Dark Entries Page 15

  He had heard no sound of Ariel’s return but was interrupted by her, returned also to her black Elizabethan costume, as he scratched and fought with lost inspiration. As on the previous evening, night was rapidly descending and he noticed that Ariel was shivering slightly in the sudden chill of the spring evening. It was an enchanting sight. Stretching out his hand, he touched her body between the edges of her deeply open white shirt.

  ‘I love you, Ariel,’ he said, ‘but I shall never be a great painter.’ He indicated the day’s several failures.

  ‘I think the secret’, she replied, kissing him, ‘is to get it down quickly. Quickly. Immediately you see it. When you see it. Don’t stop till you’ve got it down.’

  ‘I wonder how you know? You’re perfectly right. Yesterday—’

  ‘That’s just it,’ she said. ‘Yesterday – and today everything’s different. Things only exist as long as you see them. And we are all of us nothing but the sum of our moods.’

  ‘Do your moods change very much?’ he asked.

  ‘Everything changes. All the time. Very fast. I’m no exception, I’m glad to say. Only the dead fear change. I’m alive, my dear. Really very warm and alive.’

  ‘How long will it be before you change about me?’

  ‘Oh!’ The slightly drawn-out ejaculation was enigmatic. ‘Shall we go in to dinner?’

  He took her arm as a man takes a woman into dinner. From his other hand hung the day’s failures, slightly damp with dew or mist.

  Every now and then he looked out of his bedroom window and every now and then a new, small, rather distant building seemed to have appeared. One quiet night hour when he awoke without reason while Ariel lay unconscious in his arms, he found himself thinking the ridiculous thought: ‘I’m glad I don’t have to sleep in that room.’ His eye wandered round the warmly curtained walls of Ariel’s chamber, the ornate cabinets full of her clothes, the silk-covered furniture; all muffled in darkness save for the patchy starlight from the large opened window. The dimly glimpsed scene, the unique remote creature warm in his arms, composed the utmost possible tranquillity and joy. He forgot about the view in deep surrender to his own released unconscious. By day – after that first day he had seen the first house – his fears were swamped and scattered in sun and wind. But, despite her brief return more than once in conversation to the theme of change, he made no reference to the matter when talking to Ariel, did not risk another of those so natural interrogatives she so lightly made to seem so heavy and unnecessary.

  But one morning when he looked at the view for the first time that day, he noticed something nearer the house than the white, and lately multicoloured, buildings on the rather distant cliff edge. At first it seemed as though a big megalith, a rocky pillar of large circumference for a pillar, but medium height, had appeared about midway between the sea and the house. At a second glance, however, what had looked a rock or a work of masonry was seen by Carfax to be a huge, motionless man, immobile and staring before him as if he were indeed a rock or statue; and a man, moreover, whom Carfax at once identified, the man who had walked round the corner of the house during that first afternoon in the angle drawing-room with Ariel. To Carfax it seemed as though all that was fearful concentrated in that enormous figure, unmoving but living, unmistakable though too distant for the clothes or much of the features to be clearly made out; and, as on a past morning, a shudder rose through his body from the foundations of his existence.

  The mechanism of protection in his mind was now, however, working vastly better than on the earlier occasion, and association with Ariel had released a thousand springs of compensating happiness in his whole being. Almost at once, therefore, he in great part recovered and was able to go down to breakfast (which Ariel, to his considerable annoyance, apparently never wished to take accompanied by him in bed) without very much embarrassment manifesting in his aspect. None the less, another question was unavoidable.

  ‘One of the Island gods,’ she answered. ‘Or so they say.’

  ‘Ariel!’ he said urgently, his nerves once again momentarily overmastering him. ‘Please tell me. What do these things mean? I am sorry to be so obvious, but I’m a little frightened, dear Ariel. What am I to do? Why does the view from my window change every day?’

  ‘My darling love!’ She had risen and seated herself beside him, drawing up a chair. Her arms were round him, her whole nature pouring out in kindness. ‘You must remember you’ve been very ill. You mustn’t worry about life. You can’t stop things changing. It’s useless to try. You mustn’t try too much. You remember how upset you were about that picture.’ The comforting irrelevant commonplaces made his agitation seem childish and absurd: a neurotic’s infantilism.

