Eyeless In Gaza (15 page)

‘Do you l-like him?' Brian had asked one day when Gerry's name came up between them. And because the question evoked an uneasy echo in his own consciousness, Anthony had answered, with a quite unnecessary sharpness, that of course he liked Gerry. ‘Why else do you suppose I go about with him?' he had concluded, looking at Brian with irritable suspicion. Brian made no reply; and the question had returned
like a boomerang upon the asker. Yes, why
did
he go about with Gerry? For of course he didn't like the man; Gerry had hurt and humiliated him again on the slightest provocation. Or rather without any provocation at all – just for fun, because it amused him to humiliate people, because he had a natural talent for inflicting pain. So why, why?

Mere snobbery, as Anthony was forced to admit to himself, was part of the discreditable secret. It was absurd and ridiculous; but the fact remained, nevertheless, that it pleased him to associate with Gerry and his friends. To be the intimate of these young aristocrats and plutocrats, and at the same time to know himself their superior in intelligence, taste, judgment, in all the things that
really
mattered, was satisfying to his vanity.

Admitting his intellectual superiority, the young barbarians expected him to pay for their admiration by amusing them. He was their intimate, yes; but as Voltaire was the intimate of Frederick the Great, as Diderot of the Empress Catherine. The resident philosopher is not easily distinguishable from the court fool.

With genuine appreciation, but at the same time patronizingly, offensively, ‘Good for the Professor!' Gerry would say after one of his sallies. Or, ‘Another drink for the old Professor' as though he were an Italian organ-grinder, playing for pennies.

The prick of remembered humiliation was sharp like an insect's sting. With sudden violence Anthony heaved himself out of his chair and began to walk, frowning, up and down the room.

A middle-class snob tolerated because of his capacities as an entertainer. The thought was hateful, wounding. ‘Why do I stand it?' he wondered. ‘Why am I such a damned fool? I shall write Gerry a note to say I can't come.' But time passed; the note remained unwritten. For, after all, he was thinking,
there were also advantages, there were also satisfactions. An evening spent with Gerry and his friends was exhilarating, was educative. Exhilarating and educative, not because of anything they said or thought – for they were all stupid, all bottomlessly ignorant; but because of what they were, of what their circumstances had made them. For, thanks to their money and their position, they were able actually to live in such freedom as Anthony had only imagined or read about. For them, the greater number of the restrictions which had always hedged him in did not even exist. They permitted themselves as a matter of course licences which he took only in theory, and which he felt constrained even then to justify with all the resources of a carefully perverted metaphysic, an ingeniously adulterated mystical theology. By the mere force of social and economic circumstances, these ignorant barbarians found themselves quite naturally behaving as he did not dare to behave even after reading all Nietzsche had said about the Superman, or Casanova about women. Nor did they have to study Patanjali or Jacob Boehme in order to find excuses for the intoxications of wine and sensuality: they just got drunk and had their girls, like that, as though they were in the Garden of Eden. They faced life, not diffidently and apologetically, as Anthony faced it, not wistfully, from behind invisible bars, but with the serenely insolent assurance of those who know that God intended them to enjoy themselves and had decreed the unfailing acquiescence of their fellows in all their desires.

True, they also had their confining prejudices; they too on occasion were as ready as poor old Brian to lock themselves up in the prison of a code. But code and prejudices were of their own particular caste; therefore, so far as Anthony was concerned, without binding force. Their example delivered him from the chains that his upbringing had fastened upon him, but was powerless to bind him with those other chains
in which they themselves walked through life. In their company the compulsions of respectability, the paralysing fear of public opinion, the inhibitory maxims of middle-class prudence fell away from him; but when Bimbo Abinger indignantly refused even to listen to the suggestion that he should sell the monstrous old house that was eating up three-quarters of his income, when Scroope complained that he would have to go into Parliament, because in his family the eldest sons had always sat in the House of Commons before coming into the title, Anthony could only feel the amused astonishment of an explorer watching the religious antics of a tribe of blackamoors. A rational being does not allow himself to be converted to the cult of Mumbo Jumbo; but he will have no objection to occasionally going a bit native. The worship of Mumbo Jumbo means the acceptance of taboos; going native means freedom. ‘True Freedom!' Anthony grinned to himself; his good humour and equanimity had returned. A snob, a middle-class snob. No doubt. But there was a reason for his snobbery, a justification. And if the lordly young barbarians tended to regard him as a sort of high-class buffoon – well, that was the price to be had to pay for their gift of freedom. There was no price to be paid for associating with the Fabians; but then, how little they had to give him! Socialist doctrines might to some extent theoretically liberate the intellect; but the example of the young barbarians was a liberation in the sphere of practice.

