Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney

He bought more books by both Simone Weil and Teilhard, and took them home, but did not read them: he had lost interest, and besides an old mechanism had come into force. He realized that sitting in the Reading Room he had been thinking of writing a book describing, but entirely as a tourist, the varieties of religious behaviour he had actually witnessed: a festival in Ceylon involving sacred elephants for instance. The shape of this book was easy to find: he would describe what he had seen. The tone of it, the style — well, there might be a difficulty. There should not of course be the slightest tone of contempt; a light affectionate amusement would be appropriate, he found himself thinking that when the Old Guard read it they would be relieved as to the health of his state of mind.

Abandoning the Reading Room, he found that Carrie was becoming seriously interested in a young man met through her brother; he was one of the best known of the new young revolutionaries, brave, forthright, everything a young revolutionary should be. Carrie was in the process of marrying her father? A difficulty was that this young man and Joseph had recently quarrelled. They had disagreed so violently over some policy that Joseph had left this particular group, and had formed another. Rosemary thought the real reason for the quarrel was that Joseph resented his sister loving his friend but did not realize it. Jack took his wife to task over this, saying that to discredit socialist action because it had, or might have, psychological spring, was one of the oldest of Reaction's tricks. But, said Rosemary, every action had a psychological base, didn't it, so why shouldn't one describe what it was? Jack surprised himself by his vehemence in this discussion — it was, in fact, a quarrel. For he believed, with Rosemary, that probably Joseph was reacting emotionally; he had always been jealous of his sisters. Whatever the truth of it was, Carrie was certainly forgetting her 'Eastern thing'. She was already talking about it as of a youthful and outgrown phase. Rosemary, in telling Jack this, kept glancing apologetically at him: the last thing she wanted to do, she said, was to disparage any experience which he might be going through himself. Or had gone through.

Had gone through

There was a conference on the theme of Saving Earth from Man, and he had been afraid he wasn't going to be asked. He was, and Mona rang up to say she would like to go with him. She made some remarks that could be openings to his joining her in a position that combined belief in God with progressive action: he could see that she was willing to lay before him this position, which she had verbalized in detail. He closed that door, hoping it did not sound like a snub. He was again thinking of something called 'religion' as an area coloured pink or green on a map, and of a belief in an after-life, like a sweetened dummy for adults. In addition to this, he had two sets of ideas, or feelings, in his mind: one, these he had always held, or held since his early maturity; the other, not so much a set of ideas as a feeling of unease, disquiet, guilt, which amounted to a recognition that he had missed an opportunity of some sort, but that the failure had taken place long before his recent experience. Which he now summarized to himself in Walter's words as: It's a shock when your old man dies. His life had been set in one current, long ago; a fresh current, or at least a different one, had run into it from another source; but, unlike the springs and rivers of myth and fairy tale, it had been muddied and unclear.

He could see that his old friends were particularly delighted to see him at the Conference, ready to take an active part. He was on the platform, and he spoke several times, rather well. By the time the Conference was over, there was no doubt he was again confirmed as one of the Old Guard, trusted and reliable.

Because of the attention the Conference got he was offered a rather good job on television, and he nearly took it. But what he needed was to get out of England for a bit. Again Rosemary mentioned Nigeria. Her case was a good one. He would enjoy it, it was work he would do well, he would be contributing valuably. She would enjoy it too, she added loyally. As of course she would, in many ways. After all, it was only for two years, and when she came back it would be easy for her to pick up what she had dropped. And Family Counsellors would still be needed, after all! Something that had seemed difficult, now seemed easy, not much more that a long trip to Europe. They were making it easy of course because of that refusal to look at the consequences of a thing that comes from wanting to leave options open. Spending two years in Africa would change them both, and they did not want to admit that they had become reluctant to change.

On the night after he had formally agreed to go to Nigeria he had the dream again — the worst. If worst was the word? — in this region of himself different laws applied. He was dropping into nothingness, the void: he was fighting his way to a window and there he battered in panes to let in air, and as he hit with his fists and shouted for help the air around him thinned and became exhausted — and he ceased to exist.

He had forgotten how terrible — or how powerful — that dream had been.

He paced his house, wearing the night away. It was too late: he was going to Nigeria because he had not known what else it was he could do.

During the night he could feel his face falling into the lines and folds of his father's face — at the time, that is, when his father had been and elderly, rather than an old, man. His father's old man's face had been open and sweet, but before achieving that goodness — like the inn at the end of road which you have no alternative but to use? — he had had the face of a Roman, heavy-lidded, sceptical, obdurate, facing into the dark: the man whose pride and strength had to come from a conscious ability to suffer, in silence, the journey into negation.

During the days that followed, when the household was all plans and packing and arranging and people running in and out, Jack was thinking that there was only one difference between himself now and himself as he had been before 'the bit of a shock'. He had once been a man whose sleep had been — nothing, nonexistent, he had slept like a small child. Now, in spite of everything, although he knew that fear could lie in wait there, his sleep had become another country, lying just behind his daytime one. Into that country he went nightly, with an alert, even if ironical, interest: the irony was due to his habits of obedience to his past — for a gift had been made to him. Behind the face of the sceptical world was another, which no conscious decision of his could stop him exploring.