Eyeless in Gaza

  There was a long silence; only the clock ticked and the flame rustled silkily in the grate. Anthony lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Everything was suddenly clear. Uncle James was right; but the other people were right too. She had shown how it was possible for both of them to be right. Just a man – and yet . . . Oh, he too, he too would do and be!

  Mrs Foxe picked up the book once more. The thin pages crackled as she turned them.

  ‘Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came upon the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.’

  The stone . . . But at Lollingdon there was earth; and only ashes in that little box – that little box no bigger than a biscuit tin. Anthony shut his eyes in the hope of excluding the odious vision; but against the crimson darkness the horns, the triangular frizz of auburn curls stood out with an intenser vividness. He lifted his hand to his mouth, and, to punish himself, began to bite the forefinger, harder, harder, until the pain was almost intolerable.

  That evening, when she came to say good-night to him, Mrs Foxe sat down on the edge of Anthony’s bed and took his hand. ‘You know, Anthony,’ she said after a moment of silence, ‘you mustn’t be afraid of thinking about her.’

  ‘Afraid?’ he mumbled, as though he hadn’t understood. But he had understood – understood, perhaps, more than she had meant. The blood rushed guiltily into his cheeks. He felt frightened, as though somehow she had trapped him, found him out – frightened and therefore resentful.

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid of suffering,’ she went on. ‘Thinking about her will make you sad: that’s inevitable. And it’s right. Sadness is necessary sometimes – like an operation; you can’t be well without it. If you think about her, Anthony, it’ll hurt you. But if you don’t think about her, you condemn her to a second death. The spirit of the dead lives on in God. But it also lives on in the minds of the living – helping them, making them better and stronger. The dead can only have this kind of immortality if the living are prepared to give it them. Will you give it her, Anthony?’

  Mutely, and in tears, he nodded his answer. It was not so much the words that had reassured him as the fact that the words were hers and had been uttered in that compelling voice. His fears were allayed, his suspicious resentment died down. He felt safe with her. Safe to abandon himself to the sobs that now mounted irresistibly in his throat.

  ‘Poor little Anthony!’ She stroked his hair. ‘Poor little Anthony! There’s no help for it; it’ll always hurt – always. You’ll never be able to think of her without some pain. Even time can’t take away all the suffering, Anthony.’

  She paused, and for a long minute sat there in silence, thinking of her father, thinking of her husband. The old man, so massive, so majestic, like a prophet – then in his wheeled chair, paralysed and strangely shrunken, his head on one side, dribbling over his white beard, hardly able to speak . . . And the man she had married, out of admiration for his strength, out of respect for his uprightness; had married, and then discovered that she did not, could not love. For the strength, she had found, was cold and without magnanimity; the uprightness, harsh and cruel uprightness. And the pain of the long last illness had hardened and embittered him. He had died implacable, resisting her tenderness to the last.

  ‘Yes, there’ll always be pain and sadness,’ she went on at last. ‘And after all,’ a warm note of pride, almost of defiance, came into her voice, ‘can one wish that it should be otherwise? You wouldn’t want to forget your mother, would you, Anthony? Or not to care any more? Just in order to escape a little suffering. You wouldn’t want that?’

  Sobbing, he shook his head. And it was quite true. At this moment he didn’t want to escape. It was in some obscure way a relief to be suffering this extremity of sorrow. And he loved her because she had known how to make him suffer.

  Mrs Foxe bent down and kissed him. ‘Poor little Anthony!’ she kept repeating. ‘Poor little Anthony!’

  It rained on Good Friday; but on Saturday the weather changed, and Easter Day was symbolically golden, as though on purpose, as though in a parable. Christ’s resurrection and the re-birth of Nature – two aspects of an identical mystery. The sunshine, the clouds, like fragments of marbly sculpture in the pale blue sky, seemed, in some profound and inexpressible way, to corroborate all that Mrs Foxe had said.

