The Collector (27 page)

Freeze him to death.

He is absolutely inferior to me in all ways. His one superiority is his ability to keep me here. That’s the only power he has. He can’t behave or think or speak or do anything else better than I can—nearly as well as I can—so he’s going to be the Old Man of the Sea until I shake him off somehow.

It will have to be by force.

I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I
know
now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he doesn’t exist, really.

These last few days I’ve felt Godless. I’ve felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns—all silly and useless.

I’m trying to explain why I’m breaking with my principles (about never committing violence). It is still my principle, but I see you have to break principles sometimes to survive. It’s no good trusting vaguely in your luck, in Providence or God’s being kind to you. You have to act and fight for yourself.

The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It’s obvious, it stares you in the face. There
must
be a God and he
can’t
know anything about us.

(Same evening.) I’ve been very mean with him all day. Several times he’s tried to speak, but I’ve shut him up. Did I want him to bring me anything? I said, I want nothing. I am your prisoner. If you give me food I shall eat it to keep alive. Our relations from now on are strictly those of a prisoner and a warder. Now please leave me alone.

Luckily I’ve plenty to read. He’ll go on bringing me cigarettes (if he doesn’t I shan’t ask him for them) and food. That’s all I want of him.

He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.

I’m making him wish he never set eyes on me. He brought in some baked beans for lunch. I was reading on the bed. He stood for a moment and then started to go out. I jumped to the table, picked up the plate and hurled it at him. I don’t like baked beans, he knows it, I suppose he’d been lazy. I wasn’t in a temper, I just pretended. He stood there with the filthy little bits of orange sauce on his so-clean clothes and looking sheepish. I don’t want any lunch, I snapped at him. And turned my back.

I ate chocolates all the afternoon. He didn’t reappear until supper-time. There was caviare and smoked salmon and cold chicken (he buys them ready-cooked somewhere)—all things he knows I like—and a dozen other things he knows I like, the cunning brute. It’s not the buying them that’s cunning, it’s just that I can’t help being grateful (I didn’t actually say I was grateful, but I wasn’t sharp), it’s that he presents them so humbly, with such an air of please-don’t-thank-me and I-deserve-it-all. When he was arranging my supper-things on the table, I had an irresistible desire to giggle. Awful. I wanted to collapse on the bed and scream. He was so perfectly himself. And I am so cooped up.

Down here my moods change so rapidly. All determination to do one thing one hour; all for another the next.

It’s no use. I’m not a hater by nature. It’s as if somewhere in me a certain amount of good-will and kindness is manufactured every day; and it must come out. If I bottle it up, then it bursts out.

I wasn’t nice to him, I don’t want to be nice to him, I shan’t be nice to him. But it was a struggle not to be ordinary to him. (I mean little things like “that was a nice meal.”) As it was I said nothing. When he said, “Will that be all” (like a butler), I said, “Yes, you can go now,” and turned my back. He would have got a shock if he could have seen my face. It was smiling, and when he shut the door, I was laughing. I couldn’t help it again. Hysteria.

Something I have been doing a lot these last days. Staring at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I don’t seem real to myself, it suddenly seems that it isn’t my reflection only a foot or two away. I have to look aside. I look all over my face, at my eyes, I try to see what my eyes say. What I am. Why I’m here.

It’s because I’m so lonely. I have to look at an intelligent face. Anyone who has been locked away like this would understand. You become very real to yourself in a strange way. As you never were before. So much of you is given to ordinary people, suppressed, in ordinary life. I watch my face and I watch it move as if it is someone else’s. I stare myself out.

I sit with myself.

Sometimes it’s like a sort of spell, and I have to put my tongue out and wrinkle my nose to break it.

I sit down here in the absolute silence with my reflection, in a sort of state of mystery.

In a trance.

It’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep.

I hate myself.

I nearly became a murderess tonight.

I shall never be the same again.

It is difficult to write. My hands are bound. I’ve got the gag off.

It all began at lunch. I realized that I was having to struggle not to be nice to him. Because I felt I must talk to someone. Even him. At least he is a human being. When he went away after lunch, I wanted to call him back to talk. What I felt was quite different from what I decided I should feel two days ago. So I made a new decision. I could never hit him with anything down here. I’ve watched him so much with that in mind. And he never turns his back to me. Besides, there’s no weapon. So I thought, I’ve got to get upstairs and find something, some means. I had several ideas.

Otherwise I was afraid I would fall into the old trap of pitying him.

So I was a bit nicer at supper-time and said I needed a bath (which I did). He went away, came back, we went up. And there, it seemed a sign, specially left for me, was a small axe. It was on the kitchen window-sill, which is next to the door. He must have been chopping wood outside and forgotten to hide it. My always being down here.

We passed indoors too quickly for me to do anything then.

But I lay in the bath and thought. I decided it must be done. I had to catch up the axe and hit him with the blunt end, knock him out. I hadn’t the least idea where on the head was the best place to hit or how hard it had to be.

Then I asked to go straight back. As we went out through the kitchen door, I dropped my talcum powder and things and stood to one side, towards the window-sill, as if I was looking to see where they’d gone. He did just what I wanted and bent forward to pick them up. I wasn’t nervous, I picked the axe up very neatly, I didn’t scrape the blade and it was the blunt end. But then… it was like waking up out of a bad dream. I had to hit him and I couldn’t but I had to.

