Trust: A Novel Part 39

-I don't always follow him when he's being sardonic, and since that Spanish business, and his arm, he's hardly ever not sardonic. I think the reason is he's reading philosophers now. Also his arm is still in bad shape and very painful, the doctor said it's a wonder it didn't have to be amputated. He stays in his hideous little Adam Gruenhorn room practically day and night, all bandaged up, reading like mad. He's reading Materialism and Idealism. What it means, you see, is that there are two sorts of philosophers, Materialist and Idealist. One thinks the world is bad and really there, the others think the world is good and not really there. The Materialists-the ones who think the world exists but is bad-believe in G.o.d, but hate him for creating a bad world; and the Idealists-the other camp-are atheists who would love G.o.d if only they believed in him. Anyhow that's how Enoch explained it. Then I asked him what you would call a person like you, for instance, who thought the world was both good and there-whether he'd be a Materialist or an Idealist, and Enoch said neither, he'd be a fool. So then I gave him the news about your engagement, sort of to make the point for you, and he warned me strictly not to omit congratulating you. I suppose that was sardonic too. Though it really is a thing to marvel at: the way life works out. I mean it would have been perfectly sensible if you had begun with Sarah Jean in the first place, and then you wouldn't have had to feel ashamed and degraded because of the divorce. I hope contemplating this doesn't make you terribly sad, if you do like me and don't hate the irrevocable for being irrevocable. I do, I wish I could have the past back, not to do things over again in a different way but to realize while I'm living those things that this is my only chance at them. Because you don't recognize till afterward which moment of all the moments you've experienced is going to be the great high full one; and by the time you've sorted it out from the rest, it's gone. You can think about what's gone, but you can't live it. I wish there were a signal system that said: Now, it's Now, so look with all your might, and taste with all your might, and feel with all your might, and be with all your might; it's Now and it won't ever come again. A signal, not a thing like a chime but a familiar human voice, because think!-you might that very minute be taking it all for granted, you might be distracted by a fly in the room or an itch in your toe or a sign on the road, and never at all be aware you were in the prime of your one and only deep and beautiful hour. I wish in Brighton I had heard a voice I could trust say: "Brighton"-just the one name, like that, not "Europe," not "England"-just: "Brighton," and I would have understood. But there wasn't a voice. Or maybe there wasn't a voice I could trust. Or maybe I was feeling too happy to listen. The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself. Enoch looked queer when I told him that, and said it was enough of a burden on mankind that we always notice our unhappy times. Then he said I ought to be a Pilgrim Father like you, so I'd never worry about the irrevocable and would just accept it under the heading of Predestination. And then he snorted like a walrus from behind his bandages and asked me if I'd ever thought how interesting it is that people who believe in Predestination are also obliged to believe that G.o.d is a very bad planner-taking for example your having to marry and divorce me in order to marry the sort of person you ought to have married to begin with. I explained it isn't exactly Predestination you believe in, only a vague sort of idea about heaven's will, though you probably never even think about it, it would embarra.s.s you if you ever did. And you know what Enoch answered?-Since we can realize our destinies only after the fact, determinists should never speak of heaven's will, but only of heaven's was. -He's terribly clever, but over my head, and sometimes I get a little sick of always having to think so hard when I'm with him. Oh look, after all Enoch's warnings I'm nearly forgetting to tell you Congratulations after all. It's really the best thing you could have done, and very nice for poor Sarah Jean too. It was such a humiliation for her when Alan Pettigrew broke their engagement-it must be five years already!-to marry that lively girl from the West that n.o.body ever heard of. Everybody thought it a tragedy, but fate had something else in mind. Life! C'est la fille! Anyhow Alan Pettigrew was always a devious little boy. Even way back in dancing school he was always changing partners on his own, and never kept the one Miss Lamb paired him with-remember Miss Lamb's pairing system? She listened to all the old grannies. Sarah Jean and Alan Pettigrew, me and you. And see how different it all is now! P.S. I've just read this whole letter over. You won't like the philosophy parts. But really believe me in spite of them I'm much graver-minded than I used to be. You can't have had and lost Brighton without ending up a lot graver-minded than you started out. P.P.S. Let me know what to do about Mrs. Mealie and the $$$!

Memorandum from Connelly to Allegra: April 17, 1938. Bank of London, Ltd., has been directed to honor checks bearing signature of A. Mealie up to the value of '5 each. For problems of similar degree, it will be convenient for you to make arrangements with Mr. Ian Makin at the bank. Blackburn and Tweddly, Solicitors, have been instructed with regard to this individual's emigration. Yours very truly.

Allegra to William: May 1, 1938. This isn't a letter. Today is May Day, and even Enoch's ignoring Labor. He has to, or his arm won't heal. Still, May Day without a parade! We're going to get ourselves driven all the way up to the Cotswolds to see some May Dancers. The Green Park is full of green, it's true, but the country is the country. One ought to ogle low stone walls. This is only to say how surprised I was to hear (from little Sparrs, who got it from his mammy) that the wedding happened so fast. And so quietly. I suppose it was a great sacrifice for Sarah Jean, letting it all go with a hush, and not getting to be a bride with all the gala. I don't know why you slipped into it like that, it makes you seem so mournful, like a widower. Doubtless you knew what you were doing. -I was going to say something about staying on a few more months, but here's Enoch leaning on the bell, so goodbye, we're off for maypoles. But the bank sent a mysterious little message. I guess you know about it. The upshot of it is you want me to keep away till you're settled down. Just like a widower faced with an unlucky ghost! Well, if you want to correspond through the bank until you're settled down, I don't object in the least. The trouble is the bank doesn't care whether they find Nick or not. The bank's given up, and advises me to do the same. Everything's dead to a bank, you know, it doesn't matter how many ribbons are going around how many maypoles. -Enoch's in, and yelling like a madman. I said this wasn't a letter. No, there's not the tiniest stick or thread I want out of the Scarsdale house. It's all Sarah Jean's, with my blessings. (Is it all right for me to say that, or do I have to whisper it to the bank so the bank can whisper it to you?)

12.

My mother's letters. If only it were possible to call them incredible! (And thus evade them.) But by their tedium they compel belief. Not that their impulse shows a want of vitality-they have, after all, the flute-note of purity: a distinction which some persons, probably including my mother herself, ostentatiously like to toss into the category of Subjective Truth. Tedious her letters undoubtedly are; but they are not merely tedious. Think of music-some delectable sonatina, say, small yet brave-and imagine it played in the next room. Imagine it played in the next room for five hours. Even the marvelous, too long sustained, can be charged with tedium as absolutely as, in another part of the mind, the folklorist Toynbee kills our trust with his deadly progressions of distortions, any one of which, alone, we might smile at, as upon a weed grown up in a j.a.panese rock-garden. Here, however, I find that I am quoting Enoch. "Not only endless quiescence, but also endless excitation, produces the torpor of tedium," he said the day I brought out the bundle of my mother's letters; "the most celestial hymn, uncelestially prolonged, will do it. Not for nothing"-sly Enoch! to achieve this last and my mother's laughter he threaded through a lacework of ornately balanced prologue-"not for nothing do we speak of the Te Deum."