  They did not go to church; but, sitting on the lawn, she read aloud, first a bit of the service for Easter Day, then some extracts from Renan’s Life of Jesus. The tears came into Anthony’s eyes as he listened, and he felt an unspeakable longing to be good, to do something fine and noble.

  On the Monday, a party of slum children were brought down to spend the day in the garden and the copse. At Bulstrode one would have called them scadgers and offensively ignored their existence. Beastly little scadgers and when they were older, they would grow into louts and cads. Here, however, it different. Mrs Foxe transformed the scadgers into unfortunate children who would probably never get a second glimpse of the country in all the year.

  ‘Poor kids!’ Anthony said to her when they arrived. But in spite of the compassion he was doing his level best to feel, in spite of his determined goodwill, he was secretly afraid of these stunted yet horribly mature little boys with whom he had offered to play, he feared and therefore disliked them. They seemed immeasurably foreign. Their patched, stained clothes, their shapeless boots, were like a differently coloured skin; their cockney might have been Chinese. The mere appearance of them made him feel guiltily self-conscious. And then there was the way they looked at him; with a derisive hatred of his new suit and his alien manners; there was the way the bolder of them whispered together and laughed. When they laughed at Brian for his stammer, he laughed with them; and in a little while they laughed no more or laughed only in a friendly and almost sympathetic way. Anthony, on the contrary, pretended not to notice their mockery. A gentleman, he had always been taught explicitly as well as by constant implication and the example of his elders, a gentleman doesn’t pay any attention to that kind of thing. It is beneath his dignity. He behaved as though their laughter were non-existent. They went on laughing.

  He hated that morning of rounders and hide-and-seek. But worse was to follow at lunch-time. He had offered to help in the serving of the table. The work in itself was unobjectionable enough. But the smell of poverty when the twenty children were assembled in the dining-room was so insidiously disgusting – like Lollingdon church, only much worse – that he had to slip out two or three times in the course of the meal to spit in the lavatory basin. ‘Reeking with germs!’ he heard his mother’s angrily frightened voice repeating. ‘Reeking with germs!’ And when Mrs Foxe asked him a question, he could only nod and make an inarticulate noise with his mouth shut; if he spoke, he would have to swallow. Swallow what? It was revolting only to think of it.

  ‘Poor kids!’ he said once more, as he stood with Mrs Foxe and Brian watching their departure. ‘Poor kids!’ and felt all the more ashamed of his hypocrisy when Mrs Foxe thanked him for having worked so hard to entertain them.

  And when Anthony had gone up to the school-room, ‘Thank you too, my darling,’ she said, turning to Brian. ‘You were really splendid.’

  Flushing with pleasure, Brian shook his head. ‘It was all y-you,’ he said; and suddenly, because he loved her so much, because she was so good, so wonderful, he found his eyes full of tears.

  Together they walked out into the garden. Her hand was on his shoulder. She smelt faintly of eau-de-Cologne, and all at once (and this also, it seemed, was part of her wonderfulness) the sun came out from behind a cloud.

  ‘Look at those heavenly daffodils!’ she cried, in that voice that made everything she said seem, to Brian, truer, in some strange way, than the truth itself. ‘“And now my heart with pleasure fills . . .” Do you remember, Brian?’

  Flushed and with bright eyes, he nodded. ‘“And d-dances . . .”’

  ‘“Dances with the daffodils.”’ She pressed him closer to her. He was filled with an unspeakable happiness. They walked on in silence. Her skirts rustled at every step – like the sea, Brian thought; the sea at Ventnor, that time last year, when he couldn’t sleep at night because of the waves on the beach. Lying there in the darkness, listening to the distant breathing of the sea, he had felt afraid, and above all sad, terribly sad. But, associated with his mother, the memories of that fear, that profound and causeless sadness, became beautiful; and at the same time, in some obscure way, they seemed to reflect their new beauty back on to her, making her seem yet more wonderful in his eyes. Rustling back and forth across the sunny lawn, she took on some of the mysterious significance of the windy darkness, the tirelessly returning waves.

