Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Francesca paid no attention whatsoever to him. She remained sitting on the chair, rocking slightly and whimpering like a spoiled child over a broken toy. Campion took up his beret and dusted it, tightened the thong of his sandal, and hoisted his rucksack on to the table. As he was getting his arms through the straps a sudden gust of compunction passed over him. It was cruel enough to leave her there alone like this; he had, after all, taken her from her family, made her pregnant, detached her from her ordinary life. Her family would never take her back. And she had been a fine mate for him — not like one of those English girls whose reactions to sex were, medically speaking, ear, nose and throat only. Francesca was a nymph compared to so many other women he had loved. He really ought to consider her. But already an obstinate part of his mind had begun insisting that the Europa would dock in half an hour, and his agent friend had warned him not to be late. He stood at last, pack on back, bundles in hand, and looked at the girl, who had not moved from the chair though her tears seemed to have abated. She sat with her back to him, hands in her lap, her shoulders round with dejection. What should he say? Campion cleared his throat and then decided that there was nothing very illuminating to be said. He had promised to come back. It was wonderful how women could tell at a glance when one was lying or not. In his pocket there was some loose money — about a thousand francs: quite a lot, in fact. He put it on the table saying: “There, I have left some money to carry on with till I get back. I shall telegraph you from London, Francesca.” The girl said nothing. She did not move. She seemed to be in a trance. He moved the door with his hand in order that its creaking should wake her, but it did not. “Good-bye then,” he said, with such accents of relief that he was ashamed of the sound of his own voice. “Good-bye.” He was down the long staircase in a flash and to the corner of the street. Going down the cobbled side-streets in the direction of the port he began to whistle, filled with an exaggerated sense of freedom and independence. His eyes drank in the streets, their colour and shape, as if they were the eyes of someone newly born. Under his breath he sang:

Aux bidets noirs

Gros comme des poires

Du Languedoc, du Languedoc

Les couillons d’un cocu cocu cocu

Tirra lirra lirra bim bim bim …

“Mr. Fearmax?”

Fearmax detached himself from those absorbing preoccupations which kept him for the greater part of the day lying down in his bunk, and turned slowly to find that Campion had entered the cabin. “Yes,” he said.

“I learned your name from Baird. I wonder if you can be the same Fearmax who used to give séances in the Euston Road before the war?”

Fearmax fixed a confused eye upon his visitor. Campion went on, with the utmost politeness. “Not that I ever came to any of them, but I saw them advertised in the weeklies; and some time afterwards I read a series of articles in a paper called The Occult which seemed to me to be quite extraordinary.”

Fearmax made a gesture of the hand and Campion obediently sat down. “Are you the same?” he said.

Fearmax made an attempt to sit up, but his lassitude was too great. He turned, therefore, on his side and rested his head upon one elbow. His voice was hoarse. “I am the Olaf Fearmax,” he said slowly. “No doubt you’ve read about my exposure as a common fraud. I wrote those articles and I gave séances in the Euston Road.”

Campion said crisply, “My name is Campion. I am a painter. I carried those articles about with me for years. The idea of reality you put forward in them was something for which I owe you a great debt.”

Fearmax frowned and then smiled; a polar smile of indifference and apathy. “I’m glad,” he said. Campion lit a cigarette. “At the time I read them”, he said, “I was coming out of what you call the First Astral State and entering the second. I felt that I knew so clearly what you were talking about, that I wanted to meet you. I wrote you a letter.”

Fearmax knitted his brows once more. “One gets so many letters,” he said, “I’m sorry if I didn’t answer it.”

Campion brushed the idea aside summarily. His face had become animated and his eyes sparkled: “The theory of the life-death polarity is something which I’ve actually proved for myself — in my own life. You remember? That when the death-principle asserts itself in our lives reality itself gets turned inside out, so that instead of being detached from it — watching it happen as an extraneous thing — one begins to manufacture it, like a silkworm manufactures its own cocoon?”

Fearmax sat up and yawned. “I was much younger then,” he said. “I thought I was being original. I had not read the Chinese then, or even the medieval people of the Caballa. Did you say you were a painter?”

“Yes,” said Campion. “I am putting everything I’ve got into painting — and yet it is the least part of me.” He put his hands upon his knees carefully, cautiously, almost as if to balance himself as he talked of these vertiginous things. “I’ve followed out the cycle you mentioned,” he said, “but I’m beginning to wonder whether your theory covered the whole of experience — or only a part. When one begins, you say, reality is everything that is outside; when the principle of death germinates, first as a conscious idea, then as a fugitive subconscious premonition, finally as something beyond these: when that happens the fundamental nature of reality is changed. The individual gets fixed in his destiny and irresistibly begins to manufacture his own personal myth, his reality. Around himself there gradually accumulates a kind of mythological ectoplasm — it informs his acts and his words. The cocoon forms in which his — for want of a better word — immortal self is enshrined. Meanwhile his stance vis-à-vis life and society becomes as irrevocably fixed as an atrophied bone. What he does he is forced to do by the very nature of his mythopaeic role; like Luther saying, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. ’” As he said the words Campion threw his arms wide and an expression of pain seemed to settle on his features. Fearmax felt suddenly ten years younger. His eyes cleared and a smile settled upon that harsh mouth, in those eyes in their charred orbits. “How well,” he said, “how very well you put it.”

Campion went on like a river in spate almost unconscious that he had an audience. “Then it is that you begin to loosen the ties of duty and obligation. If you have been a husband or a lover or a banker you renounce the role in order to withdraw more fully on to the stage of your own personal myth. You condense and refine. And when people you knew come up and take your hand, recalling incidents of ten years back, you wonder if they realize that they are talking to a corpse.”

He licked his lips and stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. “Or else”, says Fearmax, “you accept dutifully, joyfully, the demands made upon you by obligation, secure that your world is your own even if it is bounded by a nutshell, circumscribed by monogamy or the calendar. Joyfully, Mr. Campion, joyfully. But what has all this to do with painting, may I ask?”

“Exactly,” said Campion. “It has nothing to do with it — and everything. Painting by the power of the hand and eye is one thing. Painting with the lust of the soul is quite another. I am spinning a myth about myself in a series of canvases. It is so lucid and clear that it scares me. I am not troubled now by what I might be unable to say. I am troubled by what I shall, unknown to myself, reveal. And yet the process is irresistible. I am forced to separate from people and conditions because, like a leper, I am afraid of infecting them with my own contrived disease.”