Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

It did. (Lumme, thought Truman, stifling a yawn, have I struggled so far and so hard, first with life and then with the labyrinth, in order to have nonsense talked to me on a plateau in Crete from which there is no escape?) His wife, however, seemed interested. Her cheeks became pink as always when she was excited, and she leaned forward, saying: “Do go on.”

The stranger sat before the fire cross-legged and looked before her, stretching out a small hand from time to time to catch the warmth. “Godfrey said that one could even have a physical effect on the world around you. Now, here’s a funny thing. I began to notice since he left that the axe was not wearing out. You can’t imagine how important it was to us in the early days of house-building; we used it with great care. Even then it had to be ground once every so long. Godfrey did that. But since he left it has remained sharp and bright as ever; and you can see that I’ve done quite a lot of cutting with it. Just put your finger to it. Sharp, isn’t it?” She smiled up at Elsie Truman and said: “You are looking distressed. Please don’t. I’m not mad.”

Mrs. Truman disclaimed the impeachment. She would have liked to hear more, but the stranger rose abruptly and said she would light them to their room. Picking from the corner a spill made of twisted reeds dipped in resin she led them to a small room with two beds in it. The window was boarded up, but the walls were whitewashed after the fashion of the living-room. It was bitterly cold. Elsie Truman began to cry. Her husband made no attempt to comfort her; he lay beside her staring at the ceiling and repeating in a perplexed voice: “You can say what you like, it’s a rum go. No doubt about it.” And fatigue triumphing at last over perplexity, he fell asleep, his hands under his armpits for warmth. His wife lay there for a long time listening to the graduations of the silence which came, it seemed, from the heart of some huge sea-shell; broken now and then by small noises, as of a mouse stirring, or as of ice-crystals being crushed beneath small feet. She could feel the presence of those icy peaks outside the window, standing up nude in the light of the moon, buried in their own snowy preoccupation. It was as if she had lost her way in one of her own dreams; yet underneath her growing sense of terror lay the feeling that perhaps it was only the unfamiliarity of this world that seemed inimical.

In the middle of the night, in order to relieve the demands of Nature, she picked her way by memory to the large living-room with the fireplace in it. The moon was high now and its blinding dazzle played upon the silk screens covering the windows; a faint breath of wind moved them from time to time. She was about to open the front door when she saw, to her surprise, the silhouette of the woman, thrown by the moonlight upon the nearest screen; she was seated upon a three-legged stool, facing the panorama of mountains, her body wrapped in a rug. Her head was cocked up at an angle, as if she had heard a sound, and yet her whole attitude was one of repose. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Come out if you wish.’

Elsie Truman felt rather like a small child caught on an escapade. “I just came down for a second,” she said, lifting the latch and stepping out on to the porch.

The stranger did not turn round or say any more. So rapt was her expression that it seemed for a moment as if she might be praying. Elsie Truman went about her business, for the night was cold, and she was in no mood to hang about in that icy air. On her way back to the porch she heard the other say: “Elsie.” She did not turn but still looked upwards, her eyes fixed on the snows. “Yes,” said Mrs. Truman.

“I suppose”, said the stranger, “you’d think me mad if I told you that I never sleep. ” She emphasized the words with slow pleasure. “I spend every night here and feel perfectly refreshed. Here, sit beside me for a moment and I’ll tell you something.”

“It’s cold,” protested Elsie Truman.

“Just for a moment.” She obeyed, perching herself uncomfortably on the balcony wall. “Now then,” said the stranger, her eyes fixed upon the great range of snowy mountains whose ragged fissures glittered black and baleful in the moon’s light. “Feel my pulse. Normal, eh? Feel how warm my hands are, and my feet. If you were a doctor you would mutter respectful things about my arterial system.” She still spoke in a dreamy, abstracted voice as if she were employing the greater part of her faculties elsewhere. “Sleep”, she said indistinctly, “was invented for the tired. People are tired because their style of body or mind is wrong, just as athletes get tired if their position is a cramping one.” Elsie Truman blew on her cupped hands impatiently. She had once taken a biology course at the London Polytechnic, and nothing of the kind had been suggested. “There is no more need for sleep than there is for death,” said the woman slowly. Then she added with more emphasis: “I wish I could tell you what happened to me. When Godfrey had gone, between tea-time and dinner, without warning, with no premonition — a very odd, almost disagreeable sensation, but somehow one that I recognized inside as being useful. How can I put it? On a dark night you try to find the keyhole in the front door. You cannot. That is what our lives are normally like. Then at last your key suddenly slides into the groove and you are master of your house again. A half-second of relief and power. And another thing. This experience I felt was not an extraordinary one. It came out of ordinary faculties, through repose. I had never been still enough before. Here I got as still as a needle. Elsie, are you listening?”

“Yes.” She was, all of a sudden, listening with great attention. It was as yet obscure and muddled in her mind, but something about the phrasing struck her with a sense of familiarity; reminding her of the occasion upon which Campion had revealed the existence of a beauty in her quite independent of her prettiness.

“I remembered how life was before,” pursued the old lady quietly. “I was outside everything in a certain way. Now I participate with everything. I feel joined to everything in a new kind of way. Before I lived by moral precepts — for morality is an attempt to unite ourselves to people. Now I don’t feel the need for religion, or faith in the old sense. In my own mind, inside (not as something I think or feel, but as something I am ) inside there I no longer prohibit and select. I include. It’s the purely scientific meaning of the word ‘love’. Does it sound rubbish? Do you understand a word I say?”

Indeed a strangely disquieting sense of familiarity had begun to grow in Elsie Truman’s mind. It was as if the conversation had outlined hitherto undescribed blocks of experience lying within her. It was as if a part of herself had been an untenanted house, with all its huge furniture covered in dust-cloths of accepted prejudice, vague and shapeless. “I don’t know,” she said, afraid of making a fool of herself. “I feel uncomfortable and foolish.”

“It is not important”, said the other, “to anyone but yourself. I thought I would try to explain why it is that I never sleep. And also why it is that I shan’t die until I really want to — until I’ve really explored this world to the full. Until I’m used up and, so to speak, emptied out of this world into the next.”

Elsie Truman stared fixedly at a chip in the masonry and said: “I would like to know more about it. I feel I know what you mean, but I can’t express myself. How do you … did you … find it? I mean the feeling?”

For a long time the woman said nothing, she arched her brows as if she were trying to locate within herself the sources of the spring. At last she said: “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. “There’s no positive way. It’s rather a negative business — becoming still enough inside to be receptive to it. You can’t seek for it, but if you prepare for it it will come and settle on you like an Emperor moth. In fact, not ‘seek and ye shall find’ as the Bible says, but ‘prepare and ye shall be found’. Oh, I can’t hope to make it any clearer.”