Complete Poems and Plays (46 page)

And whether in Argos or England

There are certain inflexible laws

Unalterable, in the nature of music.

There is nothing at all to be done about it,

There is nothing to do about anything,

And now it is nearly time for the news

We must listen to the weather report

And the international catastrophes.

[
Exeunt
C
HORUS
] 

H
ARRY
.
John will recover, be what he always was;

Arthur again be sober, though not for very long;

And everything will go on as before. These mild surprises

Should be in the routine of normal life at Wishwood.

John is the only one of us I can conceive

As settling down to make himself at home at Wishwood,

Make a dull marriage, marry some woman stupider —

Stupider than himself. He can resist the influence

Of Wishwood, being unconscious, living in gentle motion

Of horses, and right visits to the right neighbours

At the right times; and be an excellent landlord.

A
GATHA
.
What is in your mind, Harry?

I can guess about the past and what you mean about the future;

But a present is missing, needed to connect them.

You may be afraid that I would not understand you,

You may also be afraid of being understood,

Try not to regard it as an explanation.

H
ARRY
.
I still have to learn exactly what their meaning is.

At the beginning, eight years ago,

I felt, at first, that sense of separation,

Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable —

It’s eternal, or gives a knowledge of eternity,

Because it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell.

Then the numbness came to cover it — that is another —

That was the second hell of not being there,

The degradation of being parted from my self,

From the self which persisted only as an eye, seeing.

All this last year, I could not fit myself together:

When I was inside the old dream, I felt all the same emotion

Or lack of emotion, as before: the same loathing

Diffused, I not a person, in a world not of persons

But only of contaminating presences.

And then I had no horror of my action,

I only felt the repetition of it

Over and over. When I was outside,

I could associate nothing of it with myself,

Though nothing else was real. I thought foolishly

That when I got back to Wishwood, as I had left it,

Everything would fall into place. But
they
prevent it.

I still have to find out what their meaning is.

Here I have been finding

A misery long forgotten, and a new torture,

The shadow of something behind our meagre childhood,

Some origin of wretchedness. Is that what they would show me?

And now I want you to tell me about my father.

A
GATHA
.
What do you want to know about your father?

H
ARRY
.
If I knew, then I should not have to ask.

You
know what I want to know, and that is enough:

Warburton told me that, though he did not mean to.

What I want to know is something I need to know,

And only you can tell me. I know that much.

A
GATHA
.
I had to fight for many years to win my dispossession,

And many years to keep it. What people know me as,

The efficient principal of a women’s college —

That is the surface. There is a deeper

Organisation, which your question disturbs.

H
ARRY
.
When I know, I know that in some way I shall find

That I have always known it. And that will be better.

A
GATHA
.
I will try to tell you. I hope I have the strength.

H
ARRY
.
I have thought of you as the completely strong,

The liberated from the human wheel.

So I looked to you for strength. Now I think it is

A common pursuit of liberation.

A
GATHA
.
Your father might have lived — or so I see him —

An exceptionally cultivated country squire,

Reading, sketching, playing on the flute,

Something of an oddity to his county neighbours,

But not neglecting public duties.

He hid his strength beneath unusual weakness,

The diffidence of a solitary man:

Where he was weak he recognised your mother’s power,

And yielded to it.

H
ARRY
.
                   There was no ecstasy.

Tell me now, who were my parents?

A
GATHA
.
Your father and your mother.

H
ARRY
.
                                                     You tell me nothing.

A
GATHA
.
The dead man whom you have assumed to be your father,

And my sister whom you acknowledge as your mother:

There is no mystery here.

H
ARRY
.
                                 What then?

A
GATHA
.
You see your mother as identified with this house —

It was not always so. There were many years

Before she succeeded in making terms with Wishwood,

Until she took your father’s place, and reached the point where

Wishwood supported her, and she supported Wishwood.

At first it was a vacancy. A man and a woman

Married, alone in a lonely country house together,

For three years childless, learning the meaning

Of loneliness. Your mother wanted a sister here

Always. I was the youngest: I was then

An undergraduate at Oxford. I came

Once for a long vacation. I remember

A summer day of unusual heat

For this cold country.

H
ARRY
.
                           And then?

A
GATHA
.
There are hours when there seems to be no past or future,

Only a present moment of pointed light

When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand

To the flames. They only come once,

Thank God, that kind. Perhaps there is another kind,

I believe, across a whole Thibet of broken stones

That lie, fang up, a lifetime’s march. I have believed this.

H
ARRY
.
I have known neither.

A
GATHA
.
The autumn came too soon, not soon enough.

The rain and wind had not shaken your father

Awake yet. I found him thinking

How to get rid of your mother. What simple plots!

He was not suited to the role of murderer.

H
ARRY
.
In what way did he wish to murder her?

A
GATHA
.
Oh, a dozen foolish ways, each one abandoned

For something more ingenious. You were due in three months’ time;

You would not have been born in that event: I stopped him.

I can take no credit for a little common sense,

He would have bungled it.

   I did not want to kill
you
!

You to be killed! What were you then? only a thing called ‘life’ —

Something that should have been
mine,
as I felt then.

Most people would not have felt that compunction

If they felt no other. But I wanted you!

If that had happened, I knew I should have carried

Death in life, death through lifetime, death in my womb.

I felt that you were in some way mine!

And that in any case I should have no other child.

H
ARRY
.
And have me. That is the way things happen.

Everything is true in a different sense,

A sense that would have seemed meaningless before.

Everything tends towards reconciliation

As the stone falls, as the tree falls. And in the end

That is the completion which at the beginning

Would have seemed the ruin.

Perhaps my life has only been a dream

Dreamt through me by the minds of others. Perhaps

I only dreamt I pushed her.

A
GATHA
.
                                  So I had supposed. What of it?

What we have written is not a story of detection,

Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation.

It is possible that you have not known what sin

You shall expiate, or whose, or why. It is certain

That the knowledge of it must precede the expiation.

It is possible that sin may strain and struggle

In its dark instinctive birth, to come to consciousness

And so find expurgation. It is possible

You are the consciousness of your unhappy family,

Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame.

Indeed it is possible. You may learn hereafter,

Moving alone through flames of ice, chosen

To resolve the enchantment under which we suffer.

H
ARRY
.
Look, I do not know why,

I feel happy for a moment, as if I had come home.

It is quite irrational, but now

I feel quite happy, as if happiness

Did not consist in getting what one wanted

Or in getting rid of what can’t be got rid of

But in a different vision. This is like an end.

A
GATHA
.
And a beginning. Harry, my dear,

I feel very tired, as only the old feel.

The young feel tired at the end of an action —

The old, at the beginning. It is as if

I had been living all these years upon my capital,

Instead of earning my spiritual income daily:

And I am old, to start again to make my living.

H
ARRY
.
But you are not unhappy, just now?

A
GATHA
.
                                                          What does the word mean?

There’s relief from a burden that I carried,

And exhaustion at the moment of relief.

The burden’s yours now, yours