‘So frightfully sorry,' he scribbled in his note to Brian. ‘Suddenly remembered I'd booked myself for dinner tonight.' (‘Booked' was one of his father's words – a word he ordinarily detested for its affectation. Writing a lie, he had found it coming spontaneously to his pen.) ‘Alas' (that was also a favourite locution of his father's), ‘shan't be able to listen to you on
sin
! Wish I could get out of this, but don't see how. Yours, A.'

By the time the fruit was on the table they were all pretty drunk. Gerry Watchett was telling Scroope about that German baroness he had had on the boat, on the way to Egypt. Abinger had no audience, but was reciting limericks: the Young Lady of Wick, the Old Man of Devizes, the Young Man called Maclean – a whole dictionary of national biography. Ted and Willie were having a violent quarrel about the best way of shooting grouse. Alone of the party, Anthony was silent. Speech would have compromised the delicate happiness he was then enjoying. That last glass of champagne had made him the inhabitant of a new world, extraordinarily beautiful and precious and significant. The apples and oranges in the silver bowl were like enormous gems. Each glass, under the candles, contained not wine, but a great yellow beryl, solid and translucent. The roses had the glossy texture of satin and the shining hardness and distinctness of form belonging to metal or glass. Even sound was frozen and crystalline. The Young Lady of Kew was the equivalent, in his ears, of a piece of sculptured jade, and that violently futile discussion about grouse seemed like a waterfall in winter.
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui
, he thought with heightened pleasure. Everything was supernaturally brilliant and distinct, but at the same time how remote, how strangely irrelevant! Bright against the outer twilight of the room, the faces grouped about the table might have been things seen on the other side of a sheet of plate-glass, in an illuminated aquarium. And the aquarium was not only without, it was also, mysteriously, within him. Looking through the glass at those sea flowers and submarine gems, he was himself a fish – but a fish of genius, a fish that was also a god. I
CHTHUS
–
Iesos Christos theou huios soter
. His divine fish-soul hung there, poised in its alien element, gazing, gazing through huge eyes that perceived everything, understood everything, but having no part in what it saw.
Even his own hands lying there on the table in front of him had ceased, in any real sense, to be
his.
From his aquarium fastness he viewed them with the same detached and happy admiration as he felt for the fruits and flowers, or those other transfigured bits of still life, the faces of his friends. Beautiful hands! contrived – how marvellously! – to perform their innumerable functions – the pointing of double-barrelled guns at flying birds, the caressing of the thighs of German baronesses in liners, the playing of imaginary scales upon the table-cloth, so. Enchanted, he watched the movements of his fingers, the smooth sliding of the tendons under the skin. Exquisite hands! But no more truly a part of himself, of the essential fish-soul in its timeless aquarium, than the hands of Abinger peeling that banana, the hands of Scroope carrying a match to his cigar. I am not my body, I am not my sensations, I am not even my mind; I am that I am. I
om
that I
om.
The sacred word OM represents Him. God is not limited by time. For the One is not absent from anything, and yet is separated from all things . . .

‘Hi, Professor!' A piece of orange-peel struck him on the cheek. He started and turned round. ‘What the hell are you thinking about?' Gerry Watchett was asking in that purposely harsh voice which it amused him to put on like a hideous mask.

The momentarily troubled waters of the aquarium had already returned to rest. A fish once more, a divine and remotely happy Fish, Anthony smiled at him with serene indulgence.