  ‘Poor little Anthony!’ said Mrs Foxe, breaking the long silence. ‘It’s hard, it’s terribly hard.’ Hard also for poor Maisie, she was thinking. That graceful creature, with her languors, her silences, her dreamy abstractions, and then her sudden bursts of laughing activity – what had such a one to do with death? Or with birth, for that matter? Maisie with a child to bring up – it hardly made more sense than Maisie dead.

  ‘It must be t-t-t . . .’ but ‘terrible’ wouldn’t come, ‘it must be d-dreadful,’ said Brian, laboriously circumventing the obstacle, while his emotion ran on ahead in an imaginary outburst of unuttered and unutterable words, ‘n-not to have a m-mother.’

  Mrs Foxe smiled tenderly, and, bending down, laid her cheek for a moment against his hair. ‘Dreadful also not to have a son,’ she said, and realized, as she did so, that the words were even truer than she had intended them to be – that they were true on a plane of deeper, more essential existence than that on which she was now moving. She had spoken for the present; but if it would be terrible not to have him now, how incomparably more terrible it would have been then, after her father had had his stroke and during the years of her husband’s illness! In that time of pain and utter spiritual deprivation her love for Brian had been her only remaining possession. Ah, terrible, terrible indeed, then, to have no son!

  CHAPTER X

  June 16th 1912

  BOOKS. THE TABLE in Anthony’s room was covered with them. The five folio volumes of Bayle, in the English edition of 1738. Rickaby’s translation of the Summa contra Gentiles. De Gourmont’s Problème du Style. The Way of Perfection. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Three volumes of Byron’s Letters. The works of St John of the Cross in Spanish. The plays of Wycherley. Lee’s History of the Sacerdotal Celibacy.

  If only, Anthony thought as he came in from his walk, if only one had two sets of eyes! Janus would be able to read Candide and the Imitation simultaneously. Life was so short, and books so countlessly many. He pored voluptuously over the table, opening at random now one volume, now another. ‘He would not lie down,’ he read; ‘then his neck was too large for the aperture, and the priest was obliged to drown his exclamations by still louder exhortations. The head was off before the eye could trace the blow; but from an attempt to draw back the head, notwithstanding it was held forward by the hair, the first head was cut off close to the ears; the other two were taken off more cleanly. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera glass . . .’ ‘Happiness being the peculiar good of an intelligent nature, must attach to the intelligent nature on the side of something that is peculiar to it. But appetite is not peculiar to intelligent nature, but is found in all things, though diversely in diverse beings. The will, as being an appetite, is not a peculiar appurtenance of an intelligent nature, except so far as it is dependent on the intelligence; but intelligence in itself is peculiar to an intelligent nature. Happiness therefore consists in an act of the intellect substantially and principally rather than in an act of the will . . .’ ‘Even in my most secret soul I have never been able to think of love as anything but a struggle, which begins with hatred and ends with moral subjection . . .’ ‘“I will not be a cuckold, I say; there will be a danger in making me a cuckold.” “Why, wert thou well cured of thy last clap?” . . .’ ‘La primera noche o purgación es amarga y terrible para el sentido, como ahora diremos. La segunda no tiene comparación, porque es horrenda y espantable para el espíritu . . .’ ‘I think I have read somewhere that the preciseness has been carried so far that ladies would not say, J’ai mangé des confitures, but des fitures. At this rate, above one half of the words of the Dictionary of the French Academy should be struck out . . .’

  In the end, Anthony settled down to The Way of Perfection of St Teresa. When Brian came in, an hour later, he had got as far as the Prayer of Quiet.

  ‘B-busy?’ Brian asked.

  Anthony shook his head.

  The other sat down. ‘I c-came to s-see if there was anything more to s-settle about to-m-morrow.’ Mrs Foxe and Joan Thursley, Mr and Mrs Beavis were coming down to Oxford for the day. Brian and Anthony had agreed to entertain them together.

  Hock or Sauterne cup? Lobster mayonnaise or cold salmon? And if it rained, what would be the best thing to do in the afternoon?