I have stated that I brought out my mother's letters. This means they existed. How did they exist? William said he had torn them up. The stern historian, remembering this, will accuse me of having reconstructed them from my mother's public mode of writing (I avoid the word "style," though the innocent historian might not) in Marianna Harlow. And indeed such a forgery would not be difficult. The letters as they stand have many of the characteristics of her fiction-so much so that, having tested one's soul in these, it is no longer necessary to try oneself more profoundly in Marianna. Here, in the absence of novelistic device, are all her devices: more than one panting reader has noted how the whole of Marianna appears to have been conceived of as a single paragraph. And here is her adoration of dialectic, and of dialogue, and of Intellectual Matter not her own stuffed naively but diligently between rapturous sheets so as to make a mattress upon which to rest the astonished and violated ear. The metaphor of the mattress is not by chance. And the guru in it is undoubtedly what my mother would term the "philosophy parts"-though the same historian will perhaps blame me for having invented these out of the logic of history, which always personifies. Even in the dialogues of Plato (easily as theatrical as my mother's) we have representations not of humors but of the dual political history of the race. ("The majority of the beasts, if polled, would vote Rightist."-Enoch. Or again: "Lambs are born liberals.") But the mattress has a kick here, and a sag there, and is, besides, noisy with the claims of phantom voices: sometimes Enoch's, more often Nick's, now and then a solecism adapted from a foreign idiom introduced to my mother by that Hugh who, though this may not be the place to tell it, finally earned his daily nutriment abroad by dressing in Arab skirts and singing romantic Russian songs in a Georgian accent (not that Georgia where Stalin was born) and in a very fine near-soprano. The accent was partly perforce, and partly to deride-not the songs, but his audience. Sometimes he liked to tease a male auditor (whose spoon hung amazed at his lip) by declaring himself a rival for the male auditor's wife's affections, and this in a country where there were no miscegenation laws. But what Hugh really liked was the skirts: they hid him. They also revealed him. After the war he turned up where Nick turned up; they often traveled together, a pair of minstrel dominoes or dice, white imposing on black, black imposed on white. Or they split, usually by night, each addressing his own scarred piano in his own fork-flas.h.i.+ng winey provincial cellar. Their daylight sins were not the same. Nick roamed beaches, found what he had not sought (he prided himself on never pet.i.tioning), and afterward submitted to physiologically-oriented interrogation in several languages, including Dutch, by his fellow piano-player the walnut-veneered Ph.D. If the woman was my governess, and could be had therefore only in the unfocussed depth of morning dark, while demons clanged, the questions would be Dutch, the vicarious fancy would be Dutch, Hugh in his long Arab skirts would dream himself deliciously Dutch, and then go make excuses for Nick in Nick's cafe to Nick's employer, in French. He would say, in French, that his friend had been kept away the night before by illness, and would be kept away tonight by the same malady; the malady was a Dutch malady, and continued until my mother cured it by sending away the carrier, poor wrathful exiled Anneke, who saw cruel Palestinian wastes in the sands of the beach where Nick came rambling in indifferent hope of discovery: and discovered my governess, dozing on a flat wedge of stone. Meanwhile far below, among the smaller wavelets with their heads dissolving into little pools of white spittle, I was catching the ringworm from Jean Francois. Like a pair of courting lizards, Anneke and my father (my father!) flirted on that stone and arranged their brief opportunistic future: one spoke of the nasty child she had to tend, the other of his nasty piano. And Hugh was sent to tell them at the Palatin that Nick could not play that night. Well, let this be said of Hugh: he knew all the white man's languages. Never mind mere Romance, Kelt, and Slav; he knew all the varieties of the Germanic tongues-Low, High, Middle; Scandinavian in its several guises; Flemish; even Yiddish; even Afrikaans. Afrikaans yes, Bantu no. He had the round, beautifully-turned foreskull of a Johannesburg sweeper; few American Negroes are negroid enough to have retained that lordly arc of brow. Let this also be said of Hugh: though knowing all the white man's languages, though agonized by the longing to be white, a white man he did not long to be. The white man takes. Imperialist colonialist brute, the white man takes. Hugh wanted to be taken.

But all this is by the way. Be a.s.sured that I did not get it from William. I was musing on my mother's letters. I did not get these from William either. Yet innumerable letters glutted William's files. He had letters from architects and from contractors and from engineers of bridges. He had the young Armenian's violent letters. He had the cautiously polite but impatient letters of the fourteen other prospective curators. He had one primitive letter, in capitals, from the ferryman. He had repeated letters in a hideous pastiche of near-English from the young Armenian's parents, in which they refused the indisputably generous sums proferred for their son's life. He had a sympathetic and perhaps too graceful letter from the doctor who had escaped the acquisition of an Armenian son-in-law. He had letters from the county threatening suit. Oh, William had letters! (All lawyers do.) They were kept in a file in Connelly's charge, marked Miscellaneous. His son had read them all.

