Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Fearmax, however, seemed already to have established some sort of link. No sooner did he appear on deck than Mrs. Truman nudged her husband with evident excitement. They converged upon him. Did he remember them? He did not. Once, long ago, he had got in touch with Mr. Truman’s elder sister at Shrewsbury during a séance. The medium passed his hand over his forehead and muttered something about having met so many people; but he seemed flattered. Mrs. Truman had even read a book of his on the astral self.

On the whole the company was not uncongenial, thought Graecen as he lay in his bunk to take the afternoon nap prescribed for him by London’s most fashionable doctors. He had been keeping a diary for the first time in his life and he was propped up by three pillows, his fountain-pen poised over the page on which he was to account for his actions of today. “Account for.” There it was again. That hell-fire note, influenced by Miss Dombey’s preaching no doubt. He ruffled the pages slowly, reading his own large feminine handwriting with slow pleasure.

“Little enough”, he noticed on one page, “have I done to render, as it were, a tidy account of my stewardship on earth, before taking leave of it (the earth). A peculiar sense of emptiness fills me. What am I? What have I been? I can think of little on either score to interest a recording angel. I have been neither good nor bad. The few sins of my grosser nature (Anne, Mrs. Sanguinetti, etc.) would, I am sure, all but cancel out with those few virtues, a quiet life, acts of kindness to friends, etc. I cannot see myself being damned.…”

Dimly, above his head, he could hear the piano in the saloon being strummed in the brisk manner affected by Mr. Truman, while that ineffable voice, half-talking, half-singing, uttered the opening phrases of “A Martyr to Chastity”:

I’m a martyr to Chastity

I’m a victim of laxity

Damned from the cradle I was .

Graecen read on thoughtfully. “I cannot see myself being damned, nor can I see myself being exalted in any way. What, then, is the spiritual fate of the very ordinary person after death?” What indeed? It seemed to him that in the last few weeks all those questions which have baffled the minds of men, had accumulated round him, importuning him for a solution; or, if not a solution, at least some ratification in his own mind as beliefs. The immortality of the soul? The nature of the Trinity? Was progress an illusion? He had simply nothing to say about any of these things. The diary went on: “In some ways I feel very immature, as I do not seem to have any decided opinions about the basic problems of the day. Or is there a discernible attitude to things visible in my poetry?” He shut his eyes and thought about his poetry; all that could be got out of it was a thin Khayamish hedonism, filtered through Georgian influences. “I suppose”, the diary summed up, “that I am rather an unsatisfactory person really.”

Graecen turned back further in the diary and glanced at the period of a week before his decision to resign and set out for Cefalû. Tea, dinner and lunch engagements followed hot upon each other’s heels. There was almost no thought directed upon himself, upon his own inward workings: “Feel rather low,” he saw in one place, “Heart not compensating again.” Further down the page he came upon the note: “If Hogarth were not my oldest friend I wonder whether I could tolerate him for a second? Callous. Yet somehow warming.”

He grimaced impatiently. This was hardly the kind of literary legacy one should leave behind. He had bought such an expensive diary too — twenty-one shillings. He pictured himself writing madly as his life drew to an end; the mantic phrases of some English Rimbaud written on the edge of the abyss. But Rimbaud was only a child. This reminded him of his age; it was some time now since he had worried about getting old — all his energies had been spent in worrying about keeping alive. Mrs. Sanguinetti had said that his hair was getting thin at the back. Graecen stood up and tried to verify this observation in the shaving mirror. It was an impossible task, however, and he gave it up to return to his bunk. He sighed and took up his pen again. He would try to write something simple and honest; he would trust to time to make it moving. A corner of his tongue showed between his lips as he started.

“Today was the first lovely day. We are beating down the coast of Spain.” (As an afterthought he deleted the second verb and replaced it with “sweeping up”.) “Some vague brown cliffs came out of the dawn-haze to greet us; a chapel, a lighthouse; and one small brown man, with a string of onions round his neck who waved a minute arm like an insect in answer to our gestures. The air has suddenly turned warmer and the weather much clearer though the sea is still rough. This morning I noticed the girl I spoke of yesterday as seeming to be ill; I saw her lying in the sun asleep, stretched out in a deck-chair, her body swathed in a rug. The wind was moving her thin fair hair on her forehead. As I passed I noticed that a book lay open on her lap and with my usual bookish curiosity I stooped down over her shoulder to see what it might be. By the strangest of strange coincidences it was Greville’s Modern Poets , and it lay open at the poem of mine called ‘The Winds of Folly’. One may imagine my surprise, pride and pleasure. It is so seldom an unknown writer has the fun of seeing someone read his work. I intended on my second trip round the deck to speak to her and find out what she thought of it and the other poems in the book, but when I returned she had gone below. Never mind. I shall reserve this little conversation for some more propitious moment.”

Graecen lit a cigarette, closed his diary, and lay back more comfortably, smoothing the pillows. It was annoying to be ordered to rest every afternoon when you detested it; it was like the prohibition on smoking. The doctor must have known that he could not live without a cigarette. But then if one, why the other? If he disobeyed about smoking, why should he not drop the afternoon siesta? The weather was warm. He would prefer a stroll on deck. Why not? He got up and put on his coat again, and muttering an objurgation against medical men and their works.

On deck it was pleasant enough; the wind was kicking up a sparkling sea, while to the East loomed the capes and inlets of Spain. Graecen saw with pleasure that the girl in the deck-chair was lying asleep in the same place again today. On her lap, too, was the identical book. He approached as stealthily as a hunter to verify it. Yes, Greville’s Modern Poets . He seated himself on a convenient davit-support and waited until she should wake, studying the soft dark plume of smoke flowing from the funnels and the deep white trench gashed by the progress of the Europa through the sea. He felt light of heart all of a sudden. Miss Dale (he had looked up her name on the passenger list) slept with no sign of motion. She hardly seemed to breathe. The wind troubled her soft hair in which shone threads of gold and points of light. She was pretty in a rather watered-down way; her pale skin and soft features seemed to suggest that she was a convalescent. Graecen watched her sleeping and began to spin idle stories in his mind about her.

She had just left Newnham perhaps, where she had been reading literature. She probably wrote poetry herself. Perhaps she had just done a thesis on him for her D.Litt. She would be amazed to look up and see Graecen bending over her; a poet whose work she so much admired. They would be spark to flint. On Majorca they would go for long walks together in that perfect scenery, and she would ask him to help her with a book on Keats she was going to write. They would not be able to part from each other. He would tell her that he was …(Her anguish at this Keatsian repetition of things gave him great pleasure to imagine). Quixotically, madly, they would marry in Naples and visit Keats’ grave together. Then … Then … It all became a little misty. The great liner had moved off a couple of points. A bell rang. The patch of sun in which they were was overloomed by the great hind funnel; in the shadow it was rather chilly. Graecen was roused from this pleasurable maze of conjecture by the fact that the girl started to cry in her sleep. Tears welled out from the closed lashes and her mouth puckered at the corners. From time to time she gave a small gasp of pain. Of what could she be dreaming? Terrified that he might shame her if he stayed, he tiptoed away and went down the companionway into the saloon, where the Truman couple were playing vingt-et-un with Baird, while Fearmax sat calmly by them and watched. That night Graecen added, in his diary, an account of Miss Dale’s behaviour of the afternoon. He felt interested and sympathetic.