To the Dark Tower (3 page)

January 5th
, 1937

Spending two days in town at the Club. I have just been to dinner with Croft. He has a flat overlooking Hampstead Heath—everything neat and a little fussy. An original Derain on one wall and a pietà reproduction on the other. An E.M.G. gramophone and several albums of chamber music. A silk doll lolls on the mantelpiece with some shells and china ornaments. Croft explains: "Cynthia—my fiancée—saw about the furniture. She chose the flat, really." An absence of books. Art and music seem to be his interests.

I feel more at my ease in the study, not because of the untidiness but because there is a smell of tobacco instead of scent, and the chairs are worn and covered in leather. Some rooms have a definite female smell. I think all rooms have sexes.

Croft is charming, but quick tempered. I praise Germany, which makes him blush and contradict me. I begin arguing in a friendly fashion, when I suddenly realise that he is in deadly earnest. He begins pacing the room, hands deep in his pockets, head bent forward, lecturing me about the evils of Nazism. This seriousness is delightful: I find myself egging him on,

making interruptions, countering his arguments, just as one barracks an orator in the hope that he will be witty. And—yes—there is a pleasure in the antagonism.

He tells me that he wants to go back to the Amazon. He is full of projects—pulls out maps, shows me his notebooks, produces photographs. I exclaim about one of the photographs: "Oh, those hideous protuberances! . . .” It is of a native woman, stripped to the waist, with great swelling breasts. Croft stares at it, blushing, then snaps the album together and pushes it back into the cupboard. I have shocked him.

After this incident conversation becomes rather strained. Strange that someone who has travelled so widely should, after all, turn out to be as prudish as your stay-at-home bank clerk. Does travel really broaden the mind? Yet at dinner he had talked without any self-consciousness of circumcision rites among the Mazequals; we had even discussed polyandry, and the orgiastic marriage ceremonies of the Koryaks. Why should my remark have displeased him? From that moment his manner changed; I could see that he wanted me to leave.

An odd thing happened when at last I decided to go. He saw me to the door of his flat, and offered to accompany me down to the street; but I said that I could manage. As I descended, in the semi-darkness, I saw a figure mounting beneath me, one hand resting on the banisters; but before we met it had slipped down a short corridor leading to another flat. I heard no sound of a key; it was too dark to see if the person were hiding in the shadows.

Puzzled by this I continued my descent to the bottom of the stairs, pretended to open and shut the front door, and then waited. Footsteps running. The click of the door of Croft’s flat. A whispered: "Darling! You’re earlier than I thought." "I passed someone on my way up. I don’t think he saw me."

The door clicked shut again, obliterating their intimate voices.

Was this his fiancée? Or another woman? And were they living together?

For some reason the question filled me with curiosity. I almost went back. And all the way across the Heath I pondered. Why, why? Why this curiosity? Why a sort of baffled anger?

When I got home I could not resist a cigarette. My first for four months.

January 8th
, 1937

Meet Croft for lunch at Simpson’s. Gather that he doesn’t like the place. Almost his first remark is: "I hate to see them trundle these carcases about."

I try to get him talking about botany. But he is full of a question that some M.P. has asked in Parliament. Is he a bore? Is he a bore? I am beginning to think it.

As we walk in Green Park he tells me about his plans for a new expedition—back to the Amazon, perhaps, or to the Congo. This is his real self—the self I admire.

I think I should like to accompany him. Should I offer myself? Why not?

Feb. 2nd
, 1937

Return to Dartmouth. This morning I go down to the cove to bathe—for the first time this year. I feel proud in the certainty that I shall be the only person in. But when I get there three youths and a girl are splashing about, rather unhappily! It’s as if the enemy had ambushed me.

How ugly people look in the cold—running noses, bodies amorphous in overcoats, chilblains, a blue pallor of the skin. Horrible!

Feb. 5th
, 1937

Judith writes: "Miss Forsdike has left here. She has given me a locket which belonged to her grandmother—as a leaving present. Was it all right for me to accept it?"

Feb. 6th
, 1937

I tell Judith to return the locket. Succeed in staying in the water five minutes longer than the three youths and the girl. Beginnings of a chill—in spite of a tumbler of whisky and lemon.

I grow old, I grow old!