But not my mother's letters. These William did not have. These his son had never read. Why? Because they were in a cardboard ladies' stationery box, with gold stripes across the cover, secreted at the back of the third drawer of Enoch's locked desk. He gave me the key and told me where to find them and ordered me to bring them out There were the letters I have reproduced here (and not from imagination or speculation), and a few others. Each was encased in a pair of envelopes, the inner one fragile and crackly and zealously scratched over in my mother's hand, the scratches pointing furiously toward America, the outer one of a thick opulent paper and prudently directed toward an English bank. America had read them all, and America had returned them all. Strange, strange! There were, besides, the letter from William I have already given, and a dozen or so memoranda under Connelly's name. Oh, strange! I held them and weighed them and sniffed their ancient emanation, vaguely of sea (but most had gone by air), and regarded them as my mother must have regarded her mother's madder letters, never mailed, which the maids had brought down to her long ago: it was the same; I thought them intrusive; I thought them obscene; I thought them monstrous. For a short s.p.a.ce I intensely believed them to be forgeries, or, lacking that, some incomprehensible hoax understandable only to an irrational generation, now luckily dead. I saw them creased, unfolded, re-folded, sealed and unsealed and then again sealed, here and there yellowishly gluey or dimly patched with brittle tape; but their horror for me was not that they were old. They were old; it was not age which opened out my bitter fright. It was that they were evidence; they were in effect witnesses; by their changelessness they confirmed, they spited. Worse, they showed how the devil contrives to keep his dossier empty. They existed without seeming to have existence; like all witnesses and testimonies they were not the thing itself; they were about the thing, and could err. Behold, the thing itself has vanished; place, time, circ.u.mstance-all vanished and vanquished. Only the witnesses and testimonies linger. They come on stage Indian-file, superannuated, redolent of rejected moonings, and wearing out-of-date garments everyone now finds as ridiculous as a costume for a slightly stilted play. That my mother, today placidly conjuring herself mistress of the Emba.s.sy, should yearn to marry Nick, a drifter, a piano-player! Obsolete, all obsolete. It was as crude and absurd as though she hould suddenly declare a pa.s.sion for Ed McGovern. I could not swallow it: my mother as young as I, my mother in her wild old days. Her letters stank with their imposture; they denied the stick of time along which we willingly enough appear to jump, insanely, notch by notch; I despised them. No wonder the devil's dossier is always bare! There are no wedding-congratulations in it. There is no philosophy in it. What has been uttered has been forgotten. What has been written is disgusting, and no one will believe in it. This is how he maintains his flexible versions of what-was-the devil; this is why his briefcase is unburdened. Everyone helps him. What exists, or existed once, is said not to exist, or never to have existed at all. And if evidence should all at once emerge, and testimonies, and witnesses, by their own force, by their own radical and improbable nature they are discredited. My mother's letters! She, it turned out, did not remember having composed them; and when, obeying Enoch, I confronted myself and her with their unarguable quiddities, present in, of all undeniables, her own unchanged, hence undeveloped, handwriting, she professed more vigorously than before never to have written them. She claimed she very plainly did not feel that way, therefore could never have felt that way; she leaped hindward from improbability to impossibility. And I with her, daydreaming they were a fraud, like my mother's second marriage and divorce, supposedly to and then from that Nick who courted my governess on the beach of Europe and afterward bargained for my ignorance of his being. And achieved both; Anneke by night; blackmail by day. He always achieved what he was after; probability never touched him; for him, without danger, everything could exist, all things were permitted to exist. Meanwhile in a backward fancy I fixed on Connelly, the meticulous accountant: saw him standing, head large and clean, neck a clean slice of cylindrical pudding, at the harbor of New York, hailing steamers; or in the middle of some undersized Nineteen-Thirties suburban airfield, cattails innumerably waggling behind the landing strip, waving down a s.h.i.+mmering noisy wing. In all that distance of twenty years he seemed not smaller; rather, enormous, excessive. His great thick fingers plucked my mother's letters from the sea, from the air; I felt his dread intercepting frown. What came to William's eye William's hand tore. He tore, he tore; and tore. But Connelly, meticulous, had never torn a paper in his life; he offered to establish a private file, a smothered file, a file open to no one at all, not even to Connelly. William murdered the proposal with a twitch: a descent of the eyelids, trifling and sudden, but to Connelly meaningful and stupefying. He hung from William's look like a spider from his tenuous chain, on which the mesh of delegated strengths rely, through which all connections merge. His employer did not quite seal upper to lower lid; only pointed his glance as near to himself as possible, h.o.a.rding what he might finger there. The solid spears of my mother's childish alphabet ripped the caves and cus.h.i.+ons beneath his sweating knuckles. Then inexplicably he ceased to tear her letters: inexplicably he ceased to open them. He gave the envelopes, virgin, to Connelly. He spoke: "Read, review, consider, administer, reply to what requires reply. Then discard. Discard." Connelly, well-instructed, read, reviewed, considered, administered, replied to what required reply: then doubted. The bookkeeping mind does not discard indiscriminately. It discards either what is altogether irrelevant (this comes under the heading of finished business) or what is only too relevant (unfinished business of a suspicious nature). My mother's letters, with their devious tangents and tiresome discourses and irrational intrusions of scenes and slyness, escaped either category. They seemed not to count for nothing, but neither did they count for too much. Here and there, in scattered parts, they were plainly business, and carried the voice of injunction typical of clients of a certain magnitude; yet they represented, in a particular area pertinent to Connelly's employer, a business unmistakably finished. They were, in short, neither trifles nor threats-what was to be done with them? Not for the first time obedience quarreled with private judgment in Connelly's exacting universe. He forsook the Rome of William's command and made a Protestant decision: he delivered up those laden envelopes, white and terrible as wedding-sheets, padded and flaunting shame, delivered them up preserved, to William's desk, where his employer, coming one morning from his second marriage-bed, met them all in a row, like violated pillows pinched by use, or say instead like dead fattened swans, ready to be eaten. But he despite outrage could no longer tear them: Sarah Jean, who lived her piety and recommended mercy in all things, was certain one disposed best of the ungrateful past by showing it a gentle hand; she produced an apt epigram from the Epistle to the Corinthians, which coaxed a secret quiver from her husband's larynx, and induced in her own soul (she was certain she had a soul) a firm superst.i.tion that men who marry twice are as the lost sheep who will be gathered in. But William caught himself that minute in a recurring guilt of contrast-he could neither endure it nor elude it. The new wife's shrewd Pauline maxim, succinct, all wide white gla.s.s in its clarity and charity, all touching, modest, and persuasive, soiled his mind with its perfection. It shook out in him resonances; he scarcely knew whether it was her disciplined n.i.g.g.ardly bosom in its spare dull-silk frame that embarra.s.sed his early eye, or some peril of longing seeping somewhere near his collar-bone, as though he had just swallowed something queer but familiar. Gladioli stood serenely in vases. Was it this, a kind of dream of order realized, that made him all unexpectedly, all astonishedly, oh criminally despair? And here nearby were Sarah Jean's books, brought from her parents' house-impeccable ancestral sermons and collections of hazy brown photographs of Suss.e.x parsonages. There was a harmless Episcopal strain in that family, a tendency toward genuflection among some of the older aunts; Sarah Jean had not yielded to it. She established faith, then left the rest to behavior. She thrived on advice-projected, not encountered-and advised William that error could be brought to penitence only through the medium of sincere pity. He thought she mentioned Mary Magdalene; it startled him-but then she might only have been speaking of the Cambridge colleges, a propos of her current absorption in an ecclesiastical history of England. She read with now and then a pleasant obliging sigh of discovery, like Queen Victoria examining an official compliment from her Prime Minister (Disraeli, not Gladstone), and consenting to recognize it as true. William found it prudent to be attentive to her attentiveness, so precisely solicitous was it toward his views, so totally bending was it to his preference. He uneasily felt he did not always deserve the plenitude of her attention when she addressed him (meaning-he faced it vaguely-that he did not always give her his). She was grateful to be married; she was very clear about that; she did not hide it from him. Her reply to everything was simply and modestiy to hope she might be good. She way good. She was persistent in her goodness, she was above all certain in it. Her goodness was founded on an altogether modern distaste for self-deception. She explained she would try not to forget that she was a successor, a replacement, a second thought, in William"s life, if not in his present mind. She said: "We must not be afraid to name things by their names," and supposed it was hardly reasonable to expect that William could obliterate his treacherous and unhappy failure. Together, therefore, they would agree to fix on the past, to take it in and turn it round and observe and perceive and comprehend whatever unendurables it might throw up in the stir. She contended that it was they whose duty it was to swallow the past, lest the past swallow them. No one should ever blame her for not allowing William the opportunity for purgation. Freedom of the feelings was with her no mere mildly-acknowledged tenet: she believed in it actively, and was ready to listen to whatever William might wish to rid himself of, all old miserable tales of what had happened to make him stumble.

