Eyeless In Gaza (43 page)

Helen's reaction was curious. Distress at the spectacle of the young man's brutality towards the old. But at the same time anger with Miller for allowing himself to be knocked about without resistance. The reason for this anger? Obscure; but I think she resented Miller's success. Resented the fact that the young man had been reduced, psychologically, to impotence. Resented the demonstration that there was an alternative to terrorism and a non-violent means of combating it. ‘It's only a
trick,' she said. Not a very easy trick, I insisted; and that I certainly couldn't perform it. ‘Anyone could learn it, if he tried.' ‘Possibly; wouldn't it be a good thing if we all tried?' ‘No, I think it's stupid.' Why? She found it hard to answer. ‘Because it's unnatural,' was the reason she managed to formulate at last – and proceeded to develop it in terms of a kind of egalitarian philosophy. ‘I want to be like other people. To have the same feelings and interests. I don't want to make myself different. Just an ordinary person; not somebody who's proud of having learnt a difficult trick. Like that old Miller of yours.' I pointed out that we'd all learned such difficult tricks as driving cars, working in offices, reading and writing, crossing the street. Why shouldn't we all learn this other difficult trick? A trick, potentially, so much more useful. If all were to learn it, then one could afford to be like other people, one could share all their feelings in safety, with the certainty that one would be sharing something good, not bad. But Helen wasn't to be persuaded. And when I suggested that we should join the old man for a late lunch, she refused. Said she didn't want to know him. That the young man had been quite right; Miller was a reactionary. Disguising himself in a shroud of talk about economic justice; but underneath just a tory agent. His insistence that changes in social organization weren't enough, but that they must be accompanied by, must spring from a change in personal relations – what was that but a plea for conservatism? ‘I think he's pernicious,' she said. ‘And I think you're pernicious.' But she consented to have lunch with me. Which showed how little stock she set on my powers to shake her convictions! Arguments – I might have lots of good arguments; to those she was impervious. But Miller's action had got between the joints of her armour. He acted his doctrine, didn't rest content with talking it. Her confidence that I couldn't get between the joints, as he had done, was extremely insulting. The more so as I knew it was justified.

Perseverance, courage, endurance. All, fruits of love. Love goodness enough, and indifference and slackness are inconceivable. Courage comes as to the mother defending her child; and at the same time there is no fear of the opponent, who is loved, whatever he may do, because of the potentialities for goodness in him. As for pain, fatigue, disapproval – they are borne cheerfully, because they seem of no consequence by comparison with the goodness loved and pursued. Enormous gulf separating me from this state! The fact that Helen was not afraid of my perniciousness (as being only theoretical), while dreading Miller's (because his life was the same as his argument), was a painful reminder of the existence of this gulf.

THE CURTAIN ROSE,
and before them was Venice, green in the moonlight, with lago and Roderigo talking together in the deserted street.

‘Light, I say! Light!' Brabantio called from his window. And in an instant the street was thronged, there was a clanking of weapons and armour, torches and lanterns burned yellow in the green darkness . . .

‘Horribly vulgar scenery, I'm afraid,' said Anthony as the curtain fell after the first scene.

Joan looked at him in surprise. ‘Was it?' Then: ‘Yes, I suppose it was,' she added, hypocritically paying the tribute of philistinism to taste. In reality, she had thought it too lovely. ‘You know,' she confessed, ‘this is only the fifth time I've ever been in a theatre.'

‘Only the fifth time?' he repeated incredulously.

But here was another street and more armed men and Iago again, bluff and hearty, and Othello himself, dignified like a king, commanding in every word and gesture; and when Brabantio came in with all his men, and the torchlight glittering on the spears and halberds, how heroically serene!
‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.' A kind of anguish ran up and down her spine as she listened, as she saw the dark hand lifted, as the sword-points dropped, under his irresistible compulsion, towards the ground.

‘He speaks the lines all right,' Anthony admitted.

The council chamber was rich with tapestry; the red-robed senators came and went. And here was Othello again. Still kingly, but with a kingliness that expressed itself, not in commands, this time, not in the lifting of a hand, but on a higher plane than that of the real world – in the calm, majestic music of the record of his wooing.

