Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

He looked a strangely ineffectual and petulant figure, his moustache flying in the wind as he stood there. After a second of indecision he too jumped down on to the sand and started after her. She ran very fast right into the water which splashed up, darkening her skirt about her thighs and braking her. Then she halted in sudden indecision and turned back, while he, rushing in after her, caught her by the shoulders and embraced her. They stood for a moment — it was so strange — with the waves thumping their legs; and then he drew her back to the shore with a strange look of gratitude and exultation on his face — as if he were simply delighted by this strange gesture. I watched them hurry back to the car. The anxious chauffeur was standing in the road with his cap in his hand, obviously relieved not to have been called upon to do any life-saving. I thought to myself then: “A blind Ambassadress?

Why not? If David were a meaner—spirited man he might think to himself: ‘The originality alone would help rather than hinder my career in creating for me artificial sympathies to replace the respectful admiration which I dare only to claim by virtue of my position!’ But he would be too single-minded for any such thoughts to enter his mind.”

‘Yet when they arrived back for tea, soaked, he was strangely elated. “We had a little accident” he called gaily as he retired with her for a change of clothes. And of course there was no further reference to the escapade that evening. Later he asked me if I would undertake a portrait of Liza and I agreed. I do not know quite why I felt a sense of misgiving about it. I could not refuse yet I have found several ways of delaying the business and would like to put it off indefinitely if I could. It is curious to feel as I do, for she would be a splendid subject and perhaps if she had several sittings we might get to know each other a little and ease the constraint I feel when I am with her. Besides, I would really like to do it for his sake, for he has always been a good friend. But there it is…. I shall be curious to know what she has to ask you about her brother. And curious to see what you will find to say about him.’ I: ‘He seems to change shape so quickly at every turn of the road that one is forced to revise each idea about him almost as soon as it is formulated. I’m beginning to wonder about one’s right to pronounce in this fashion on unknown people.’ She: ‘I think, my dear, you have a mania for exactitude and an impatience with partial knowledge which is … well, unfair to knowledge itself. How can it be anything but imperfect? I don’t suppose reality ever bears a close resemblance to human truth as, say, El Scob to Yacoub. Myself I would like to be content with the poetic symbolism it presents, the shape of nature itself as it were. Perhaps this was what Pursewarden was trying to convey in those outrageous attacks upon you — have you come to the passages called “My silent conversations with Brother Ass”?’ I: ‘Not yet.’ She: ‘Don’t be too wounded by them. You must exonerate the brute with a good-natured laugh, for after all he was one of us, one of the tribe. Relative size of accomplishment doesn’t matter.

As he himself says: “There is not enough faith, charity or tenderness to furnish this world with a single ray of hope — yet so long as that strange sad cry rings out over the world, the birth-pangs of an artist — all cannot be lost! This sad little squeak of rebirth tells us that all still hangs in the balance. Heed me, reader, for the artist is you, all of us — the statue which must disengage itself from the dull block of marble which houses it, and start to live.

But when? But when?” And then in another place he says:

“Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition” — a characteristic remark. It was the central point of his difference with Balthazar and the Cabal. Pursewarden had turned the whole central proposition upside down.’ I: ‘To suit his private ends.’ She: ‘No. To suit his own immortal needs. There was nothing dishonest about it all. If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You have to be faithful to your angle of vision, and at the same time fully recognize its partiality. There is a kind of perfection to be achieved in matching oneself to one’s capacities — at every level. This must, I imagine, do away with striving, and with illusions too. I myself always admired old Scobie as a thoroughly successful example of this achievement in his own way. He was quite successfully himself I thought.’ I: ‘Yes, I suppose so. I was thinking of him today. His name cropped up at the office in some connection. Clea, imitate him again. You do it so perfectly that I am quite dumb with admiration.’ She: ‘But you know all his stories.’ I: ‘Nonsense. They were inexhaustible.’ She: ‘And I wish I could imitate his expression! That look of portentous owlishness, the movement of the glass eye! Very well; but close your eyes and hear the story of Toby’s downfall, one of his many downfalls. Are you ready?

I: ‘Yes.’ She: ‘He told it to me in the course of a dinner-party just before I went to Syria. He said he had come into some money and insisted on taking me to the Lutetia in ceremonial fashion where we dined on scampi and Chianti. It began like this in a low confidential tone. “Now the thing about Toby that characterized him was a superb effrontery, the fruit of perfect breeding! I told you his father was an M.P.? No? Funny, I thought I mentioned it in passing.

Yes, he was very highly placed, you might say. But Toby never boasted of it. In fact, and this shows you, he actually asked me to treat the matter with discretion and not mention it to his shipmates. He didn’t want any favours, he said. He didn’t want people sucking up to him neither, just because his father was an M.P.

He wanted to go through life incognito, he said, and make his own career by hard work. Mind you, he was almost continuously in trouble with the upper deck. It was his religious convictions more than anything, I think. He had a remorseless taste for the cloth did old Toby. He was vivid. The only career he wanted was to be a sky-pilot. But somehow he couldn’t get himself ordained. They said he drank too much. But he said it was because his vocation was so strong that it pushed him to excesses. If only they’d ordain him, he said, everything would be all right. He’d come right off the drink. He told me this many a time when he was on the Yokohama run. When he was drunk he was always trying to hold services in Number One hold. Naturally people complained and at Goa the captain made a bishop come aboard to reason with him.

It was no go. ‘Scurvy’ he used to say to me, ‘Scurvy, I shall die a martyr to my vocation, that’s what.’ But there’s nothing in life like determination. Toby had plenty of it. And I wasn’t at all surprised one day, after many years, to see him come ashore ordained.

Just how he’d squeezed into the Church he would never tell. But one of his mates said that he got a slightly tainted Chinese Catholic bishop to ordain him on the sly in Hong Kong. Once the articles were all signed, sealed and wrapped up there was nothing anyone could do, so the Church had to put a good face on it, taint and all. After that he became a holy terror, holding services everywhere and distributing cigarette cards of the saints. The ship he was serving on got fed up and paid him off. They framed him up; said he had been seen going ashore carrying a lady’s handbag!

Toby denied it and said it was something religious, a chasuble or something that they mistook for a handbag. Anyway he turned up on a passenger-ship next carrying pilgrims. He said that at last he had fulfilled himself. Services all day long in ‘A’ Lounge, and no one to hinder the word of the Lord. But I noticed with alarm that he was drinking more heavily than before and he had a funny cracked sort of laugh. It wasn’t the old Toby. I wasn’t surprised to hear he had been in trouble again. Apparently he had been suspected of being drunk on duty and of having made an unflattering reference to a bishop’s posterior. Now this shows his superb cleverness, for when he came up for court martial he had the perfect answer ready. I don’t quite know how they do court martials in the Church, but I suppose this pilgrim boat was full of bishops or something and they did it drum-head fashion in ‘A’ Lounge. But Toby was too fast for them with his effrontery.