He could, he must, tell her everything about poor Allegra; it would help him to tell it all, and then, as convenient by-product, it would help her: from it she would learn exactly what she must not do to stain his hope in her. For example: one day he had praised her punctuality; and she, fiercely fearlessly direct, all bravery and therapeutic theory, inquired whether Allegra had not ever been punctual. Curious how he blushed! She had to prod: "Was she? You must not evade. It's better for you to air old annoyances, dearest, no matter how trivial. Haven't I told you again and again how awful it was for me the day I got that telegram from Alan from out West? That was trivial, too-adding another girl I didn't even know to the list of wedding-guests. And then"-but Sarah Jean's humor was of the too-conscious kind-"marrying her instead of me! There, you see how I've purged all that? You must do the same. Say it: Allegra wasn't punctual." "She wasn't-very," he concurred feebly. "You seel There now! Don't you feel better already?" said Sarah Jean, and punctually conceived the germ of his son to show him she would do for him whatever Allegra had not done, as well as vice versa. The point of things was to give right names. G.o.d was G.o.d, and had a Son, who was Our Lord and Saviour; the past was the past, which meant not that one never thought of it, but-on the contrary-that one owed it something, probably reformation; and (finally) bad behavior was bad behavior and had to be accepted for what it was if redemption were to be properly understood as a real process in G.o.d's scheme. What this signified practically was that William was not to think it necessary, on Sarah Jean's account, to sever his acquaintances.h.i.+p with poor wretched Allegra: oh, by no means! One day soon Allegra would come home, and then, of course, she must be treated as a Christian would treat anyone. She must be seen, interviewed, aided: the bundle of pitiful baby as well. Above all, William must not avoid Allegra on the gentlemanly supposition that a confrontation might enliven something like jealousy in his wife-she, after all, was his wife: how humiliating for her if by such a delicacy he implied, however obliquely, that he thought them the same-equals who could be compared one to the other! Instead let there be, for decency's sake, an open trafficking of Christian mercy between William and poor mistaken Allegra. Did she a.s.sail him with wearisome demands in every mail? (A guess. Sarah Jean was a sorceress at guessing.) He ought to answer her, of course, and personally: only contemplate her situation! Alone, abandoned, alien to all the world's ways! William's wife, still riding the majesty of her newly-bought bed, gave the fullness of her sincerity to William's tie, which he was knotting. "What? No, I didn't say Mary Magdalene, what made you think of that? I said Magdalene-did you know Peter was on their crew?"-referring to some obscure younger cousin who had been sent abroad to breathe in a Church-of-England education. "You know what they called him over there? Peetah. He came home with it and now all the time he p.r.o.nounces it Saint Pee-tah. It's one of the names on my list. We've used it a lot." "Names?" said William with heated nape. "Dearest, for the child. You must start a list too"-how tractable, yet how confident, she seemed in the new bed!-"and then we'll see where we match." "If we don't match at all?-I don't care for Peter." "We'll match somehow, wait and see. We're bound to overlap. One always does overlap with lists of names." "I thought of William," he said shyly. "Dearest, whatever you like. Though we never did go in for Juniors. They've simply clambered down. It's the kind of thing the Irish do nowadays. But never mind, it's to be whatever you like, William. Still-" she s.p.a.ced them out: elegant smile, yawn, elegant smile-"isn't your office man, that Connelly, isn't he a Junior? I mean just to prove my little point?" He nodded; in him something shuddered open like a bleakness, a chasm. "Well then! Whatever you like," she beamed. Whatever he liked: it jumped, half-wooed, half-repelled, a live tendril round his neck, the suddenly recognized thing garlanding him-the anti-sermon her docile eagerness aroused and then suppressed. She removed herself from the throne of bed in her stately way, and came and put her face upon the knot in his tie. She was taller than Allegra; her eyes were too close to his. "We're to make up for everything, I mean disappointments in the past; I intend to manage that we will; and we will, if we plan and pray," she said into the place where his voice coiled in hiding. He could not uncoil it; it resisted with a gasp. He had not heard his wife, though she heard him, and wondered. The unbodied joy had him by the throat. Its race had never begun. He had drowned it, he had dashed it into a wave. And now it had him by the throat. "What's the matter?" said Sarah Jean. "Do you think it's wicked to put it that way? All right, let's pray first and then plan," she reversed herself submissively, releasing the piety, like a blue milk, into her propinquant eyes. She was twenty-seven and nearly happy. Already a strict little duet of lines like linked semaph.o.r.es lauded the indivisibility of marriage in her high bridal brow.

And William asked Connelly, "Is it do you find a very common custom among Roman Catholics of Irish extraction?" Connelly stared, expecting anger and the violent dropping, all eery noiseless click, of William's white lids: the letters lay arranged and revealed. His employer did not look down. "Naming the son for the father, I mean." "I'm Jim," said Connelly, "my old dad was Jim. I don't know about the rest." "I see," said William-and attached: "these. I see these are surviving. A tedious collection, I've told you. What am I to do with bulging envelopes? Why haven't you torn them up? Look at the dates-have you kept them in a crypt? You've at least taken care of their insides?" Connelly a.s.sented: he had done it all, read, reviewed, considered, administered, replied to what required reply. "Then discard," said William; "discard; I say discard them, I don't want them, get them out of here." And kept his look wide, wide: with his hand curled on his chest, as though he were about to cough up a lodged bone.

And Connelly? Authority weighed; but authority sighed at its loss. Connelly, meticulous, could not, by his own hand, destroy paper. In h.e.l.l the accountants will be made to tear all the letters they have ever written, and all the letters they have ever received; and the howls of the accountants will exceed the bleats of those who for their sins the G.o.d of Dante condemned to roll throttled in the river of excrement. Still, Connelly was not technically disobedient. To get rid of a thing is to discard it. The letters came at last into the keeping of the English bank, which is to say they came into no-one-in-particular's keeping, which is to say they were, at last, nowhere. And if they were nowhere, how could they be said to exist? And if they did not exist, how could they fill the devil's dossier? And if the devil himself has no evidence, who then has?