‘I was thinking about Plotinus,' he said.

‘Why Plotinus?'

‘Why Plotinus? But, my dear sir, isn't it obvious? Science is reason, and reason is multitudinous.' The fish had found a tongue; eloquence flowed from the aquarium in an effortless stream. ‘But if one happens to be feeling particularly
un
multitudinous – well, what else is there to think about except
Plotinus? Unless, of course, you prefer the pseudo-Dionysius, or Eckhart, or St Teresa. The flight of the alone to the Alone. Even St Thomas is forced to admit that no mind can see the divine substance unless it is divorced from bodily senses, either by death or by some rapture. Some rapture, mark you! But a rapture is always a rapture, whatever it's due to. Whether it's champagne, or saying OM, or squinting at your nose, or looking at a crucifix, or making love – preferably in a boat, Gerry; I'm the first to admit it; preferably in a boat. What are the wild waves saying? Rapture! Ecstasy! Fairly yelling it. Until, mark you, until, the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet . . .'

‘There was a Young Fellow of Burma,' Abinger suddenly declaimed.

‘Made quiet,' Anthony repeated more loudly, ‘by the power of harmony . . .'

‘Whose betrothed had good reasons to murmur.'

‘And the deep power of joy,' shouted Anthony, ‘we see . . .'

‘But now that they're married he's

‘Been taking cantharides . . .'

‘We see into the life of things. The life of things, I tell you. The life of things. And damn all Fabians!' he added.

Anthony got back to his lodgings at about a quarter to midnight, and was unpleasantly startled, as he entered the sitting-room, to see someone rising with the violent impatience of a Jack-in-the-box from an armchair.

‘God, what a fright . . .!'

‘At last!' said Mark Staithes. His emphatically featured face wore an expression of angry impatience. ‘I've been waiting nearly an hour.' Then, with contempt, ‘You're drunk,' he added.

‘As though
you'd
never been drunk!' Anthony retorted. ‘I remember . . .'

‘So do I,' said Mark Staithes, interrupting him. ‘But that was in my first year.' In his first year, when he had felt it necessary to prove that he was manly – manlier than the toughest of them, noisier, harder-drinking. ‘I've got something better to do now.'

‘So
you
imagine,' said Anthony.

The other looked at his watch. ‘I've got about seven minutes,' he said. ‘Are you sober enough to listen?'

Anthony sat down with dignity and in silence.

Short, but square-shouldered and powerful, Mark stood over him, almost menacingly. ‘It's about Brian,' he said.

‘About Brian?' Then with a knowing smile, ‘That reminds me,' Anthony added, ‘I ought to have congratulated you on being our future president.'

‘Fool!' said Mark angrily. ‘Do you think I go about accepting charity? When he withdrew, I withdrew too.'

‘And let that dreary little Mumby walk into the job?'

‘What the devil do I care about Mumby?'

‘What do any of us care about anybody?' said Anthony sententiously. ‘Nothing, thank God. Absolutely noth . . .'

‘What does he mean by insulting me like that?'

‘Who? Little Mumby?'

‘No; Brian, of course.'

‘He thinks he's being nice to you.'

‘I don't want his damned niceness,' said Mark. ‘Why can't he behave properly?'

‘Because it amuses him to behave like a Christian.'

‘Well, then, tell him for God's sake to try it on someone else in future. I don't like having Christian tricks played on me.'

‘You want a cock to fight with, in fact.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Otherwise it's no fun being on top of the dunghill.
Whereas Brian would like us all to be jolly little capons together. Well, so far as dunghills are concerned, I'm all for Brian. It's when we come to the question of the hens that I begin to hesitate.'

Mark looked at his watch again. ‘I must go.' At the door he turned back. ‘Don't forget to tell him what I've told you. I like Brian, and I don't want to quarrel with him. But if he tries being charitable and Christian again . . .'

‘The poor boy will forfeit your esteem for ever,' concluded Anthony.

‘Buffoon!' said Staithes, and, slamming the door behind him, hurried downstairs.