Feb. 9th
, 1937

Miss Forsdike has become a
waitress
Judith tells me. Apparently she talked of the narrowness of school life, the need for experience, etc., etc., when Judith said good-bye to her.

The woman is mad.

It is always schoolmistresses who talk of the narrowness of their life. It must be the most disappointed of professions.

Feb. 14th
, 1937

Something of the old manner survives! This morning Clark wakes me ten minutes late. I reprimand him.

"I’m sorry, sir."

He makes for the bathroom to get my bath.

"Well—what’s the meaning of it?"

He limps back. "Everything’s rather muddled this morning, sir. My wife’s had to go to hospital, sir."

"Oh, I’m sorry. Let me know what I can do."

That’s all. He limps out. He expects this severity from me—would be surprised at anything else. But, of course, he knows that I shall give him an afternoon off—and send something from the hot-house. We understand each other.

March 1st
, 1937

A sudden interest in chess. Will now study every book on the subject for the next six months, become an expert, and then drop it. Bridge, polo, music, botany—they have all gone the same way.

I notice a nun buying sock-suspenders in Woolworth’s. What delicious and tantalising images are conjured up by the sight.

March 16th
, 1937

Clark’s wife has died. She was a fierce old slattern who caught him by having a baby (which I do not believe was his): I remember when he came back from leave and told me about it—half proudly, half apologetically. For some reason I flew into a rage—told him he was a fool (which, considering what followed, was prescient of me). And now she is dead...

Clark asks for a
week’s
leave. But when I look flabbergasted he modifies this to a day. Funeral arrangements, etc. A week would have meant having his daughter, Ethel; and women servants are intolerable. They always like to put themselves in the position of
(a)
your wife, or
(b)
your mother. Subconsciously, of course. But I hate it.

April 2nd
, 1937

Judith home. The child is growing up, rather disturbingly. I feel inadequate—for the first time. Finicky over food; sudden tears; keeps a diary which I am not allowed to look at. Sad that she should have left that neutral state which makes all young people companionable.

April 4th
, 1937

Last night Judith had a nightmare and woke me by screaming. I went in to find her sitting bolt upright in bed clutching the blankets. Her pupils were oddly dilated, like a cat’s.

"Anything the matter?"

"Only a dream." Her teeth began chattering.

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Don’t you want to tell me?"

She turned away, her eyes slowly filling with tears. The electric light made deep shadows under them.

"Will you be all right?

"I think so."

"Not sure?” I took her hands, with their stumpy fingers, like a boy’s. "Would you like to come to my room?" "May I?" "Please."

At first she lay down on the divan in my room; but soon after I had turned out the light she crept into my bed beside me, cold, still shivering, her body curled against mine. Soon she was asleep, her shoulders rising and falling beneath my hand.

I brushed my fingers against her cheeks. They were still wet with tears.

April 5th
, 1937

S. N. G. once said in exasperation: "You are incapable of tenderness." That is not true. The other night—with Judith beside me—it was tenderness that kept me awake, watchfully, fearing another nightmare. Youth has this effect on me. The epileptic boy in the theatre, when everyone was filled with revulsion...

April 7th,
, 1937

Up to London for a big function at the Guildhall. Public faces in public places—how I hate them. This is the last invitation that I shall accept. Judith says: "May I come with you?" I wish she could. But perhaps it is as well for her to keep her illusions. This, to my mind, is the pathos of youth: all the dull events that beset us when we grow up—dinners, love-affairs, committee meetings—seem so romantic, so desirable. What a shock it is to discover the truth! "But there
must
be something more to it," one thinks. "This can’t be all. I must have missed something." One day Judith will learn that it is more interesting to swim in the cove than to stuff oneself at a public banquet.

From
SHIRLEY FORSDIKE

April 12th
, 1937

MY DEAREST,—I have put off writing to you from one month to another, always hoping for some answer to that letter of mine in which I told you that I loved you. Anything would have been better than your silence—anger, a letter to the headmistress, anything. To feel that I am simply beneath contempt—that is intolerable.