The question is not rhetorical. The answer is Enoch. He was not what we mean when we say idealist, and preferred Job's shard to Plato's absolute. Perhaps this is the explanation for why he chose a smoky August day in 1939 to move my mother out of England. He himself drove the hired car (in those days he would never ride behind a chauffeur) to the queen-s.h.i.+p, a tower dimly speckling the fog with flags limp round her smokestacks, steaming with the cautious breathing of the refugee rich. He shook hands with Mrs. Mealie only because her stern Welsh wrist jutted like a log at him; but he refused to kiss the baby, which was held out for goodbye. "Farewell," he told the baby. "Go home," he told Allegra. "I've left a mess," she complained, "n.o.body knows what a mess I've left, all sorts of stuff, Siegfried still packing the littler trunks, G.o.d knows what he'll steal for his wife. And papers and papers of one sort or another at the bank mixed up with William I guess or that Connelly, I haven't the slightest notion, all the money-arrangements and things, after all I never go there, I tell them to send me the money and they do. You're just pus.h.i.+ng me out, you know that." "Out of the way." "What, I'm in your way? And who's come practically every day and read that idiot Kant to you in that idiot hole of a room so you could listen with your eyes shut? I can't understand it, if you're so mad at the Germans, and you go right on reading that idiot German-" Like a troubling echo in a deep deep cave, the. s.h.i.+p's whistle boomed. There was a rustle among the pa.s.sengers. "Well, it's not cannon," said Mrs. Mealie, disapproving of the stir; there was fear in it. "Me-me-me," mouthed the baby, switching its small ugly eyes upward toward the marbled ceiling of the cabin. The cabin was indistinguishable from an English parlor; there was even a fringe on the lampshade. Mrs. Mealie moved from table to table, patting things admiringly. She had never seen the inside of a s.h.i.+p before, and she was not yet certain whether it was really moral for a s.h.i.+p to seem exactly like a parlor. "What am I going to do about the bank?" said Allegra: "I mean if they keep on sending the money, and there's no one in the flat but that Siegfried-oh, I forgot to tell you, Enoch, I'm letting him stay there; after all, the rent's paid for months. I don't see why you didn't want it instead of that hole. I told him he could bring his wife if he wanted to, and the whole Viennese ghetto if it suited him. He was pretty obsequious, it was disgusting, they don't understand about democracy. I don't like them when they're grateful and I don't like them when they're ungrateful. Well, look, you're not going to tell me they're all like King Solomon or King David or somebody-" But the whistle had begun again, a long sharp groan, as though a very large creature had been wounded. Under the wine-colored carpeting vibrations faintly beat. "Goodbye," Enoch said, "it's all ash.o.r.e that's going ash.o.r.e." "Well, dash away," said Allegra-"abandon me to the sea's bowels. You made up the whole war scare just to get me out of your room." "Get you out of Europe," Enoch said. "London isn't Europe, not a soul ever thought it was. Anyhow it isn't as if I didn't read aloud perfectly satisfactorily!" "I don't quarrel with your elocution," Enoch said, "but it's not the sort of war you're meant for. You'll be better off at home." "Oh, better off, better off! What do you know about better off?" she wailed at him while the cabin shook. "I know I'd better be off," said Enoch, and ducked out the low door. ("There's the engine!" cried Mrs. Mealie; privately she was noting that no decent parlor in her experience had ever had floorboards that wobbled.) "But the bank," said Allegra; "can't you do something about the bank, Enoch?" She had followed him into the corridor. "Shall I blow it up?" he offered, showing her his patient genial ordinary scowl. "I mean," she explained, "I've neglected everything, such a mess, I didn't even telephone them to say I'm leaving, it's just the sort of inefficiency William hates-" "Ah, if you're out to please William, that's another matter," he concluded nicely: "I like that. It's touching, a loyal spurt of conjugality-after-the-fact. You make a model wife-provided the precaution has been taken of divorcing you first." A steward came through, pressing himself past them against the tube-like walls of the pa.s.sageway: "Gangplank's coming up, sir. Gangplank's coming up. Last call." "Go home," Enoch said, "America needs you." "Oh, I know. America craves me." "Go home, prove by your presence it's still the land of the spree and the home of the idle rich. Have a good time. Let us leftovers here have our little European war to ourselves. Go home and be an heiress." "It's nothing but a silly fight over refugees from perfectly awful ghettos. n.o.body's going to fight over that. Only," she said with a gloomy absent look, "if there's a war I'll never find Nick. Never, never. Therefore there won't be a war. And if there isn't a war the bank will think I'm acting like a d.a.m.n fool for running out. William will, anyhow." "So let's have the war to save your face," Enoch said. "But take care of the bank, will you?" I'll settle it all, 111 see to everything," he told her mildly. "You'll settle it all, really?" "Yes." "You'll see to everything?" she insisted. "I said I would." "But you only mean the bank, don't you?" "What else could I mean? I'll settle the n.a.z.is, I'll see to Hitler? Bank on it, I meant the bank. The bank, the bank, the bank. Bank on it." "You didn't mean Nick." "Oh h.e.l.l, you bet I didn't mean Nick." "Then 111 never marry," she said in furtive despair; Mrs. Mealie stood righteously at the curtained porthole, shrugging the baby to the inconvenient rhythm of the swarming engines underfoot. It was plain from the tilt of her shoulder she had determined it was not moral for a s.h.i.+p to seem exactly like a parlor. Luckily she had not been informed that the baby she held was societally amiss (a phrase the baby would have enjoyed had the One been uttered and the other been awake to hear; for, already human, it was beginning to like to imitate sounds and to create semblances of word-noises, some rather complex), or she would have regarded the baby as she now regarded the s.h.i.+p: tolerable for the length of the journey, since there was no avoiding it, but not to be personally acknowledged, since it was an impostor. The baby in particular was an impostor: Mrs. Mealie had been told (it was Enoch's idea to tell her) that it was the child of divorced parents; she thought it was being taken to America to be seen by its father. The baby had a pa.s.sport all to itself: in this and in the s.h.i.+p's register it was already pa.s.sing under William's name, the first of innumerable similar impostures. This too was Enoch's plan; incalculably, Enoch believed in respectability. Nevertheless his departing words to Allegra were irritable and not respectable: "Oh go home; what do I care if you marry or you don't marry?" But this woke her into a gleeful sneer-"As long as you settle me, as long as you see to me! I'm banking on you!" she shouted after him while the returning steward, come to give the last alarm of all, stared.