Her lips moved as she repeated the familiar words after him – familiar but transfigured by the voice, the bearing of the speaker, the setting, so that, though she knew them by heart, they seemed completely new. And here was Desdemona, so young, so beautiful, with her neck and her bare shoulders rising frail and slender out of the heavy magnificence of her dress. Sumptuous brocade, and beneath it, the lovely irrelevance of a girl's body; beneath the splendid words, a girl's voice.

She felt again that creeping anguish along her spine. And now they were all gone, Othello, Desdemona, senators, soldiers, all the beauty, all the nobleness – leaving only lago and Roderigo whispering together in the empty room. ‘When she is sated of his body, she will find the error of her choice.' And then that fearful soliloquy. Evil, deliberate and conscious of itself . . .

The applause, the lights of the entr'-acte were a sacrilegious irrelevance; and when Anthony offered to buy her a box of chocolates she refused almost indignantly.

‘Do you think there really are people like lago?' she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Men don't tell themselves that the wrong they're doing is wrong. Either they do it without thinking. Or else they invent reasons for believing it's right. lago's a bad man who passes other people's judgments of him upon himself.'

The lights went down again. They were in Cyprus. Under a blazing sun, Desdemona's arrival; then Othello's – and, oh, the protective tenderness of his love!

The sun had set. In cavernous twilight, between stone walls, the drinking, the quarrel, the rasping of sword on sword, and Othello again, kingly and commanding, imposing silence, calling them all to obedience. Kingly and commanding for the last time. For in the scenes that followed, how terrible it was to watch the great soldier, the holder of high office, the civilized Venetian, breaking down, under lago's disintegrating touches, breaking down into the Africa, into the savage, into the uncontrolled and primordial beast! ‘Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief! . . . Noses, ears, and lips! Is it possible?' And then the determination to kill. ‘Do it not with poison, strangle her in bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.' And afterwards the horrible outburst of his anger against Desdemona, the blow delivered in public; and in the humiliating privacy of the locked room, that colloquy between the kneeling girl and an Othello, momentarily sane again, but sane with the base, ignoble sanity of lago, cynically knowing only the worst, believing in the possibility only of what was basest.

There was a hideous note of derision in his voice, an undertone of horrible obscene laughter. Irrepressibly, she began to tremble.

‘I can't bear it,' she whispered to Anthony between the scenes. ‘Knowing what's going to happen. ‘It's too awful. I simply can't bear it.'

Her face was pale, she spoke with a violent intensity of feeling.

‘Well, let's go,' he suggested. ‘At once.'

She shook her head. ‘No, no. I must see it to the end.
Must
.'

‘But if you can't bear it . . .?'

‘You mustn't ask me to explain. Not now.'

The curtain rose again.

Her heart was beating heavily; she felt sick with anticipation. In an almost childish voice, sweet, but thin and untrained, Desdemona began to sing.

The vision wavered before Joan's eyes, became indistinct; the tears rolled down her cheeks.

It was over at last; they were out in the street again.

Joan drew a deep breath. ‘I feel I'd like to go for a long walk,' she said. ‘Miles and miles without stopping.'

‘Well, you can't,' he said shortly. ‘Not in those clothes.'

Joan looked at him with an expression of pained astonishment. ‘You're angry with me,' she said.

Blushing, he did his best to smile it off. ‘Angry? Why on earth
should I be angry?' But she was right, of course. He
was
angry – angry with everyone and everything that entered into the present insufferable situation: with Mary for having pushed him into it; with himself for having allowed her to push him in; with Joan for being the subject of that monstrous bet; with Brian because he was ultimately responsible for the whole thing; with Shakespeare, even, and the actors and this jostling crowd . . .

‘Don't be cross,' she pleaded. ‘It's been such a lovely evening. If you knew how marvellous it's made me feel! But I have to be so careful with the marvellousness. Like carrying a cup that's full to the brim. The slightest jolt – and down it goes. Let me carry it safely home.'

Her words made him feel embarrassed, almost guilty. He laughed nervously. ‘Do you think you can carry it home safely in a hansom?' he asked.