As you may have heard from Judith, I have left the school for this restaurant. I imagined that it might help—might make me forget you among faces and noise and bustle. But it hasn’t. I am still where I started from. I wonder if you realise what this obsession means: to treasure a newspaper paragraph in which you are mentioned—only your name perhaps; to read over and over again one of your articles, until I know each trick of style, the exact way in which you will say a thing; and then, when I get back to this horrible boarding-house and sit down to dinner, to try and turn the conversation in such a way that you will be mentioned—the last war, generalship, South America. Hearing two people discuss you on a bus I stayed on long past my stop. I think I would have joined in if they had not left before I could reach them. And the news-reel: you only appeared for a moment, watching an inter-services football match, but I went again and again. And always I felt the same intolerable excitement—the dryness of the mouth, the singing in the ears—when the camera flashed to you, in an old macintosh, your hands deep in your pockets.

Can you understand this? Can you see what I suffer? Can you see that anything that does not concern you does not exist? What happened yesterday, what will happen to-morrow—nothing matters, unless someone mentions your name, or I read about you, or I see you come out of your Club and get into a taxi, or you have an article in one of the papers. I live only at these moments. These moments are my life. There is nothing else.

Oh, I know what you think. "A repressed spinster. Crazed. Man-starved." But it isn’t as simple as that. When I was still at the school it might have been so. It might simply have been that I needed someone to sleep with. But it can’t be that now—or I should have cured myself by coming here. Certainly, I hoped to cure myself. But it hasn’t made any difference.

I could have any of these men if I wanted them. But I don’t. After Danaë had been visited by Zeus in a shower of gold, do you imagine that she could then tolerate the caresses of mere mortals? I am for you, and of you. If you will not have me, then no one shall.

I was so happy yesterday; and even to-day the glow has not left me. Yesterday I
saw you
, the first time for so many weeks. I read in the papers that you were a guest at a banquet at the Guildhall. So I overstayed my lunch-hour and joined the little crowd who were waiting outside. I thought I should faint from the anticipation. One man looked at me and said: "Aren’t you feeling well?" But I nodded my head and moved on.

Then the moment when the doors were thrown open, and between the slouching, apathetic crowds, all waiting for some sort of revelation, there moved the smiling public figures—the privy councillors and their wives, the ministers of this and that—all strutting and chatting and nodding, all seeking for acknowledgment of their own importance. Stupid, smiling faces, mildly cheered as they vanished into their cars.

Then you, striding erect, your forehead creased as though in perplexity, your eyes preoccupied. Can you see the contrast? Are you surprised that the crowd which had cheered halfheartedly at its ministers of State should now roar at you in a frenzy of enthusiasm? Yet few of them knew who you were.

That is a proof of your power. Those people knew the falsity, the emptiness of all the figures that had preceded you. They knew that the smiles and nods were a frank request for honour. They could see the smallness beneath.

But you—they could see that you were real. There was no fraud with you. They knew that their love or hate meant nothing to you. You did not want their respect. You did not care about them. The day-to-day popularity of alderman and M.P.—you rejected it. You were grand in your self-sufficiency.

I saw then what you could achieve if you wished. Those apathetic faces—sickly, worried, perplexed; the City clerks, the women out shopping—you were the figure they had been subconsciously waiting for. They were tired of the demagogues and the yes-men. If you had stopped then on the steps of the Guildhall you could have told us to do anything and we would have done it.

Do you doubt your power now? Do you wonder why I called you a god?

Oh, you can save us, all of us. You can take away the ordinariness and the stupidity and the meanness of life. You can make men and women out of us. You can give us a direction, an aim. You can lead us.

Believe me when I say this. In my last letter I wrote, "For thine is the kingdom..." That is true.

Use me, do what you want with me. I know that I cannot hope for your love—if I had it, it might perhaps kill me or drive me out of my mind; it would be tremendous, superhuman—but let me come and be your servant, let me be near you. I would expect nothing. I need nothing. You would not have to pay me. This is all that I ask. And if not this, then find something else for me to do for you—anything, anything at all. If it is for you then it will be sufficient. At the moment life is a matter of aimless waiting—a preparation, perhaps. When will the tongues of fire descend? When will you reveal yourself?

Answer this letter, I beg of you. Acknowledge my existence. If I do not exist for you, then I do not exist at all. I exist only in your eyes.

This letter gives me a sad feeling of peace. I have said so little of what I should like to say: but the thought that you will read it is enough. Will you forgive me?—Always, always yours,

SHIRLEY.