The next day two things happened: a pair of mustached men (one lip wore an inkblot, the other a bear's elbow) settled it all and saw to everything-Europe, that is-and named the myth they had made between them a Pact, to keep the cynical peace; and Enoch walked into a certain grey structure of the kind that is usually called "imposing" and presented himself to a spectacled person grown up to be like an asparagus-limp, lean, vaguely pale in a mottled and moldy way, and his fingertips just moist. "Mr. Ian Makin?" "Quite," said the asparagus, but was imperfectly cordial as though he suspected a daylight robbery, until his caller explained that he had come in behalf of the American lady of whom Mr. Makin would know a very great deal; and would Mr. Makin kindly take effective cognizance of the fact that the lady had gone home to America? "A pity," said the asparagus, who had regarded Allegra as one of his most profitable international "arrangements"; he had very generous terms from William, and almost no service at all to render, beyond the mailing of a check and the maintenance of a vault. The vault was a bit of a nuisance; he had instructions to see to it that none of its contents (of a certain nature) was ever permitted to travel back again to the New World's inhospitable sh.o.r.es. The patroness herself, of course, he had never seen. For more than a year she had kept aloof; she seemed to look on every communication from the bank as an insult. Now and then a paper came from New York imploring her signature; the paper entered the London mails, received the lady's chill child-like scribble, re-entered the London mails, and was quickly posted back to New York. But this was rare. Still, Mr. Makin had observed from these operations that New York appeared to wish to deal with the lady as impersonally as possible; and this was exactly what outraged her. She blamed the bank for allowing itself to be put in the middle, and for behaving rudely. Mr. Makin felt a particular kind of moral discomfort, as though he were a keyhole peeper, whenever he entered the vault and with his own hand placed in their a.s.signed compartment a new batch of envelopes which an accompanying note from a certain Connelly had described as unreturnable under any circ.u.mstance. Being a banker, he was a suspicious man, and it seemed to him that the lady's own letters were flocking ungallantly back to her. Luckily or unluckily she had never called for them-perhaps because the bank had failed to mention in any specific sense that they were there. The bank said merely, "Here are some new papers that have come for you," and the lady said, "Do I have to sign?" and when the bank said no, the lady did not reply further. But now here was this gentleman (who somehow did not look quite a gentleman: perhaps it was that his shoes were not brushed enough) telling him that the lady would not return to London at all, that everything was to be severed; certainly they would have to wait for a confirmation from New York, but meanwhile it would do no harm to withhold the checks, as the ungentlemanly gentleman was suggesting. Doubtless there was going to be some difficulty over the vault-did the lady desire everything to be transferred to New York? " She doesn't desire anything," Enoch answered, thinking how, after a whole year, she still desired Nick. "Ah?" said Mr. Makin, and turned over a wan hand; "then we're to wait on word from Mr. Connelly?" "I don't know any Connelly," said Enoch, who had more than once encountered this name emitted in wrath; "I suppose you'll be hearing from the trustee as soon as she docks. He doesn't know she's coming." Mr. Makin thought this odd, even uncouth, and very American; it made him more uncomfortable than ever. "What do you make of the news, sir?" he said in a thin voice, deflecting a discussion which puzzled as much as it embarra.s.sed him-"I suppose if she'd known it was coming, she wouldn't have been so quick to escape poor old England, eh? There won't be a war now, you know, and in my opinion we're safe as houses, just as long as those great fellows keep things down between themselves and leave the rest of us out of it, eh?" But Enoch had only just awakened from a sleep begun late that morning; he had read-i.e., had not read-all night, in an anguish of insomnia; between leaves the objectionable baby jiggled in his brain as it had jiggled on its nurse's shoulder in the s.h.i.+p's cabin. He thought he despised it because it could not talk philosophy, which was true enough, though he did not suppose that was the real reason. The real reason was that it was Nick's. But that was not the real reason either. He did not care that it was Nick's. He cared that it was Allegra's, and fettered her. Meanwhile this silly asparagus was wanting to know whether he had read the newspapers. Of course he had not read them; he had not even read his Wittgenstein. "Peace is all, sir, made it all right between them, those two," elucidated the asparagus, "who'd believe it only this morning, eh, the surprise of the century! Hitler and Stalin in bed together? Well, give an inch to the Reds and they want to pull everything down, but I've never had any quarrel with Mr. Hitler myself, and now here's the evidence just today that Mr. Chamberlain's been right all along, in spite of the way some quarters show themselves partial to slander. I don't say there's any soul can do no wrong in politics, but he never said worse than that Hitler wouldn't go to war, and I say the proof of the eating is in the pudding-" But here Mr. Makin had to pause. He was now certain that his visitor was not a gentleman: he had not smiled at his wit in turning round the proverb about the pudding, and, worse, Mr. Makin half believed he had heard the fellow enunciate a phrase popular only in the gutter. "I daresay you're one of these leftist warmongers," Mr. Makin did in fact not dare to say; instead he thanked Enoch for stopping by, and said how very sorry the bank was to lose one of its valued American patrons. Having brought this out-it was a clear dismissal-Mr. Makin paused again. He was remembering the difficult envelopes. If the profitable "arrangements" had indeed been terminated, as his caller claimed (and Mr. Makin admitted to himself that the man seemed remarkably well-informed about everything relating to the American lady), then the unchivalrous vault would have to be vacated. Plainly the bank could no longer keep watch over property no longer entrusted to it. Banks, after all, whatever they may be morally, are legally rigorous. But neither did the bank-in a pinch Mr. Makin often interchanged his own mind with one belonging presumably to that grey height of stone-neither did the bank care to send the interdicted letters back to New York. Not the bank but Mr. Makin had received certain warnings from Connelly, whose position over there was unascertainable: he was possibly a person of influence, from whom might flow further opportunities for equally profitable international "arrangements." Mr. Makin slightly flexed the asparagus-tips which were his ears. "Mr. Vand, may I ask," he asked, with all the shrewdness of a country person (he was a country person, though he did not know it; even while their genes roar in us we seem not to remember our great-grandparents), "may I ask your relations.h.i.+p to our erstwhile patroness?" Apparently this was precisely the right question. A look of absolute attentiveness stiffened the visitor's rather plump face. Mr. Makin noted to himself that he was not mistaken in his formulation of what could logically be expected of human nature, including his own. "There is a little matter," he continued, "which we should find just a bit sticky to dispose of at long distance. We here deal in cablegrams, you see, and cablegrams-heh heh-tend to confuse absolutely, as Lord Acton didn't-heh heh-quite put it. We of the bank so much wish the dear divorced lady had called on us before her departure. It would have simplified indeed. Not the least thing against these war scares is the way they, ah, scatter people. So unnecessary. The bank, you see, is in possession of a particular group of papers-" "Oh, that's all right," Enoch said, "I'll take them if you want." "Personal papers, I should perhaps add? Though it's only a perhaps unwarranted suspicion on the bank's part. These are the bank's suppositions, you understand. As a matter of fact the bank would have no way of knowing-" "Perfectly all right," intervened the visitor, whom Allegra had been consistently refusing for fifteen months, "the dear divorced lady in question is planning to become my wife." But they had never found the town where the May Dancers were supposed to weave. Instead she made the chauffeur drive into an opening in a yellow meadow (it was the last time Enoch ever consented to go with a chauffeur), and left him to swelter in the brilliant black limousine near a nodule of incurious cows while the two of them went to sit on a wall. It was low, in the ancient fas.h.i.+on of that landscape, and made of round and flat and angled rocks ingeniously fitted together, and all without mortar. They marveled at the decency of a pair of shady trees, and at the long-ago stone-maker's dogged eye and hand; then unexpectedly Enoch declared himself to be not a stone wall. "n.o.body ever said you were," said Allegra. "And even if I am a wall don't think I have any objections to mortar," he retorted. Whereupon his companion reasonably complained that he ought first to decide whether he was or wasn't a wall, and then she would see, if he persisted in metaphor, what "mortar" signified. "Anything that sticks," he said at once and nastily: "I have in mind wedding-glue." "Blood's plenty stickier than that," she told him. She said she meant the child. She owed it its proper father. She would never marry-oh, never again!-unless she married Nick; it was simply a question of learning where he was, only no one would help her, not Enoch, not William, not that fool Connelly, certainly not the bank, which she regarded as no better than the parakeet house at the zoo. (Their architectural styles were undeniably similar.) In spite of all William's practicality, concerning the bank she was wiser than he; she knew perfectly well the bank wasn't responsible. It had written to her insultingly: "It is not in our province to conduct a missing persons' service, particularly in today's Europe, with its s.h.i.+fting populations." As though a man were a population! As though Nick were a refugee! As though she could go and marry anyone, when she had Nick's own child to think of! As though Enoch could even dream of getting her for a wife! She chided his effrontery with regularity. Meanwhile he had to live, and went to work grubbing for a freshly-organized encyclopaedia company, which hoped to prey on the respectability-urge of poor people, and a.s.signed Enoch the article on Metaphysics, History Of. He felt his eyes deteriorating when night after night he dug into his library load. So Allegra came to Adam Gruenhorn's hole and read to him; he saw the light on her hair, and tried to be amused by the mechanical spate of her misp.r.o.nunciations. When she went away he had to study all over again what she had sung out to him. She was bored, and he pitied her boredom, but kept her motives alive: she supposed she was a Samaritan n.o.bly a.s.sisting him, and gloriously yielded everything up in a garble of non-comprehension. But in the matter of wedding-glue she was steadfast, and refused him all the way from the pre-Socratics through David Hume. Hope of Nick had made her puritan and body-shy: in Adam Gruenhorn's room Allegra read, and Enoch pretended to take notes while her voice swayed among the sentences it knew how to turn into mysteries. They never touched fingers. She refused him and refused him. In Adam Gruenhorn's room she refused him; she refused him through Hegel and Kant; she refused him on the s.h.i.+p in the last hour, while Mrs. Mealie jiggled Nick's daughter, for whose sake alone she said she hoped in Nick. She commanded him not to dreamland refused him again. Despite her strictures he had his dream, though at first sight a bank may not seem a likely place to speak one out. At first sight only-for articulated dreams are lies, and lies have been uttered before in banks. "Oh, very good indeed! Splendid for the bank!" lied Mr. Makin, hearing Enoch's dream (he meant splendid for himself, seeing he was to avoid a predicament with Connelly), and led his caller into the vault-"of course if you are affianced to the lady, in that case, sir, though I confess it's a trifle irregular, I can entrust these entirely to your discretion? Actually, these days most things aren't being played exactly according to Hoyle, are they though? We jolly well wouldn't have believed it this morning about the Reds and the Germans, would we now? In the same bed? Still, the main thing is keeping the peace, isn't it?"

