The Towers of Trebizond Page 25

  Vere was apt to lead a sportive life of pleasures and palaces, yachts and private planes, villas in France and castles in Italy, being invited to these amenities by friends, and this week in Venice we led this palazzo life, and were asked to parties at other palazzi, by Italian, French and English friends, some of whom were my friends too, but most were Vere's. It made for great luxe; the one who had lent us this palazzo had left his servants in it—a cook and a gondolier—so we gondoled everywhere and ate well, though as to that we usually ate other people's meals in the other palazzi. We sat late in the Piazza and listened to music, or we gondoled up the Canal and watched fountains of fireworks playing, on account of there being a fiesta every night. By day we rambled about the calli, looked at pictures and churches and fountains and bridges, all the usual lovely Venice things, took a vaporetto out to some haunted lagoon island with a derelict church, bathed from the Lido, which was not, in April, a mob, and then back to the Piazza to meet someone or other for drinks.

  Fortunately that hymn has got it wrong. It should be

  . . . they live in such delight,

  Such pleasure and such play,

  As that to them one happy week

  Doth seem a thousand years.

  This seems always to be the case, when the happiness is eventful and full of getting about, which is why, when one has been travelling abroad for a month it seems more like three months, and when one gets back one's friends have scarcely noticed that one is gone, and say, "You're back very soon," which does not seem to oneself to be at all the case. Anyhow, this Venice week, and the days we spent driving there and back, seemed like all summer compressed into a fortnight, and, looking back, it still seems that.

  Chapter 25

  We drove from Folkestone in time to join in the great Sunday evening crawl into London. It was so difficult in France and Italy that after a time we began getting cross. We had meant to be up in time to dine quietly before we parted, and we felt that this would ease the parting a little. But it began to seem that we should not reach London in time for this, or for anything else. Every one had had the idea of starting for home early, so as to miss the crawl, but, since every one had had the idea, no one missed the crawl. People got peevish, they began hooting and cutting in, and I got peevish too, so I took a euphoria pill, which makes you feel as if you would get there in the end. After we were in London the buses all seemed to be rushing on against the lights for about ten seconds after they had gone red. This trick of buses, and of a lot of other drivers, but buses are the worst and the most alarming, has always made me full of rage, it is the height of meanness, stealing their turn from those with the right to cross, it is like pedestrians crossing against the lights and stealing the turn of cars which have been waiting for their chance, but this in England is not actually a legal crime, only caddish, whereas for traffic it is a legal crime as well. The taxi drivers say that when they do it they are run in if seen by the police, but that the buses usually get off, as if a driver is prosecuted the other drivers come out on strike, but this may be only the anti-police malice of taxi drivers.

  When Vere was driving, I kept saying, "Push off the moment they go green. Don't let those cads get away with it," but Vere said, "Better let them get away with it and stay alive." When I took over, I was feeling like an avenging policeman, furious for the cause of legality, buoyed up by my euphorian pill, and all set to show the cads they couldn't get away with it. But they kept at it, and usually I could do nothing about it but hoot, as I was not the front car. Presently I was, and as the lights changed I saw a bus dashing up to crash the red, and I was full of rage and shouted, "Look at the lights," and started off the moment they were green. I heard Vere say, "Famous last words," and that was the last thing I ever heard Vere say. The crash as the bus charged the car and hit it broadside on and smashed us was all I knew for quite a time. When I came to, everything was a mess and a crowd, and I was lying in the mess with someone sponging blood from my face. I tried to turn my head and look for Vere, and saw a figure lying in blankets close by, quite still, and the head was at an odd angle. I think I was only partly conscious, because all I said was, "that murdering bus crashed the lights," and went off again.

  They kept me in hospital a fortnight, with sprains and cuts and concussion and shock, then aunt Dot drove me down to Troutlands. The bus driver was tried for manslaughter, as so many witnesses had seen him pass the lights, but he was acquitted on the grounds of this being such common form, and only got six months for dangerous driving. He had, after all, driven no more dangerously than buses and many other vehicles drive every day, only this time he had killed someone. I do not think he was even disqualified. No one blamed me, except myself. Only I knew about that surge of rage that had sent me off, the second the lights were with me, to stop the path of that rushing monster, whose driver had thought that no one would dare to oppose him. The rage, the euphoria, the famous last words; only I knew that I and that driver had murdered Vere between us, he in selfish unscrupulousness, I in reckless anger.

  I had plenty of time to think about it; no doubt my whole life. It seemed impossible to think about anything else. I don't think I talked much to aunt Dot, who nursed me back to health with the most exquisite kindness and patience. But I do not think she had ever loved any one as I had loved Vere, and nor had she killed her lover.