Then he began to straighten up (all this happened in a flash, really) and I did hit him. But he was turning and I didn’t hit straight. Or hard enough. I mean, I lashed out in a panic at the last moment. He fell sideways, but I knew he wasn’t knocked out, he still kept hold of me, I suddenly felt I had to kill him or he would kill me. I hit him again, but he had his arm up, at the same time he kicked out and knocked me off my feet.

It was too horrible. Panting, straining, like animals. Then suddenly I knew it was—I don’t know, undignified. It sounds absurd, but that was it. Like a statue lying on its side. Like a fat woman trying to get up off the grass.

We got up, he pushed me roughly towards the door, keeping a tight hold of me. But that was all. I had a funny feeling it was the same for him—disgusting.

I thought someone may have heard, even though I couldn’t call out. But it was windy. Wet and cold. No one would have been out.

I’ve been lying on the bed. I soon stopped crying. I’ve been lying for hours in the dark and thinking.

I am ashamed. I let myself down vilely.

I’ve come to a series of decisions. Thoughts.

Violence and force are wrong. If I use violence I descend to his level. It means that I have no real belief in the power of reason, and sympathy and humanity. That I lameduck people only because it flatters me, not because I believe they need my sympathy. I’ve been thinking back to Ladymont, to people I lameducked there. Sally Margison. I lameducked her just to show the Vestal Virgins that I was cleverer than they. That I could get her to do things for me that she wouldn’t do for them. Donald and Piers (because I’ve lameducked him in a sense, too)—but they’re both attractive young men. There were probably hundreds of other people who needed lameducking, my sympathy, far more than those two. And anyway, most girls would have jumped at the chance of lameducking them.

I’ve given up too soon with Caliban. I’ve got to take up a new attitude with him. The prisoner-warder idea was silly. I won’t spit at him any more. I’ll be silent when he irritates me. I’ll treat him as someone who needs all my sympathy and understanding. I’ll go on trying to teach him things about art. Other things.

There’s only one way to do things. The right way. Not what they meant by “the Right Way” at Ladymont. But the way you feel is right. My own right way.

I am a moral person. I am not ashamed of being moral. I will not let Caliban make me immoral; even though he deserves all my hatred and bitterness
and
an axe in his head.

(Later.) I’ve been nice to him. That is, not the cat I’ve been lately. As soon as he came in I made him let me look at his head, and I dabbed some Dettol on it. He was nervous. I make him jumpy. He doesn’t trust me. That is precisely the state I shouldn’t have got him into.

It’s difficult, though. When I’m being beastly to him, he has such a way of looking sorry for himself that I begin to hate myself. But as soon as I begin to be nice to him, a sort of self-satisfaction seems to creep into his voice and his manner (very discreet, he’s been humility itself all day, no reproach about last night, of course) and I begin to want to goad and slap him again.

A tightrope.

But it’s cleared the air.

(Night.) I tried to teach him what to look for in abstract art after supper. It’s hopeless. He has it fixed in his poor dim noddle that art is fiddling away (he can’t understand why I don’t “rub out”) until you get an exact photographic likeness and that making lovely cool designs (Ben Nicholson) is vaguely immoral. I can see it makes a nice pattern, he said. But he won’t concede that “making a nice pattern” is art. With him, it’s that certain words have terribly strong undertones. Everything to do with art embarrasses him (and I suppose fascinates him). It’s
all
vaguely immoral. He knows great art is great, but “great” means locked away in museums and spoken about when you want to show off. Living art, modern art shocks him. You can’t talk about it with him because the word “art” starts off a whole series of shocked, guilty ideas in him.

I wish I knew if there were many people like him. Of course I know the vast majority—especially the New People—don’t care a damn about any of the arts. But is it because they are like him? Or because they just couldn’t care less? I mean, does it really bore them (so that they don’t need it at all in their lives) or does it secretly shock and dismay them, so that they have to pretend to be bored?

I’ve just finished
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
. It’s shocked me. It’s shocked me in itself and it’s shocked me because of where I am.

It shocked me in the same way as
Room at the Top
shocked me when I read it last year. I know they’re very clever, it must be wonderful to be able to write like Alan Sillitoe. Real, unphoney. Saying what you mean. If he was a painter it would be wonderful (he’d be like John Bratby, much better) he’d be able to set Nottingham down and it would be wonderful in paint. Because he painted so well, put down what he saw, people would admire him. But it isn’t enough to write well (I mean choose the right words and so on) to be a good writer. Because I think
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
is disgusting. I think Arthur Seaton is disgusting. And I think the most disgusting thing of all is that Alan Sillitoe doesn’t show that he’s disgusted by his young man. I think they think young men like that are really rather fine.

I hated the way Arthur Seaton just doesn’t care about anything outside his own little life. He’s mean, narrow, selfish, brutal. Because he’s cheeky and hates his work and is successful with women, he’s supposed to be vital.

The only thing I like about him is the feeling that there is something there that could be used for good if it could be got at.

It’s the inwardness of such people. Their not caring what happens anywhere else in the world. In life.

Their being-in-a-box.

Perhaps Alan Sillitoe wanted to attack the society that produces such people. But he doesn’t make it clear. I know what he’s done, he’s fallen in love with what he’s painting. He started out to paint it as ugly as it is, but then its ugliness conquered him, and he started trying to cheat. To prettify.

It shocked me too because of Caliban. I see there’s something of Arthur Seaton in him, only in him it’s turned upside down. I mean, he has that hate of other things and other people outside his own type. He has that selfishness—it’s not even an honest selfishness, because he puts the blame on life and then enjoys being selfish with a free conscience. He’s obstinate, too.