So there were two tricks played that day: one to get hold of my mother's letters; one to get hold of Europe. Perhaps it will be claimed the latter is really wicked, the former not very. Yet power motivates great and small. It is something to slice up Europe like a whipped-cream cake, through which the brute knife flies. But it is also something to steal the letters of a woman who will not marry you, though the mouth of a new May has swallowed the old May's tail, by pretending that she will.

The letters disappointed. They stimulated in him no sense of power over her privacy; he felt only the sort of obliging and embarra.s.sed pity one accords a vaudeville act that fizzles. They were the last of her letters he was ever willing to read, including those numberless texts and tracts that afterward came to him legitimately, and came, and came, and came. In the first place, he saw at once that her letters were not really private. She had composed them not for William, who would be blunt to their experiments, but for that mult.i.tudinous readers.h.i.+p we call Posterity, as though it, unlike our poor selves, cannot be startled by the irrational and the sudden. Those abstractly creeping dialogues, as whimsically intrusive in the life of the letters as a rumor of lava, were certainly for Posterity: they were stiff and priggish, as if to say: "What clever young men I was acquainted with in my prime!" She had left out all the profanity. She made everything arid, respectable, and tidy. She had contrived to have Enoch sound like a silly philosopher, so that her lover would show up juicy by comparison. But all the same he did not emerge as juicy: Posterity, being better-read than Allegra, would tick off all the influences; it would label Nick "derivative" and toss him off as a husk. Even his Greeks were not his Greeks; he had picked them up along the way. The dryad was gypped from an English novelist. All the effects were staged. The romance was Romantic. The jeering was puerile, and was unrelated to humor. The wit was a bore. The only note of reality was the baby, which had somehow eluded inhabited trees, garlands, spooks, and even myths about the sanct.i.ty of beauty, to come out of it all still a baby, leaky and unpleasant but at least not illusory. It had vomited over his leg while a lightning screech of toothache slammed the innermost nerve of his skull. The baby was real beyond all. Everything else was Imagination, which is useless in society, and weakens the Ideal by infecting it with its own unreality. But Enoch had determined that the Ideal is the opposite of myth, because it always belongs to the future, and owns thereby the reality of the possible; he took Ideal as a synonym for Real, and scorned that frailty in Allegra's mind which had chosen for a Golden Age a tawdry little episode called Brighton. Imagination entered her second-hand from Nick, who himself had it third-hand, because Romance meanders from peddler to peddler, holding itself out for what it is not and defrauding the be-glamoured and credulous world. Here was Enoch coming down from London once upon a time covered with carbon-s.m.u.ts the dirty train had liberated into its pa.s.sengers' pockets and lungs; he arrives dusty, tired, but undefrauded; and when, hoping for a cot and a meal and a tease from Allegra, he sees instead that absurd sticky circlet of berries hung upon the tree, he does not think: "Ah, Romance." He does not think: "Ho ho, Imagination." He does not think: "Aha, an idyll, pastoral or otherwise." He thinks: "s.e.x, d.a.m.n it, and it's me shut out and bound for the old robber-witch who keeps roomers down the road," and would in fact have turned back to London if he were sure his best friends there weren't likely to sell him to the police for a license to storm the Cenotaph, and if there were in London a square of earth he could line his fingernails with. He was in Brighton to dig up weeds and scheme a future: nor was he deluded by the notion of a future which can compel lion to lie down with lamb. That is Imagination, that is Romance, and offends against the given genius of lion and lamb, which the Ideal, scrupulous and preoccupied with the Real, will never do. Ideals and idylls do not recognize one another. An idyll twists nature, and spins us lawns and pipers where life delivers a marsh and toilers, and, ignoring a rapacious commerce in slaves testifying to other things, gilds us a Greece of athletes, leaf-crowned, beautiful. But the Ideal is tougher than hoaxing Romance, and was never designed for the gullible or the stupid, and works in anger with the grain of nature, rotted grey, split and splintered, old, old, hammered, tragic. The tragic grain of nature! The Allegra of the letters missed it; she thought sadness a l.u.s.trous form, like an objet d'art, a vase with its dark dread hole kept secret and small, and the round sides all one and all dazzlingly patterned, and all fathomable; and the whole to be held to the light for an unimaginable and always absent flaw, the eye never to be put to the lips of the black entrance, as though nature had no b.l.o.o.d.y underside, and grief had no ugliness, and fact had no dirt in it. The stiffness of a thumb: that was death to her: that and nothing else: carca.s.s: not unintelligible unspeakable affront committed by a criminally G.o.dless universe. He sat amazed at the untextured flatness of her vision. The culpability in her innocence snagged and rubbed him: that very smoothness of her apprehension was precisely what he acknowledged to be the coa.r.s.eness in the grain. Meanwhile the walls of her flat, where he had come directly from the bank as part of the gesture of settling and seeing to the traces of her departure, were broadened by a spill of sunset, which increased the volume of everything. Nearby the head of the servant seemed huge and golden; the diffused blaze perched for a moment on a bristle half-visible inside his nostril, and thickened it into a brazen bar. He was folding sheets into a trunk, urging one knee against a leather ha.s.sock. "Siegfried," said Enoch, "you look like an armorless knight I hate to see a man kneel. A pa.s.serby might take it for wors.h.i.+p instead of packing." "Bitte, nicht so schnell zu sprechen," muttered Siegfried, matching corners; he pouted a cigar upon his lip, a practise his employer had forbidden: it gave his jaw a mournful slant "I need a box," Enoch said, "for a hundred fat letters. A parallel action to yours: a trunk for these sheets. Ein Sarg, you see? Find one." "Bitte?" "A box. To keep dead things in. Nice and roomy, you understand what I mean?" The head veered into shadow and was reduced to that of a sullen man: "Ja, here is somewhere one she finishes yesterday," and vanished into what two days before had been Allegra's bedroom. The door opening like a sail pressed out an acute startling perfume. "This will be?" asked the man, too deferential, presenting a fine deep fancy cardboard cube: "so much letters she has made, there are also others empty-standing should you require." "No, just right; this one. The perfect coffin. -Siegfried, what will you do now?" "Bitte?" "You'll stay till the paid rent runs out?" "Ja." "And you'll bring your little boys?" "Nicht possible, they are residenced already with Englisch families, I give for this monthly the money, also for my small child." "But you'll bring your wife all the same?" "Nicht moglich." "Ah, too bad. She's got a job somewhere, is that it?" "She is in hospital." "Filthy place to work," Enoch remarked, concentrating on cramming a fool's letters into a cavity. "Nein. She will die there," said Siegfried, but contradiction was not in his voice: he had with a whole heart entered the servant cla.s.s.

