Lawrence Durrell: The Dark Labyrinth

Very often it sounded like absolute nonsense; yet in the course of time the very boundaries of language themselves seemed to fall away, so that the meaning of what she said seemed to render up overtones and distinctions more clear to either than had seemed possible. It was as if they were being initiated into an entirely new vocabulary.

One day while they were standing, paddling in the little basin where the icy water from the trout-stream curled about their ankles and whispered in the cresses they picked, Elsie Truman asked curiously: “Ruth, is there nothing you miss from your old life?”

“Everything. If I were taken back tomorrow by force — if Evan came for me, I would go without a murmur. But that’s because I really know how to live anywhere now. I think I’m a person now, not a fog. Perhaps my influence would be helpful, beneficent. But when you say ‘miss’ you really mean ‘long for’. I don’t long for anything — not even for lunch, which is going to be late unless we hurry …”

“It’s odd”, she said on another occasion, “that we live between the two accidents which might alter our lives completely. If we broke the burning-glass one day, for example, where should we be? If a helicopter such as you describe, Mr. Truman, were to come and settle on the meadow: we should have to choose between going and staying. Either accident is possible. Death or Life? Life or Death?”

“Think of them all,” said Truman. “Cities, manganese mines, governments, clubs. India, China, Russia — makes you wonder what it all means. Cotton, iron, steel … where does it all lead?”

“All parts of an unco-ordinated pattern. Man as a person looking for what I think I’ve found. The search throws up bright bits of gold and information which catch his attention and prevent him from looking deeper into himself. Yes, a staggering spectacle of a genus , engaged in a wasteful way of living. And yet every activity leading back like an arrow on the map to central metaphysical problems of the self. The wars of factories, of diplomats, of concepts — all hopelessly entangled in the opposites that created them.”

“Could you teach them any different?” Truman spoke piously, enviously, as if there were nothing he himself might wish to do more than to alter humanity.

“I would not try: any more than I try to alter you.”

“What would you do then?”

“Nothing. Pay my rent like everyone else.”

Truman grunted with disappointment. He had hoped for something more simple: a formula, a maxim. “I bet”, he said, “you’d find a little hill covered with gorse and olive-trees and heather. And build yourself a house and some beehives. And keep a goat.”

“Yes,” said his wife. “And wait for us to come along, with new ways of making hot bath water and milking the goat. I bet you would fetch up here just the same. It suits you.”

“It suits you too, but you haven’t fully realized it yet.”

“Well,” said Truman, “I never was one for grumbling. And the life is remarkably healthy in spite of the cooking.”

He made his way slowly from the house whistling softly and crossed the meadow. “I have no more idea of what everything is all about,” he said to himself gravely in an undertone. “I’m fogged. That’s what it is. Completely fogged.” Yet he felt remarkably clear-headed in that blue air. “Fogged,” he insisted from time to time as he milked the goat and wandered off for a walk. “Bloody well fogged.”

He stopped upon the bluff and stared across the vast bluish plains towards the distant hills tremulous in mist. “Someone must come out one of these days,” he thought, “to prune those orchards. I wonder whether we could signal.” He put the thought carefully aside as if it were something fragile and breakable. In the kitchen Elsie had already lit the wood fires. She was about to start cooking some wood-pigeons for lunch. “Hunger,” said Truman trenchantly, “that’s all I feel. Hunger. You keep your philosophy, my girl, for after meals.”

His wife was smelling her hands carefully, inhaling the faintly musty odour of the dead birds. “You go away,” she said. “It won’t be ready for hours yet.”

He stood irresolutely and watched her moving about. “Are you happy?” he said at last with peculiar diffidence, standing on one leg and folding his arms across his chest. She looked at him smiling.

“I never stop to consider,” she said. “I mean, really contented,” he continued.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Are you?” “I’m fogged,” he said, exploring his teeth with his tongue. “I’m absolutely fogged. I don’t know what I feel about anything any more. I feel as light as a feather. I feel absolutely fogged.” It gave him a peculiar sense of relief to confess himself; and at the same time he was irritated not to be able to define his feelings more clearly.

He left her and went for a walk by the stream, with his hands thrust deeply into the. pockets of his battledress. He had intended to carry this feeling of confusion with him and to try and clear it up, but his hand closed about his beloved knife, and soon he was whittling at a branch of walnut, whistling through his teeth as he worked. He presumed that this must be happiness. He raised his eyes and looked across the valley. Below them he saw birds making their short elliptical flights, busy upon errands whose purpose was like his own, but more mysterious, more beautiful. An almost damnable sense of the mysterious nature of the world took possession of him. He would have smoked if he had had any cigarettes left. Instead he went, still whistling, and mended the rough parapet of the little trout pool into which the stream overflowed, working slowly like a beaver. Looking down into the wrinkling water he saw the sunlight freckling the smooth pebbles of the stream’s bottom; it reminded him of the freckles upon his wife’s nose. She had become swarthy and more beautiful, with brown face and arms always bare to the sunlight. He had changed also: was bearded now. He regarded his image in the flowing waters with curiosity and humorous indulgence. His eyes stared back at him shining with strange watery lights. “It’s rum”, he told himself, “for an ordinary bloke like you. Very rum.”

The season moved towards its centre — towards autumn and the pressing of the little grape yield: towards winter with its rude terrors of wind from Tartary. Their function became more absolutely defined by the work demanded by the season. Yet there was no sense of calendar time left in either of them. They gathered the barley and the wild corn; they gathered the burst vessels of fig from the trees, full of the cloying honeyed richness of summer. Day after day the great fireplace had to be stacked with logs against the cold. There was work to be done. Ruth Adams, gentler, less communicative now, shared these labours with them, working in a quiet enjoyment of the time which as yet neither knew properly how to share.

The small orchard gave them fruit. The old woman taught them how to make wine from flowers. From the little marshy hollow below the cliffs — the last point at which the stream bent suddenly in upon itself and rushed through a sill of rock — they gathered the bulbs of swamp orchis for their tea; or nearer the house camomile, sage, vervain. It seemed as if very little were lacking — though both wine and bread were of a crude quality as yet.

Autumn came and with it the first rain — millions of silver needles bounding from the rocks and concavities around them. They worked on in a peasant frenzy of determination not to let the rain steal their barley, or to let the old woman find them inferior to herself in the tasks of existence. They were learning. Elsie Truman’s hands had become hard and calloused from the work, but her face and her carriage had been improved. She was serener, yet more alive. “You’re like a gipsy,” her husband told her, as she lay in bed beside him. Her body had filled out, become firm and round. “I almost feel as if I were going to have a child,” she told him. “Doesn’t seem likely somehow or possible at my age, does it?” She did not add any reflections upon her private conviction that the child, when it came, would be Campion’s. That could wait for futurity — the futurity of comprehension and tranquillity when, by the terms of self-knowledge, such small offences against defined loyalties could be added up and probably forgiven. The child, too, in a sense, still belonged to the old world of troubled relationship; had as yet no place in this quiet house.