Her face lit up with pleasure at the suggestion. He waved his hand; the cab drew up in front of them. They climbed in and closed the doors upon themselves. The driver jerked his reins. The old horse walked a few steps, then, at the crack of the whip, broke reluctantly into a very slow trot. Along Coventry Street, through the glare of the Circus, into Piccadilly. Above the spire of St James's the dilute blackness of the sky was flushed with a coppery glow. Reflected in the polished darkness of the roadway, the long recession of the lamps seemed inexpressibly mournful, like a reminder of death. Bu there were the trees of the Green Park – bright wherever the lamplight struck upwards into the leaves with an unearthly, a more than spring-like freshness. There was life as well as death.

Joan sat in silence, holding firm within herself the fragile cup of that strange happiness that was also and at the same time intensest sadness. Desdemona was dead, Othello was dead, and the lamps retreating for ever down their narrowing vistas were symbols of the same destiny. And yet the melancholy of these converging parallels and the pain of the tragedy were as
essential constituents of her present joy as her delight in the splendour of the poetry, as her pleasure in the significant and almost allegorical beauty of those illumined leaves. For this joy of hers was not one particular emotion exclusive of all others; it was all emotions – a state, so to speak, of general and undifferentiated movedness. The overtones and aftertones of horror, of delight, of pity and laughter – all lingered harmoniously in her mind. She sat there, behind the slowly trotting horse, serene, but with a serenity that contained the potentiality of every passion. Sadness, delight, fear, mirth – they were all there at once, impossibly conjoined within her mind. She cherished the precarious miracle.

A hansom, he was thinking – it was the classical opportunity. They were already at Hyde Park Corner; by this time he ought at least to have been holding her hand. But she sat there like a statue, staring at nothing, in another world. She would feel outraged if he were to call her roughly back to reality.

‘I shall have to invent a story for Mary,' he decided. But it wouldn't be easy; Mary had an extraordinary talent for detecting lies.

Reined in, the old horse gingerly checked itself, came to a halt. They had arrived. Oh, too soon, Joan thought, too soon. She would have liked to drive on like this for ever, nursing in silence her incommunicable joy. It was with a sigh that she stepped on to the pavement.

‘Aunt Fanny said you were to come and say good-night to her if she was still up.'

That meant that the last chance of doing it had gone, he reflected, as he followed her up the steps and into the dimly lighted hall.

‘Aunt Fanny,' Joan called softly as she opened the drawing-room door. But there was no answer; the room was dark.

‘Gone to bed?'

She turned back towards him and nodded affirmatively.
They stood there for a moment in silence.

‘I shall have to go,' he said at last.

‘It was a wonderful evening, Anthony. Simply wonderful.'

‘I'm glad you enjoyed it.' Behind his smile, he was thinking with apprehension that that last chance had not yet disappeared.

‘It was more than enjoying,' she said. ‘It was . . . I don't know how to say what it was.' She smiled at him, added, ‘Good-night,' and held out her hand.

Anthony took it, said good-night in his turn; then, suddenly deciding that it was now or never, stepped closer, laid an arm round her shoulder and kissed her.

The suddenness of his decision and his embarrassment imparted to his movements a clumsy abruptness indistinguishable from that which would have been the result of a violent impulse irrepressibly breaking through restraints. His lips touched her cheek first of all, then found her mouth. She made as if to withdraw, to avert her face; but the movement was checked almost before it was begun. Her mouth came back to his, drawn irresistibly. All the diffuse and indefinite emotion that had accumulated within her during the evening suddenly crystallized, as it were, round her surprise and the evidence of his desire and this almost excruciating pleasure that, from her lips, invaded her whole body and took possession of her mind. The astonishment and anger of the first second were swallowed up in an apocalypse of new sensations. It was as though a quiet darkness were violently illuminated, as though the relaxed dumb strings of an instrument had been wound up and were vibrating ever more shrilly and piercingly, until at last the brightness and the tension annihilated themselves in their own excess. She felt herself becoming empty; enormous spaces opened up within her, gulfs of darkness.