  There were other aspects. I had come between Vere and his wife for ten years; he had given me his love, mental and physical, and I had taken it; to that extent, I was a thief. His wife knew it, but we had never spoken of it; indeed, I barely knew her. We had none of us wanted divorce, because of the children; I liked it better as it was, love and no ties. I suppose I had ruined the wife's life, because she had adored him. Vere always said that he was fonder of her because of me; men are given to saying this. But really she bored him; if she had not bored him, he would not have fallen in love with me. If I had refused to be his lover he would no doubt, sooner or later, have found someone else. But I did not refuse, or only for a short time at the beginning, and so we had ten years of it, and each year was better than the one before, love and joy gradually drowning remorse, till in the end it scarcely struggled for life. And now the joy was killed, and there seemed no reason why my life too should not run down and stop, now that its mainspring was broken. When a companionship like ours suddenly ends, it is to lose a limb, or the faculty of sight; one is, quite simply, cut off from life and scattered adrift, lacking the coherence and the integration of love. Life, I supposed, would proceed; I should see my friends, go abroad, go on with my work, such as it was, but the sentient, enjoying principle which had kept it all ticking, had been destroyed.

  I could not, all the time, believe what had happened. I would forget; and then I would remember, and say to myself, "Vere is killed. We shan't see one another again, ever," and it would seem a thing too monstrous to be true. John Davies of Hereford's dirge for his friend Mr. Thomas Morley kept beating in my ears like waves on a beach—

  Death has deprived me of my dearest friend.

  My dearest friend is dead and laid in grave.

  In grave he rests until the world shall end,

  The world shall end, as end all things must have;

  All things must have an end that Nature wrought …

  Death has deprived me of my dearest friend…"

  And so on, ad infinitum. In fact, I became sunk in morbid misery. If the object of pleasure be totally lost, a passion arises in the mind which is called grief. Burke: and he did not overstate.

  Aunt Dot, I know, hoped that I should make my peace with the Church, now that the way was open. She spoke of it once, but with a warning note.

  "I think, my dear," she said, "the Church used once to be an opiate to you, like that Trebizond enchanter's potion; a kind of euphoric drug. You dramatized it and yourself, you felt carried along in something aesthetically exciting and beautiful and romantic; you were a dilettante, escapist Anglican. I know you read Clement of Alexandria; do you re
member where he says, 'We may not be taken up and transported to our journey's end, but must travel thither on foot, traversing the whole distance of the narrow way.' One mustn't lose sight of the hard core, which is, do this, do that, love your friends and like your neighbours, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don't dramatize and dream of escape. Anyhow, that seems to me to be the pattern, so far as we can make it out here. So come in again with your eyes open, when you feel you can."

  But I did not feel that I could. Even the desire for it was killed. I was debarred from it less by guilt, and by what seemed to me the cheap meanness of creeping back now that the way was clear, than by revulsion from something which would divide me further from Vere. It had always tried to divide us; at the beginning, it had nearly succeeded. To turn to it now would be a gesture against the past that we had shared, and in whose bonds I was still held. "Your church obsession," Vere had called it. "Well, some people have it. So long as you don't let it interfere with our lives . . . "

  I had not let it do that, and now I did not want to, for a stronger obsession had won. I could not argue against the gentle mockery of that mutilated figure whom I had loved and killed. I had to be on the same side as Vere, now and for always, and in any future there might be for us.

  Not that I believed now, as once I had, in any such future. Father Hugh had once said to me on the Black Sea that if one went on refusing to hear and obey one's conscience for long enough, it became stultified, and died; one stopped believing in right and wrong and in God, and all that side of life became blurred in fog: one would not even want it any more. I had got to that stage now; I wanted nothing of it, for even to think of it hurt.

  Someone once said that hell would be, and now is, living without God and with evil, and being unable to get used to it. Having to do without God, without love, in utter loneliness and fear, knowing that God is leaving us alone for ever; we have driven ourselves out, we have lost God and gained hell. I live now in two hells, for I have lost God and live also without love, or without the love I want, and I cannot get used to that either. Though people say that in the end one does. To the other, perhaps never.

  However this may be, I have now to make myself a life in which neither has a place. I shall go about, do my work, seek amusements, meet my friends, life will amble on, and no doubt in time I shall find it agreeable again. One is, after all, very adaptable; one has to be. One finds diversions; these, indeed, confront one at every turn, the world being so full of natural beauties and enchanting artifacts, of adventures and jokes and excitements and romance and remedies for grief. It is simply that a dimension has been taken out of my life, leaving it flat, not rich and rounded and alive any more, but hollow and thin and unreal, like a ghost that roves whispering about its old haunts, looking always for something that is not there.

  The passing years will, no doubt, pacify this ghost in time. And, when the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again.

  Still the towers of Trebizond, the fabled city, shimmer on a far horizon, gated and walled and held in a luminous enchantment. It seems that for me, and however much I must stand outside them, this must for ever be. But at the city's heart lie the pattern and the hard core, and these I can never make my own: they are too far outside my range. The pattern should perhaps be easier, the core less hard.

  This seems, indeed, the eternal dilemma.

  {1} (approx.) Have mercy on me, save me from my sins, O Lord help me.

  {2} Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.