  ‘Are you c-coming to the F-fabians this evening?’ Brian asked, when the discussion of the next day’s plans was at an end.

  ‘Of course,’ said Anthony. There was to be voting, that evening, for next term’s president. ‘It’ll be a close fight between you and Mark Staithes. You’ll need all the votes you can . . .’

  Interrupting him, ‘I’ve st-stood down,’ said Brian.

  ‘Stood down? But why?’

  ‘V-various reasons.’

  Anthony looked at him and shook his head. ‘Not that I’d have ever dreamt of putting up,’ he said. ‘Can’t imagine anything more boring than to preside over any kind of organization.’ Even belonging to an organization was bad enough. Why should one be bullied into making choices when one didn’t want to choose; into binding oneself to a set of principles when it was so essential to be free; into committing oneself to associate with other people when as likely as not one would want to be alone; into promising in advance to be at given places at given times? It was with the greatest difficulty that Brian had persuaded him to join the Fabians; for the rest he was unattached. ‘Inconceivably boring,’ he insisted. ‘But still, once in the running, why stand down?’

  ‘Mark’ll be a b-better president than I.’

  ‘He’ll be ruder, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘B-besides, he was so a-awfully k-keen on g-getting elected,’ Brian began; then broke off, suddenly conscience-stricken. Anthony might think he was implying a criticism of Mark Staithes, was assuming the right to patronize him. ‘I mean, he kn-knows he’ll do the j-job so well,’ he went on quickly. ‘W-whereas I . . . So I r-really didn’t see why . . .’

  ‘In fact you thought you might as well humour him.’

  ‘No, n-no!’ cried Brian in a tone of distress. ‘Not th-that.’

  ‘Cock of the dunghill,’ Anthony continued, ignoring the other’s protest. ‘He’s got to be cock – even if it’s only of the tiniest little Fabian dunghill.’ He laughed. ‘Poor old Mark! What an agony when he can’t get to the top of his dunghill! One’s lucky to prefer books.’ He patted St Teresa affectionately. ‘Still, I wish you hadn’t stood down. It would have made me laugh to see Mark trying to pretend he didn’t mind when you’d beaten him. You’re reading a paper, aren’t you,’ he went on, ‘after the voting?’

  Relieved by the change of subject, Brian nodded. ‘On Syn . . .’ he began.

  ‘On sin?’

  ‘Synd-dicalism.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Odd, when you come to think of it,’ said Anthony when their laughter subsided, ‘that the mere notion of talking to socialists about sin should seem so . . . well, so outrageous, really. Sin . . . socialism.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s like mating a duck with a zebra.’

  ‘You could t-talk about sin if you st-started from the other end.’

  ‘Which end?’

  ‘The s-social end. O-organizing a s-society so well that the i-individual simply c-couldn’t commit any sins.’

  ‘But do you honestly think such a society could exist?’

  ‘P-perhaps,’ said Brian doubtfully, but reflected that social change could hardly abolish those ignoble desires of his, couldn’t even legitimate those desires, except within certain conventional limits. He shook his head. ‘N-no, I don’t kn-know,’ he concluded.

  ‘I can’t see that you could do more than just transfer people’s sins from one plane to another. But we’ve done that already. Take envy and ambition, for example. They used to express themselves on the plane of physical violence. Now, we’ve reorganized society in such a way that they have to express themselves for the most part in terms of economic competition.’

  ‘Which we’re g-going to ab-abolish.’

  ‘And so bring physical violence back into fashion, eh?’

  ‘Th-that’s what you h-hope, d-don’t you?’ said Brian; and laughing, ‘You’re awful!’ he added.

  There was a silence. Absently, Brian picked up The Way of Perfection, and, turning over the pages, read a line here, a paragraph there. Then with a sigh he shut the book, put it back in its place and, shaking his head, ‘I c-can’t understand,’ he said, ‘why you read this sort of st-stuff. S-seeing that you d-don’t b-believe in it.’