Allegra never knew. She would have considered a cook with a dying wife the worst of all morbidities; she would have dismissed him. Often enough she accused him of releasing a morbid atmosphere into the house; she said refugees brought a morbid atmosphere wherever they appeared. She would certainly have dismissed him, so he hinted at nothing, and pretended muteness was his character, though he wished that earlier, when it mattered, he might have had his oldest boy to live with him. He would have reined him and held him very still, but she would not agree. She feared he would ask to bring the younger pair, as if he did not know they were too little and difficult and as if he would think to keep them. But in the evenings he would have taken the oldest child to see the mother. How expensive in England simultaneously to die and to board boys! At first their tragedy was formal and decorous and even mincing; there was no haste in it; the woman in the bed described the processional of her suffering as segmented, like the parts of a stained gla.s.s window, each invented shape of agony added to and confirmed by the previous one but separated from it by a leading of morphine: a mosaic of bright pains. That was her first joke in English (at home she was the family clown); she kept English children's books, whirling with colored ill.u.s.trations, in the bed with her to learn the language well, until all language unlearned itself in the wall of her shocked mouth. "The boy can come now," Enoch said, "there's no obstacle to his coming now." No use: she was never conscious, two weeks already never awake at all. How expensive in England to breathe like gra.s.s and to be drugged and to wait! He intended to wait in this great carpeted apartment until the dry breast stopped its subtle journey of fractional ascent and hesitant descent; meanwhile would wait below a high ceiling not very different from the ceilings of Wien, under which his incredible stews had glowed and serving-maids fled to fetch trays of pastries lambent with spiced honey. The view was not the same; in Wien fountain after fountain after fountain, but they had robbed him and forced him naked to play underwater like a whale for them. How a country is traitor to a man! A whole nation turned seditionist! A government betraying its own citizen! Then the escape, bribes, Switzerland, Italy, a filthy boat, Portugal, England, the man, the woman, three sons, alive, alive. Survival!-stilettoed by what? fate? irony of fate? fate sans chivalry? Never trust. Trust is a word for the firing squad. In the end a germ is fate. Dessenungeachtet, as a servant (he did not say as a man: what is man?) he was grateful as a dog to his employer for the gift of allowing him to remain without paying in this grand place. It was a bed to sleep in. He would prepare himself for his orphans. Poor Rudi! Leon! Berni! Berni with his six little teeth! The rent he saved would be the price of the coffin. "She has told me she has offered to a friend this flat, but he would not take it, he has not wished it, for me how fortunate, where should I in the last hours go?"-kneeling to lock his employer's trunk. The lid swept down with a wheeze, setting off a fidgety dance of the grit on the window-sill: it lifted and stirred and rained itself down once more. Grit is one of the eternals. The chimneys heave their laden bladders, the grit is sp.a.w.ned out of a domestic cloud in the lowest air, the black footless ants appear on the sill. Brush away, mop away, empty buckets with zeal; grit returns. Everything is flux; grit is forever. Futility is day after day. Time is not what we suppose, moments in an infinite queue, but rather a heavy sense that we have been here before, only with hope, and are here again, only without it. "Your luck will not change," says Time. "Give up, the world has concerns of its own," says Time, "pain is biologically discrete," says Time, "woe cannot be shared," says Time, "regret above all is terrifyingly individual." And Time says, "Take no comfort in your metaphysics of the immortality of the race. When your species has evolved out of recognition grit will be unspoiled. There will always be grit. It alone endures. It is greater than humanity."

But it is not greater than humanity; it is the same. We join the particles in their dance on the sill. It is the magnificent Criminal plan, to shove us into the side of a hill, mulch us until we are dissolved into something more useful but less spectacular than before, and send us out again in the form of a cinder for some churl of a descendant to catch in his eye, cursing. The tragic grain of na