Complete Poems and Plays (41 page)

After being put to bed. But at least they never knew

Where we had been.

M
ARY
.
                           They never found the secret.

H
ARRY
.
Not then. But later, coming back from school

For the holidays, after the formal reception

And the family festivities, I made my escape

As soon as I could, and slipped down to the river

To find the old hiding place. The wilderness was gone,

The tree had been felled, and a neat summer-house

Had been erected, ‘to please the children’.

It’s absurd that one’s only memory of freedom

Should be a hollow tree in a wood by the river.

M
ARY
.
But when I was a child I took everything for granted,

Including the stupidity of older people —

They lived in another world, which did not touch me.

Just now, I find them very difficult to bear.

They are always assured that you ought to be happy

At the very moment when you are wholly conscious

Of being a misfit, of being superfluous.

But why should I talk about my commonplace troubles?

They must seem very trivial indeed to you.

It’s just ordinary hopelessness.

H
ARRY
.
                                          One thing you cannot know:

The sudden extinction of every alternative,

The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.

You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.

You only know what it is not to hope:

You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you,

Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless

Unrecognised by other men, though sometimes by each other.

M
ARY
.
I know what you mean. That is an experience

I have not had. Nevertheless, however real,

However cruel, it may be a deception.

H
ARRY
.
                                                     What I see

May be one dream or another; if there is nothing else

The most real is what I fear. The bright colour fades

Together with the unrecapturable emotion,

The glow upon the world, that never found its object;

And the eye adjusts itself to a twilight

Where the dead stone is seen to be batrachian,

The aphyllous branch ophidian.

M
ARY
.
                                             You bring your own landscape

No more real than the other. And in a way you contradict yourself:

That sudden comprehension of the death of hope

Of which you speak, I know you have experienced it,

And I can well imagine how awful it must be.

But in this world another hope keeps springing

In an unexpected place, while we are unconscious of it.

You hoped for something, in coming back to Wishwood,

Or you would not have come.

H
ARRY
.
                                         Whatever I hoped for

Now that I am here I know I shall not find it.

The instinct to return to the point of departure

And start again as if nothing had happened,

Isn’t that all folly? It’s like the hollow tree,

Not there.

M
ARY
.
          But surely, what you say

Only proves that you expected Wishwood

To be your real self, to do something for you

That you can only do for yourself.

What you need to alter is something inside you

Which you can change anywhere — here, as well as elsewhere.

H
ARRY
.
Something inside me, you think, that can be altered!

And here, indeed! where I have felt them near me,

Here and here and here — wherever I am not looking,

Always flickering at the corner of my eye,

Almost whispering just out of earshot —

And inside too, in the nightly panic

Of dreaming dissolution. You do not know,

You cannot know, you cannot understand.

M
ARY
.
I think I could understand, but you would have to be patient

With me, and with people who have not had your experience.

H
ARRY
.
If I tried to explain, you could never understand:

Explaining would only make a worse misunderstanding;

Explaining would only set me farther away from you.

There is only one way for you to understand

And that is by seeing. They are much too clever

To admit you into
our
world. Yours is no better.

They have seen to that: it is part of the torment.

M
ARY
.
If you think I am incapable of understanding you —

But in any case, I must get ready for dinner.

H
ARRY
.
No, no, don’t go! Please don’t leave me

Just at this moment. I feel it is important.

Something should have come of this conversation.

M
ARY
.
I am not a wise person,

And in the ordinary sense I don’t know you very well,

Although I remember you better than you think,

And what is the real you. I haven’t much experience,

But I see something now which doesn’t come from tutors

Or from books, or from thinking, or from observation:

Something which I did not know I knew.

Even if, as you say, Wishwood is a cheat,

Your family a delusion — then it’s
all
a delusion,

Everything you feel — I don’t mean what you think,

But what you feel. You attach yourself to loathing

As others do to loving: an infatuation

That’s wrong, a good that’s misdirected. You deceive yourself

Like the man convinced that he is paralysed

Or like the man who believes that he is blind

While he still sees the sunlight. I know that this is true.

H
ARRY
.
I have spent many years in useless travel;

You have staid in England, yet you seem

Like someone who comes from a very long distance,

Or the distant waterfall in the forest,

Inaccessible, half-heard.

And I hear your voice as in the silence

Between two storms, one hears the moderate usual noises

In the grass and leaves, of life persisting,

Which ordinarily pass unnoticed.

Perhaps you are right, though I do not know

How you should know it. Is the cold spring

Is the spring not an evil time, that excites us with lying voices?

M
ARY
.
The cold spring now is the time

For the ache in the moving root

The agony in the dark

The slow flow throbbing the trunk

The pain of the breaking bud.

These are the ones that suffer least:

The aconite under the snow

And the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood.

H
ARRY
.
Spring is an issue of blood

A season of sacrifice

And the wail of the new full tide

Returning the ghosts of the dead

Those whom the winter drowned

Do not the ghosts of the drowned

Return to land in the spring?

Do the dead want to return?

M
ARY
.
Pain is the opposite of joy

But joy is a kind of pain

I believe the moment of birth

Is when we have knowledge of death

I believe the season of birth

Is the season of sacrifice

For the tree and the beast, and the fish

Thrashing itself upstream:

And what of the terrified spirit

Compelled to be reborn

To rise toward the violent sun

Wet wings into the rain cloud

Harefoot over the moon?

H
ARRY
.
What have we been saying? I think I was saying

That it seemed as if I had been always here

And you were someone who had come from a long distance.

Whether I know what I am saying, or why I say it,

That does not matter. You bring me news

Of a door that opens at the end of a corridor,

Sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure

That every corridor only led to another,

Or to a blank wall; that I kept moving

Only so as not to stay still. Singing and light.

Stop!

What is that? do you feel it?

M
ARY
.
                                       What, Harry?

H
ARRY
.
That apprehension deeper than all sense,

Deeper than the sense of smell, but like a smell

In that it is indescribable, a sweet and bitter smell

From another world. I know it, I know it!

More potent than ever before, a vapour dissolving

All other worlds, and me into it. O Mary!

Don’t look at me like that! Stop! Try to stop it!

I am going. Oh why, now? Come out!

Come out! Where are you? Let me see you,

Since I know you are there, I know you are spying on me.

Why do you play with me, why do you let me go,

Only to surround me? — When I remember them

They leave me alone: when I forget them

Only for an instant of inattention

They are roused again, the sleepless hunters

That will not let me sleep. At the moment before sleep

I always see their claws distended

Quietly, as if they had never stirred.

It was only a moment, it was only one moment

That I stood in sunlight, and thought I might stay there.

M
ARY
.
Look at me. You can depend on me.