Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

In the end, however, it turned out rather differently. It was Baird who introduced them; and Miss Dale had never been nearer to Newnham than Golder’s Green. Graecen was saddened to hear the flattened accent of London’s poorer suburbs ring in her voice. She was, it is true, a convalescent; but that is the nearest she got to a resemblance with the girl of his imagination.

Virginia Dale was a shorthand typist at the Ministry of Labour. She lived with her aunt at Golder’s Green in a semidetached house. The doctor had ordered her abroad because she showed signs of being tubercular. “A victim of the unconscious intention,” said Campion later, when he heard a recital of her woes. Perhaps this was true. At any rate, it was when Bob, her fiancé, died in an air accident in Greece that Virginia Dale began to lose a hold on the life in which he was to play the part of a deliverer. She could not contemplate going on living with her aunt. She became very ill.

So much was easily told, but what interested Graecen was this: what should such a girl be doing with Greville’s Modern Poets , in which his work was well represented? He could not approach the subject for a couple of days until he managed to see her alone. Then at last, one afternoon, he saw her lying alone in the deck-chair aft, and brought up the subject.

“The other day”, he said, “you were lying there with a book of poems.” (Miss Dale blushed scarlet, as if he had said something indecent.) Graecen went on: “You had it open at a poem which I myself wrote. I was so curious to know whether you read poetry for pleasure, or what you were doing with the book.” Miss Dale licked her lips and smiled.

“I’m trying to get my school cert.,” she said, “in order to get into the post office. You see, in my present work there’s no old-age scheme, no pensions, nothing. In the post office, when you get to a certain age, you get a pension.” She said it with considerable middle-class pride. “I have no money of my own, you see.”

“But, good gracious,” said Graecen, both annoyed that he should be taught for the Oxford Locals, and flattered that he should be taught at all. “Good gracious me.” He often used expressions he had heard his mother use when he was a child. “So they are learning my verse in order to get jobs in the post office,” he told himself angrily. Miss Dale was looking confused.

“I should jolly well hope that a girl like you will get herself sensibly married instead of bothering about the post office,” said Graecen gallantly. To his annoyance, this seemed to dispose her to start crying again. He hated tearful women. She recovered her composure, however, with some effort. Whenever people spoke of marriage it made her remember Bob, after whose death she felt that her good looks, as well as whatever little courage she possessed, had gone for ever. As a matter of fact she remembered reading and re-reading Graecen’s poem with an increasing sense of confusion and annoyance. Perhaps since he had written it.…

“I suppose”, she said, “you wouldn’t care to help me a bit with my Litt. paper? I find the poems in that book so difficult.”

Was there ever an author who was not flattered by a request for an explanation? Perhaps. But Graecen was not he. He enjoyed himself a great deal in reading “The Winds of Folly” to Miss Dale in his best radio voice. He enjoyed even more dismantling it for her, showing the syntactical subtleties that held it together, the interior rhyme, the metrical felicities — in fact everything that made it one of the duller anthology pieces of our time. He was flattered at so attentive and modest a listener, and took Virginia Dale in hand. He not only explained his own work, but he explained also the work of his contemporaries — some of which he did not understand himself. “It will not be my fault”, he thought, “if the damned girl does not get a credit in English composition.”

They passed the coarse brown rock of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean.

The weather became milder, the air softer. The days of blueness began.

At Marseilles Campion came aboard with his rucksack and easel; his arrival was a not unwelcome surprise to Baird, who noticed that he had aged. “Fancy seeing you,” said Campion coming upon him as he was on his way down to the cabin he had wangled with the help of a shipping agent.

“You are the last person I expected to see,” said Baird, and accompanied him down to his cabin to help him unpack. “I wangled it,” said Campion crisply, unfastening his rucksack and pulling out a lot of dirty clothes, a tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush. He proceeded to clean his teeth and explain in little asides how he had managed to get aboard the Europa without troubling the purser or registering in the ordinary way. “I’m only going to Crete,” he said. “By the way, Baird, it will amuse you to know that I am still attached to the War Graves people. Not content with keeping me busy during the war and preventing me having my head blown off, they are keeping me busy in peace. I’ve got to paint a row of graves somewhere in Crete where half a score of idiots were interred after a gallant if unwise operation. Farcical, isn’t it? But I’m painting like a fiend now. If only I didn’t feel so much at the end of everything.” He sat down on the edge of the bunk and lit a cigarette. Then he took off his beret and absently combed his hair. “It’s like getting farther and farther away from the human race — getting lost. Queer feeling.” Baird was interested. Campion whistled a couple of bars of a popular song and looked across at the stack of canvases on stretchers that lay in the corner of the cabin. “It’s a dull world to live in,” he said at last, as if the impetus to frankness had been succeeded by a reticence more worthy of his listener. “What have you been up to?” he said, peering at Baird’s medals. “Campaign medals I see. And the M.C. Well, my dear fellow, I have some campaign medals too. I wore them on the seat of my trousers last Armistice Day and coughed slightly at the Cenotaph during the silence.”

One’s dislike for Campion was always halted, reflected Baird, by the memory of those innocent powerful paintings. Perhaps an artist was not made to be liked, but to be put up with. Or was it possible to be a great spirit on one plane, and to be at odds with the whole canon of accepted human belief, on another? Or rather, perhaps, was not the work part of the life — a sort of propaganda for it in which one could see the miserable limitations of the human mind? He did not like Campion. Did Campion like himself?

“I’m on the edge of something good,” Campion was saying. “Something bigger than I’ve done to date. And it always makes one feel ill at ease and anxious. I’ve felt awful about this trip — a premonition that something would happen.”

He got up abruptly and took his sketch block and a thick copying pencil. “Let’s go up,” he said. “I’ve never seen the town from the sea.”

Graecen was filled with vague alarm at being introduced to Campion. The little man looked so cold and intense, and was so articulate; he radiated a kind of power which put one on the alert. His very glance was critical and divining. One did not feel quite safe. It was as if the small figure had condensed and crystallized its essential experiences of men, enabling it to bring summary judgments to bear upon them. He was mollified, however, by Campion’s description of old Conklin as a moron. The article on Syrinx still rankled. “You probably know the man,” said Campion. “I don’t but I used to keep a file of his criticisms — some of the things in it were just unbelievable. I remember once, for example, he began an article ‘If Dostoievski had lived today he would be classed as un-British as well as unstable. The persistent vein of cruelty in his work makes one fear that he was the kind of man who would shoot at a fox.’” Graecen laughed politely. He was glad that Campion found Conklin so third-rate as a critic. He was flattered when he found that Campion was doing a sketch of him as he sat reading. The nervous small fingers moved in spidery fashion over the paper, deft and yet cautious. The eyes had puckered into slits. Graecen, whose taste in painting and sculpture was far more dependable than his taste in books or people, knew and admired Campion’s work. He, too, found himself wondering why so violently unorthodox a man should produce painting whose innocence and serene power seemed to be the antithesis of his troubled, obscure and rebellious nature.