With the distance between me and the Druid, as well as my growing need to trust fewer people with the weight of my private inquiries, this lookout cartridge narrows from the walls of its slot. But it enlarges too so that that which lies between, crowds that between which it lies.
Your breathing, said my Druid Andsworth, and stepped aside as if to reveal the thing I next saw in his tome-lined den, the phone on the desk.
You’re back from New York. Was it a necessary trip?
I told him that once begun it had become necessary.
There was a fire in the grate. The phone receiver when I touched it was warm. (There was a copy of English Country Life open on the desk.) I took my hand off the phone and straightened up.
But I’d passed beyond Mr. Andsworth, having seen through that strangely familiar little woman in the front doorway that he was somehow involved with Gene and thus part of the network I had thought him authoritatively separate from. And if he could not yet know how I’d identified myself at the door, he knew either from reports or by the way I had walked into his study that I had knowledge which altered him.
I feared for you, he said, remaining at the open study door.
I let him talk — he said he’d sensed in me a need for cures that he could never satisfy, I might as well set off thunderclaps on Guy Fawkes night — he’d had only a handful of principles which might but only might be received in the body of my mind, he said, in such a way as to open currents between cell and cell, recollection and recollection, lungs and shoulders, head and hand, even (to let the fancy play a bit) between on the one hand America and England on a Mercator grid, and on the other America and England on some other representation — oh he’d sensed in me when I’d first come (in March, wasn’t it?) a failure of collaboration with myself which he felt could not be especially helped by his macrobiotic community (which even if I’d been interested would have been inconvenient since I had a family I was devoted to way up in Highgate who incidentally — and he underscored the words — he hoped were well) but—
I interrupted to ask if I might use his phone.
He closed the door and continued.
I must have known, he said, that the film good or bad could hardly make a revolution in my life, and if it became an obsession might interpose itself between the Logos in me and the active instincts that, as Poseidonus tells us, must be organized by Logos. And if he did not hold dogmatically with the old arguments by which this control is articulated — as I myself must know from his efforts to associate the electronic idiom (which he thought closer to my personal interests) with the gods who are aspects of the one total Nature — any more than he necessarily believed with ancient Druids that the world is literally consumed from time to time by fire or water — any more than he disbelieved in the Norse gods—
I had begun to dial, begun amid my host’s words as if only rudeness could roll me through (and I even whispered audibly the third number).
— any more than one would ever now talk seriously about human sacrifices at Midsummer Solstice.
Of my daughter Jenny? I shot out at him.
Or a substitute for her! he shot back, startled into automatic humor.
I dialed only two more numbers, for I’d decided a real Dagger on the other end of the line might Cramp whatever now occurred to me. I held the receiver to my ear. Mr. Andsworth in retort raised his forearm so the sleeve of the dark green jacket of his suit pulled back to reveal his gold-banded Timex which he consulted with pursed lips.
To the phone (which began to crackle and then to whisper with one of those crossed connections one often overhears in the London telephone system) I spoke as if to Dagger.
Admit, friend, I said, you wanted the snapshot of Paul to appear in Suitcase Slowly Packed.
I waited. I said, I don’t care what it would have looked like with the film slowed down. Why didn’t you tell me in the first place? We might have saved our film.
I waited, then said, I don’t care, Claire’s told me what she and Graf have for their own film using our remains.
I paused for a long count, then said, I know all about that. They can pinch a dozen Xeroxes, they still have to find my original.
But pausing yet again — recalling Dagger’s tales of summer stock in St. Louis and a screen test in which he had to talk on the phone, I saw (through this seeming irrelevance) that Dagger might often have been tracking and shooting people whose significance in this story he himself could only guess from what Claire had told him.
No, I said, when I finish here I’m going right back to New York. I’ve got to see Monty about his sister and above all I’ve got to see Claire.
Oh I paused, I paused! And you who have me, whatever is inside me, must imagine what energy I tapped from that almost dead phone. I said, Of course we’re still pals, Dagger, but listen man, we got work to do on the Bonfire in Wales.
Mr. Andsworth was panting in an easy chair by the gilt-tooled encyclopedias and folios and some portfolios that might hold prints and maps. The color had so gone from his gaunt cheeks that last night’s white stubble was now hard to see. I had been almost tired in the cab, but rather than lean too close to one time or the other I had kept my body buoyed in some gimbaled space, I’d passed through one gate, then another. And now through my thoughts about Dagger roused by an imaginary conversation with him, I’d found such energy that I could have rushed on foot eight London miles to take Lorna twice before tea.
Wales, said my Druid.
I know, I said, and taking a chance added, the meaning of the grove, the man in the grove whom you called a guru whom that lovely stern woman with the apple cheeks tried to shield—
I almost said Elspeth! as in my own talk I found the softening fade from present to past to present through the fat red little old woman at the door, some outer or other image of Elspeth herself beyond any difference between color and black and white.
I have to go, I said, hoping for what I now received (and wondering where my suitcase was). I hung up.
Mr. Andsworth looked ill.
Crazy Wednesday, I said.
I, he said, could see no reason why you should not film Stonehenge. It was what you wished. I knew your friend’s acquaintance with certain people. You know my vision of a benign violence I will not live to see. I sincerely wished some new order for you yourself and for your dear wife — even a return to America. I did not know after all what I see I should have divined — that you would become involved in the violence that Paul in May was determined to sequester himself from once and for all. Believe me, I knew little, and know little more perhaps than you — it’s Thursday not Wednesday — and maybe knew more then than now — only that these people are beyond me. I do not want to know what you know, do you see? I was concerned about Paul as I was about others whom I know in their individual contributions to — the continuum — even you, who were at best a marginal case. I was amused; yes, that’s it, I was amused; and that is why I made my little remark about Cape Kennedy.
And about being a tourist? I said.
No. That was more serious.
Do you know Chad’s brothers?
Not Chad’s.
Who were you phoning? Your phone was warm.
Who were you phoning just now?
The Druid’s door came toward me and I opened it. I bade Mr. Andsworth as gentle a goodbye as I could find in me.
But when I reached the front door and had my case in hand, he spoke again. He was at the end of the hall’s twilight—entre chien et loup is the quaint French for twilight — and Andsworth said, Mr. Cartwright, someday the destruction of your film will seem part of a large endless harmony, believe that. Mary told me (and I enter it here like a stabbingly mysterious communication)—