And then, how those bamboo pieces rankled! But I would have furnished the flat in chintzes, if only she could have been prevented from poisoning the springs of relationship. Chamberlain was horrified by her stolid and utterly ladylike composure. “What a little Magdalene,” he remarked, as usual never slow to say what was most truthful and most inconvenient. “One of these days she will say, ‘Mrs. Gregory to you, young man.’ Seriously Gregory, where does this tram ride end?”
Can you imagine me remarking, “I think it’s shortsighted of you, young man, to expect me to help you criticize my own wife?”
The Chamberlains hardly ever called after that. One gets used to being very much alone. However I missed the fine rolling arguments, the eternal questions of desire, marriage, etc.
Of course, there were spaces between the stars occasionally. When she was ill, weak as a kitten, there were rarer moments, when our lives seemed to burn up again, twist up into red shapes of real fire and tenderness. Passion flourishes on tears and self-reproaches. But the contact was tenuous; a precarious crossing from island to island over immense gulfs. Superimposed always across our world was the notation of the disease, with its movements up and down the chart, unpredictable. Yes, it was my world dying, I can see that now, in retrospect; falling away into wanness and death. Without any sort of emotion we were waiting for the last convulsion of matter, the last shaky dredging out of the lungs, bright spurt of blood, untying of fingers and knees.
I would give anything for it to have been as I wrote it. In spite of my defects the potential emotion is there, you must admit it. It should have been a mouth-to-mouth affair with an elegant epigraph and a cracker motto for an epilogue. Gracie died just at the time when I had no emotion whatsoever to spend on her: dingily, surrounded by nurses and heartless starched blouses, in a Bournemouth nursing home. What thoughts went through that silly little head at the last, one does not know. There was no movement in the room, except the prodigious movement of the sea. Mist, and the rain hissing along the concrete marine parade. In the silence you could hear the waves combing up across your thoughts, washing them, sucking back the impurities as they went back. Not even the fashionable numbness, I assure you. Lightheaded as a bell. The rigor had set the bashed face of my little tart in a Christ-like grin of pure imbecility. In my imagination I fell upon the corpse, and enacted a whole scene out of a Greek tragedy. There was nothing moving in the room except the gigantic sea licking the windowpanes, and my thoughts in their heroic mime. All my life I have done this — imagined my actions. I have never taken part in them. It is the catharsis of pure action which is so wounding an absolute to contemplate now. Invultuation! Daily I pierce the image of myself, and nothing happens.
(I am obsessed by the imaginary triviality of all this. Is this just another tic born of diffidence? Am I concerned, here, privately, standing on my own soul’s ground, with the creation of literature?)
History is a study which has none of the venom of reality in it. Your protagonist, your chorus, your crowd: everything on the stage has no more personality than an old pack of cards. But autobiography is another matter altogether: if you are honest, a continual, a painful kinosis. If you are dishonest, an eternal fear.
I have been rereading these pages; a little weary and disgusted at the way I prey upon myself; a little horrified at the squeals which go up from them. Memories of De Profundis!
Since I returned from Bournemouth — alone, the very word is like a bell — I have had all my time to myself. I see no one, except occasionally Tarquin, occasionally Morgan. There is nothing to do, nothing to be done. Yet, this is a lie, because this time has been the most critical in my life; the most vital, as far as the making of decisions goes, I have ever known. I have been glad to be alone, to revise the vast catalogue of thoughts and actions which have been born in me. My body is here, like a vast unused library in which no one has interested himself for years. Aware all at once of the battered volumes around me, I have been indexing them, estimating the mental and spiritual calibre of their original collector. It is fearsome work. Here an Ella Wheeler Wilcox, there a Freud … further on an Old Moore’s Almanac, a Baedeker. But where is the Black Book — that repository for all the uncut gems of creation? I grope along the shelves, blind.
This is my forty days in the wilderness. There has been time to revise, to annotate, to gloze. Fiat voluntas. On the manuscript I shall draw a Phoenix, with its feathers in flames; a raving piece of heraldry to insist on the eternal desire in me — to confess and be assoiled. Meanwhile, I wander along in my private wilderness, broken-mouthed with thirst, humming the Te Deum, envying everyone. Yes, the butcher, the baker, the nun and the candlestick maker. The porter who brings me my meals, and stands like a carving with the glass of beer held in his paw. Even Tarquin whose struggle is not with the Holy Ghost but with his own weakness.
Gracie’s father, now. There is a subject for envy. My wire brought him down the following day. Small, muscular, with one of those fine ascetic heads you see in Renaissance frescoes: a helmet of small fine bones, pressing down in planes to the temples. His words were gnarled and twisted, it seemed, by the shelf of pearly false teeth which they had to pass. His first hoarse query as he stepped from the train was, “Is she still fresh?” Walking towards the waiting taxi I explained that she was. Silent he walked beside me, with a queer jauntiness, as if propelled not so much by the movement of his muscles as by an explosion in each foot as it touched the ground. In the taxi he undid his soiled grey muffler, and produced an old tin case with cigarettes in it. We smoked in silence. “I didn’t bring her ma,” he said at last; “she’s queer, you know. Yers, a little queer.”
In the silence of authority we were shown into a little room, where she lay, amused, like some obscene flower dragged out of the underworld.
Her father advanced towards her with a series of noiseless explosions. “I must say,” he observed, “they made a fine job of it. A fine job.” Tap, tap, tap, went his fingernails against the wood. Yes there was no doubt. It was a first-rate job. As if contemplating some definite gesture he turned to me, then stopped and resumed his nonchalant assessment of things. I was somehow afraid he was going to shake hands with me over the body, and compliment me on the fine job I’d made of the whole business. He stared down with his watchful, slightly bloodshot eyes.
But it was when he lifted the sheets, and started to examine her more closely, that a spear entered my left side; there was a quality of curiosity in his pose whose meaning I could not guess, but which made me somehow curious of myself as an interloper, almost as if I were intruding in the unpleasant poignance of a private domestic scene. I turned to the window and lit a cigarette with profound embarrassment. It was all in extremely bad taste — Gracie giving up her ghost so easily, lying there so wan; and this little nut of a man running his blunt workman’s thumbs over her body, as if he were touching marble, considering its smoothness. No movement in the room, but the sea. I was stifling slowly in my own cigarette smoke when he turned and said, with decision, “Well, that’s that.”
If there were any private thoughts locked away in that bony skull of his, I did not get a glimpse of them. For the night he had taken lodgings, he said, in the commercial hotel — the Caledonia stern and wild — which was at the end of the road. Turned on his heel after a civil greeting, and left me staring after him, down the long rain-shining streets. I walked up and down the dark parade until nearly morning, trying to sort out those fragmentary impulses, emotions, which weighed me down, and put a fog across reality. Nothing echoing in my mind but the vast reports of the waves against the concrete, the drizzle of rain on my mouth. And her father? More than ever an enigma: self-contained, airtight, damp-proof; locked in silence under the shabby overcoat and soiled muffler; behind the fine plate of bones in his skull. One could beat against his personality again and again, with a sea of queries, advances, intimacies, and the stability of his position was unaltered. Over and above all this, like the very lunge and swing of the dark sea, there was the sad recognition of my failure to mix the real and the unreal, my failure to make imagination life. It was only then that I could have wept: for myself.