Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

ESTHER SAXEY

The RMS Carmania stood at dock, serene despite the gull screams and mud stink. Christopher had left me watchdog to three trunks and a brace of hatboxes.

A lad rushed over to earn a tip.

‘Saw yer friend,’ he said, as he loaded the trunks onto a trolley. “Are you two artists?”

I would be leaving England within the hour. A queer impulse prompted me to announce: “No. We are Uranians.”

To my surprise, he grinned.

“What, is that like a Martian? Are you two from another planet?”

It wasn’t even the first time I’d heard this witticism. I began to hate Mr. H.G. Wells.

Being Uranians has led Christopher and me to travel a lot. Never fleeing in disgrace. Not yet. Not quite. Few trips came as near the knuckle as our escape to Paris, ten years ago.

Christopher and I had met at College (Trinity) but we hadn’t been the best of friends, only two of a group. As we lost good men to marriage, we grew more intimate. Not loving, not on my part. Perhaps had he been taller, less hairy, less like an anxious mole… But why would all that matter, you ask, when Uranian love is for the noble disposition? (Plato told Christopher so, and Christopher told me.) At the time, I believed that nobility would shine through in some physical way: graceful movement, sparkling eyes. So I would love my beloved’s mind, but my beloved would also be beautiful. I was insufferable.

Christopher took me out every week for art or opera. He gave me Uranian pamphlets, which I forgot to read, and poetry, which made me melancholy. In his presence I felt, always, that I was failing an examination.

Until one night when he burst into my rooms, hatless and agitated.

“He’ll be arrested this evening!”

We were admirers of Oscar Wilde (you could have known it by our neckties alone). Oscar’s libel case had just taken a disastrous turn.

Christopher cried: “We have to leave England!” He then made the most eloquent plea of his life. His proposal: we take the boat train that night to Paris, to live where laws were more liberal.

I’d been torn between two idols, until that moment. Should I be a witty cynic, like Wilde? Or embrace the world as my brother, and find delight in every drop of dew, like Walt Whitman in his poems? I’d ricocheted between the two approaches, by turns aloof and sentimental. Now, Christopher was pushing me hard towards Whitman-ish optimism: freedom, he said, brotherhood!

While my man packed for me, I mused aloud: “If you think it’s dangerous to stay, perhaps I should warn some of my friends…”

“Oh. Well, we could .” He was right to be sullen, because I was lying. I wasn’t thinking of danger. No, I was thinking: I could burst in on a friend, the same way Christopher had burst in on me. Make the same impassioned speech, steal all Christopher’s best lines. Woo my friend! Win him!

And I would have done it. But there wasn’t one man who stood out above the others. Uranian love is lifelong (said Plato-through-Christopher). So I couldn’t accidentally shackle myself to a dullard. I’d been flitting about and fantasising, dithering over who to honour with my constancy.

The Waterloo platform was white with steam and swarming. Valets crowded the train corridors. Gentlemen sat in silent rows in every compartment, spines stiff with nerves. Nobody spoke. Half the Uranians of London were on the train.

Christopher’s energy was spent, but I was exhilarated by our flight. I wondered: should I make a speech? Brothers! We are travelling together. Once we reach Paris, must we disperse, like droplets in the ocean? Is this the greatest gathering of our kind since Athens? Surely, we should… We must…

I stood in the corridor by an open window, getting my nerve up. I looked into the starry night and told myself that the dark was as homelike and wholesome to me as the day. My brothers were beautiful (although not, I thought, all equally beautiful, and some couples shockingly mismatched). And somewhere up above us was our planet: gorgeous, mysterious Uranus. Pale blue, glowing from within, winding around the sun once every eighty-four years (Chris owned a small book on the subject). Unknowable, remote! My ruling celestial body!

“Everything to your satisfaction, sir?”

He spoke like a steward, but his bottle-green velvet suit put the lie to it.

“One shouldn’t have all one’s satisfactions satisfied,” I spluttered, failing to be Wildean.

His face was sly and his nose was broken. Edward Carpenter, the socialist said (via Christopher) that love may exist most purely between men of different classes. I wondered: who buys this lad’s clothes? Who bought his ticket for this train? His arm pressed mine as the train jolted. It was all very sudden. Were we both under the influence of our heavenly patron?

“Sir,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”

The last trace of my cynicism boiled away. I gave my passionate assent.

He pulled back and smirked. “That’s handy to know,” he said, and hopped off up the corridor, to boast to his chums.

I crept back to my compartment. I didn’t make a speech to my fellow travellers.

On the ferry to France, I felt my purpose renewed. My lustful body was lost property. In Paris, I would be pure. No more self-deception. No more frittering my time looking for noble minds at tennis clubs. I’d been a terrible Uranian◦– we should be scholars, but I’d never stuck to any kind of study. I turned to Christopher.

“I didn’t bring anything to read. Do you…?”

I wondered if he would produce A Problem in Greek Ethics and the deck would ring with cries of recognition. But he pulled out a slim tome from the Theosophists. I winced at the opening sentence: Kâmaloka as it is called in Sanskrit… But then the tone altered. The author was speaking of something termed the astral plane . He assured me that the astral plane was absolutely real . As real as Charing Cross. I missed Charing Cross already. I was persuaded of his common sense.

I read about the astral body, a thing apart from the fleshly body. The concept gripped me. (Of course it did: I had more-or-less eloped with a man I didn’t desire, and I wished to be so spiritual that his hairy hands wouldn’t distress me.)

I read that my astral body could fly through the air, if I desired it. No, if I put my mind to it.

At our Parisian hotel Christopher slept. In my room, I prepared to make a further, audacious journey.

The book on astral travel had frustratingly little in the way of instruction. I lay on my bed, conscious of my sweating back. The boy from the train drifted into my mind, and I pushed him away. I pushed away all fleshly things◦– I pushed myself out of my body.

I left. I lifted. It had worked. I hovered.

I feared to look down on my own fleshly body, so I passed on, up, through the ceiling of the hotel room. I was naked. I was naked of myself , without a body. I wasn’t cold. I could hear, faintly, the horses and the music of the Paris street. But my only crisp sense was sight. I saw Paris◦– a glittering mosaic. I took it in at a glance and then looked up to the stars. Could I go up, I thought, until the lights of the stars and the lights of Paris were of equal size, constellations above and below me?

How to move? Against what could I push? Should I flap my arms? I had no arms. I saw the moon. I thought: there! And leapt.

Such a pace would have made my stomach sick but I had no stomach. I was gleeful at my lightness and speed. Nevertheless, I quailed at the prospect of the void between the planets. I’d forgotten most of what I’d read in Christopher’s small book. Would it be cold or fiery? In a perpetual storm? It was calm as a millpond and almost empty. Dust, small rocks, passed through me.