In the ancient trees of the park the birds were waking up, thousands and thousands of them, birds of every kind, whose names one never knew, suddenly calling aloud as if in response to some secret alarm signal only they could hear. Every one of them was singing. In the whole of the sky there was not an inch of empty space — every atom of the fresh morning air was filled with birdsong. But what was there for them to shout about? Were they praising God, as St Francis taught, or demanding breakfast, or greeting their spouses, these precious little birds of the sky? And then they started to take off, in all their thousands and thousands, large wings and small flitting about with a freshness for which there are no words, every one soaring on wings… and it was as if the very next moment the trees themselves would fly up after their beloved inhabitants, along with the green marble basins, the slow-footed flights of marble steps, the pale statues of gods, the embankment and the whole park swathed in mist, and a great darkness would arise in its place, and the Earth itself would be completely alone, with only me left behind, and the mutual loneliness of the two of us. The utter, utter loneliness.
At the door to their room I took my leave of Marcelle, with a formal kiss on the hand.
“Tomorrow,” she said grandly.
“Today,” I replied. “It’s been tomorrow for some time.”
I never saw her again. While she slept off her exhaustion after the party, I moved out of the house. After some searching I went to live in La Varenne, beside the Marne, at the other end of the Paris conurbation. At first I had a lot of difficulty: every change of line unnerved me. I had to cross the metro system from right to left, and Vincennes now stood for the way home — previously it had been Maillot, in the opposite direction. For an absent-minded person it was truly horrible. But after a while I got used to it.
1932
FIN DE SIÈCLE
THE CHESHIRE CHEESE PUB in London is famous for having remained exactly as it was when the great Dr Johnson, that commanding figure of eighteenth-century English literature, sat there and delivered his immortal banalities, so faithfully recorded for posterity by the assiduous Boswell. The most distinguished poets of the age have met there ever since. Towards the end of the last century, for example, it was here that Tyrconnel, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and John Davidson held their weekly reunions.
On this particular occasion only three of the quartet were present, Tyrconnel, Dowson and Johnson. Tyrconnel was holding forth. He was a languorous, deeply unconventional Irish poet, as signified by the single curl of silky black hair that strayed so casually over his forehead. Hardly a week went by without his having made some new mystical discovery, some fresh instance of telepathy, perhaps, or some interesting notes he had come across inserted by an archangel into a piece of Old Irish prose. He chatted away about such things with the easy familiarity and volubility with which others might discuss a football match. This was in marked contrast to Lionel Johnson, who would deliver his observations about the weather in the manner of a revelation: “There was a thick fog in Chelsea this morning,” he would regularly announce, and glare balefully around the room, his hand clapped on some invisible sword.
“You deal out a pack of cards marked with mystical symbols,” Tyrconnel was saying. “The important thing is the square grid on the back of the card. It gives you the matrix in which the secret meaning is contained. Then, if an adept studies the cards at a particular hour of the night, his visions will correspond directly with the symbols. If the card stands for Public Esteem, he will be looking at his future career. If he draws the symbol for Heaven, he will learn the nature of the greatest happiness that lies in store for him…”
“Very interesting,” observed Lionel Johnson, with his customary decisiveness.
Tyrconnel’s face reddened slightly.
“I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Johnson, if I hadn’t seen some extremely convincing experiments carried out in our little group.”
“In our little group” was a regular saying of his, though it was never quite clear in what species of secret institution or laboratory these improbable researches were conducted. Johnson and Dowson never asked. They were afraid that he might already have told them, only they hadn’t been listening at the time.
After this, Johnson spoke about his new Tractatus, in which he would show once and for all that Bloody Mary had been quite right to send the Protestant martyrs to the stake. Tyrconnel listened with great interest. He did not for a moment believe in Johnson’s Catholicism, any more than Johnson did in his mystical anecdotes. He knew that it was all part of the business of being a poet, the licensed eccentricity of the poet’s view of the world. The precise nature of the world view didn’t matter — what did was the burdensome honour of the vocation, in which verse forms amounted to dogma and symbols represented political affiliations.
Then came that memorable business with the Scots.
Davidson, the one Scottish member of the group, finally arrived. Without a word of forewarning he had brought along two of his fellow Scots — tall, thin, badly dressed young men with grey, baldly staring eyes. They sat themselves down with an air of embittered arrogance, the way Scots often do, and proceeded without the slightest inhibition to pour scorn on Tyrconnel’s mystical revelations. This did not particularly bother Tyrconnel — he was not a man who took himself seriously — but then one of the newcomers suddenly barked at Lionel Johnson:
“And why aren’t you drinking?”
“I never do,” Johnson replied coldly. “You know, when I was still quite young I once fell on my head…”
But his interlocutor was not going to let him digress. He made his contempt for Johnson’s asceticism abundantly clear. He poured scorn on everything he considered unhealthy, decadent, over-refined and self-consciously crafted. In his opinion only the Scottish peasantry were worth anything in this world, and no serious writer could get by without drawing on the ancient, undiluted wisdom of the Gaelic people and the primordial power of the ballad tradition.
The three lyric poets listened to this for some time, with polite smiles on their faces, much as St Sebastian had done on a similar occasion. They stroked and played with the dog under the table, then suddenly stood up and took their leave.
All three knew, without a word being said, that it was the end of their weekly reunions for ever. They could never again return to the Cheshire Cheese without exposing themselves to the risk of a further meeting with the two Scottish representatives of the Primal Force. They themselves were gentlemen of far greater refinement, fin de siècle to the core and Englishmen to boot, and they could think of absolutely nowhere else they might meet, that is to say, without asking Davidson to dispense with his Highland friends. Thus these convivial gatherings, of such great significance in the history of English literature, came to an end.
Having escorted Johnson home, Tyrconnel remained out in the fog, sensing the utter emptiness of his life. As he drifted from gas lamp to gas lamp a strange feeling gnawed away at him — the same sort of half-conscious preoccupation you get when a particularly attractive woman steps onto the train while you’re chatting to your friends: you hardly notice her, and no one quite realises why you all keep turning your heads in one direction, until eventually you spot her. But this particular concern, when he finally identified what it was, was not quite so appealing.