walked to the window. The smoke drifted backwards over his shoulder in a wide flat band of gray, undulated a little towards the floor, then softly dispersed in an upward vagueness towards the ceiling by the bathroom door. He watched it, saw the last pale thread of smoke lick neatly over the top of the door, and suddenly remembered that long ago he had meant to make a study of drafts in this fashion. “The flight of cigarette smoke is only a draft made manifest.” He said this aloud, as he crossed the room to open the door to the corridor, he said it with amusement, and then added:
— There goes the professor’s clock.
The clock had struck the half hour. Standing just outside the corridor door he blew upward a long soft plume of smoke, blew it towards the top of the doorjamb, but not forcibly: with the effect, therefore, of merely releasing, for observation, a trial balloon of smoke, a willing cloud. After a barely perceptible pause, the smoke billowed downward very slightly and then swooped in a long wide dispersed wave upward into the room. Keeping quite still, lest his own movement create any artificial current of air, he repeated the action: again the smoke swirled neatly, after a moment’s hesitation, into the quiet room — obviously the air in the corridor was warmer than the air inside. This being the case, the current near the floor must, of course, flow the other way. Stooping close to the linoleum floor he exhaled a soft cloud before him. It wavered, broke, and came loosely backward across and round his face. Exactly as one would expect.
The same thing would probably be true of the doors to the bedroom and the kitchenette?…
The bedroom worked beautifully — the draft was sharper, more dramatic, the smoke was as if violently seized, hurled headlong down invisible rapids. But the kitchenette, presumably because its window was shut, or simply because it was out of the path of the main currents, was a disappointment: the movement of the smoke, whether at floor or ceiling, was scarcely perceptible, sluggish, equivocal. In fact, it would go exactly where propelled. He blew cloud after cloud into the little boxlike room, it hung swaying and gently convolving over the table, over the white enameled refrigerator, over the gas stove, almost motionless, passive. It was like a backwater of a river: it was stagnant; and looking at it he became abruptly aware of the profound nocturnal silence. It was that moment between night and morning when the traffic is stillest, the brief interval between the end of the night life and the beginning of the day — the hour when life is at its ebb. In hospitals, people were now in the act of dying. And in Reservoir Street, at this instant—
He turned quickly away, walked to the corridor and closed the door. Returning, he stared out at the palely brightening clouds, heard again that grazing patter of the drizzle on the pane, saw the little chain of fine bright beads which had been lightly etched there. But the rain could make no difference — it neither added to nor subtracted from the wide appearance and nature of things. The structure beneath it was exactly the same, — undiminished, loyal, unsentimentaclass="underline" what one had made, or what one was making, was still the same, kept its hard and clear identity. And the whole face of the world, if one now dared to see it thus, was one enormous growing “thing”—a vast and dreadful or beautiful flower: a flower which, if beautiful, was also terrible: as if the universe might be simply a single outrageous pond-lily whose roots were murderous. Yes, it was exactly that. The blood drawn up by that profound taproot made possible the thrust and loveliness of the blind enormous flower: the perfect synthesis of good and evil. And if this was so, if life was in essence really like this, why then was it possible to feel any compunctions? Unless, of course, one simply failed outright in one’s attempt to identify oneself at all points with life: failed, at it were, to stretch oneself co-terminally with the four points of the cross, and to become, oneself, cruciform.…