Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Madame Dubois returned with a packet of crystallized fruit and some cream cakes of deleterious hue. “We have feasts,” she said. “ Orgies of iced cakes and Russian tea in the little studio. And I tell him once more the plot of the novel which I shall never write; and he brings me the presents he has had six months to choose.” Blessed are the happy.

The war was approaching, he reflected, as he rode eastward across the deadly green Egyptian delta to Alexandria. There was perhaps only a year of this life to spend before the barriers came down. He stood up and examined his face in the pocket mirror of the carriage, steadying himself against the swaying of the train by placing his braced legs far apart. The face that stared back at him was certainly the face of a person. It was good, very good, to feel at last a responsibility for his own mind and body: to be rich with increase.

Madame Dubois had said, on that last evening: “I think, you know, that you have discovered the south, and you know that the only life for you is one of curiosity — sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation.”

In Haifa he was pounced upon, as he was having his shoes cleaned, by Miss Dombey, of all people. Rufous-red, burnt to brickdust by the sun and her perpetual pent-up rage against people for having dark skins, Miss Dombey was travelling for a missionary society. “Fancy seeing you here,” she said. “I heard you were drifting round the Mediterranean.”

“Drifting,” thought Baird. It could not have been better put; in Miss Dombey’s mouth the word carried a suppressed pejorative inflexion. Drifting was something that “remittance men” did. It was, however, impossible to escape from her. They had a cup of tea, and between them reconstructed the fragments of that old overcast life when Miss Dombey cycled to Thorsham every Saturday to change her books at the library and take Bible class for the vicar. The rain, the steaming fields. He heard fairly regularly from his father. Outside in the dusky street a thin rain began to fall, as if to heighten the verisimilitude of the atmosphere created by the tea-cups and the scrannel-harsh voice of Miss Dombey. She was fuller of freckles than a peacock’s tail, he found himself thinking. Each freckle an eye, and every eye an inquisition. Now she wanted to talk about Alice. He changed the subject abruptly and told her about his little Moorish house in Fez, omitting any mention of the kohl-painted pair of dark eyes that watched the dusty road by the cypresses so anxiously for him. Miss Dombey had been sent east upon what she described as “the Lord’s business.” Leaving England had been a revelation. She had always heard of the “backward” races, she said, but had never realized how backward and savage they were. “The filth, ” she said challengingly, when he tried to defend Cairo and Jerusalem. Miss Dombey obliged with two examples of Egyptian life which were incontestably true to character. Walking down Kasr El Nil she had seen a little man in a black suit and hat approaching her. He had no nose, but in the space where the nose should have been was the cork of a bottle, across which lay the rim of his spectacles. On another occasion, travelling third the better to observe her quarry (the fellah), she had noticed that a strange smell of burning was emanating from the man seated next to her. He had a lighted cigarette in his hand which had burnt down to the flesh of the finger. He felt nothing. She realized that the smell was that of burnt flesh. The man was a leper ! She recounted these ancedotes with triumphant gestures and Baird had to admit that his Middle East was dirty; but how varied, and how delightful. “It’s the same everywhere,” said Miss Dombey, “ same people saying the same things.” That also was true. Everywhere there was the conventional Latin situation — hopeless broken-down provincial societies talking Lycée French and making Cirque Medrano love. But everywhere, too, the seduction of blue water and islands, and the occasional slant-eyed dark person who demanded only a fugitive devotion of the body, being unable to touch the heart or perhaps not even desiring it. How could one make this clear to Miss Dombey? He could imagine the expression on her face if he should say that he had become a sub-tropical man. “I must go,” he said, “the taxi for Beirut is leaving in a few minutes.” He shook her warmly by the hand and left her standing there in her torn mackintosh, with her uncombed, untidy red hair shaking in the wind from the open door.

He had spent several months in the Lebanon among the little Druse villages, and was travelling towards Gaza once more in a crowded second-class compartment, when he heard that war had been declared. A couple of Egyptians in their red tarbushes were eagerly reading an Arabic paper; opposite him an old Hebrew and his son were arguing in French about the possibilities of fighting spreading to the Middle East. As the train started rolling slowly away from the flower-scented groves of cultivation towards the twilit desert that stretched between them and Egypt, the old man was repeating: “A war is nothing at all.” He was, like all Orientals, equipped with a massive rosary which he drew backwards and forwards through his fingers as he talked, touching the larger amber stones voluptuously. Baird could see the venal old face with its dark eye-pouches quickened by the thought of war and its profits; the movement of men and armies, the millions of tons of provisions — concrete, steel, tobacco, and medical stores — which would be spewed out and wasted in every theatre. “It is nothing,” he repeated; how many wars, expulsions, evacuations had he seen that he could think of war in Europe with nothing more than the restless cupidity of his race? He was urging his son to join the army at the first opportunity. “Syria will be a bastion,” he repeated. But it was obvious from his face that he was thinking how much a son in uniform could help him to get contracts for fruit or wool or firewood. Their argument became quite heated. “But the war will never come here,” said the younger man and his father’s face fell, while the face of one of the Egyptians in uniform brightened considerably.

Baird wrapped himself in his coat and tried to sleep. It seemed to him that he had never been so well-equipped for death. He confronted the idea with an utter calm. He was not to know, however, how much worse than simple death a war could be, with its power to deaden and whip the sensibility into emptiness; he was not to foresee the dreadful post-war world which became a frantic hunt, not for values, but for the elementary feelings upon which any sense of community is founded. No. That remained to be revealed apocalyptically by Hogarth in the little smoke-filled room in Harley Street.

At the time when Graecen was offering his diffident services to his old regiment and writing a poem for The Times which echoed all the proper sentiments: at a time when Fearmax decided to enter a “retreat of atonement” and Mr. Truman became a machine-gunner; Baird, with no specific aim or determination found that three languages and a public school translated him comfortably into the uniform of a second lieutenant. The deathly staleness of Cairo and its climate were soon enough exchanged. He was happy. The terrible feeling of moral insensibility — the Gleichbgultigkeit that Böcklin afterwards spoke of on the Cretan mountains, before he killed him — that was an unforeseen enemy lying in futurity.

He saw a short fierce action in Libya, and the retreat across Crete; phenomena more exhilarating than frightening to a temperament as equably based in common-sense. But the first signs of discontent were already there. It was becoming difficult to stand the restricted, stupefying, idiotic system of Army life, which excluded every privacy and every comfort. Seeking for something with more freedom, he happened upon an embryonic department of counter-espionage in need of linguists.