  ‘Only the commonplace is really comforting, Ariel.’

  ‘Only children, and unhappy people, who are like children, distinguish the commonplace from the exceptional. “Under the common thing the hidden grace.” Now you are getting better you are beginning to see within the commonplace the exceptional, to find the exceptional becoming quite commonplace. You have been so long among strangers, my love.’

  ‘But have I been as ill as all that? If things are really so different from what they have always seemed to me, I must have been mad. Mad for years.’

  ‘Quite possibly, my dear,’ she replied. ‘When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.’

  ‘But I should surely be mad now if I didn’t wonder about some of the things that have happened since I’ve been here? Things I can’t understand or find out about.’

  ‘Aren’t you happy?’

  ‘I should never before have thought such happiness was possible. At least for me. And it is not that I used to think I knew very much. I used to try to follow Goethe’s advice. I tried to worry only about the things I had decided were within the capacity of the mind. One’s own mind, or perhaps the best mind that has yet been born, sets the limit of truth. It is truth, in fact. Don’t you think, Ariel?’ He gazed at her anxiously.

  ‘Cosi e se vi pare. That is the only truth. And very dull it is. Except perhaps as breakfast chat between people in love.’ She rose and resumed eating. ‘Metaphysics exist only as the food or the substitute for love.’

  ‘Perhaps it is that the things my mind can grasp here are rather different things from the things it could grasp in England,’ he went on hesitantly.

  ‘In England you would have felt guilty for loving me and would be eating a little instead of a lot of butter for breakfast. So things are rather different,’ she answered lightly. ‘There’d be no point in your leaving England if they weren’t any different at all.’

  ‘You do know that the view from my bedroom window changes every day and sometimes during the day?’ he asked desperately.

  ‘It changes and you change with it, my dear. It is your illness which makes you want everything to stay always the same. You are getting better now, quite fast.’

  ‘I can never be perfectly happy, dearest Ariel, until I know why the view from my window changes all the time, and why it is a different view from all the other rooms I have been in, and why – a lot of other things. Why, Ariel, why?’ He was pale and anxious. ‘If you love me and know the answers, please tell me.’

  Real fear for him seemed to appear in her face for the first time. Once more she abandoned her breakfast and stared at him for a moment. ‘I don’t know the answers, my dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t even understand the questions completely. It only occurs to me that if you were perfectly happy, that too would change. And you would change also and would cease to find it perfect happiness. We can think or do. What else is there? Except that when you and I think and do together there is happiness for a while. I fear if we ask too much we shall lose everything. I am afraid of your questions when we are so happy together.’

  Some measure of acceptance began once more to creep over him.

  ‘Ariel,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘Will you please not ride today? Will you spend the day wit
h me?’

  ‘I shall not ride today,’ she answered. Love and not a little fear held them in perfect sympathy.

  Rising, she left the oval room. Shortly she reappeared having changed into a striped silk dress and high-heeled shoes. They passed the day doing very little.

  Late in the afternoon she offered him another room, which he accepted. He at once moved his few possessions. It was a handsomely decorated apartment, warm and luxurious; and the view from its window was of those steep intractable hills: a view which changed almost too little, Carfax once or twice thought, remembering his struggles to paint it. His love and sleep that night were less than ever troubled by memories of his former bedroom whereat his last glimpse had offered little but peaceful sunshine.

  Next day she rode again; but not the day after. The daily habit was broken and henceforth maintained on only perhaps two days out of three. Carfax, baulked of his picture, had taken up work in the music room, where he occupied himself setting some poems written by Ariel herself. Sometimes she would sing the songs to him in the evening. Later he began a larger choral work with words drawn from Beddoes, a handsome hand-printed edition of whose writings he had found in Ariel’s library. This composition he seemed never able to complete; but immediately he had started it, he had become aware of a sudden change in his estimate of the earlier songs. Previously he had considered them, especially when sung in Ariel’s cello contralto, as the best music he had written. But as soon as he had completed a single day’s work on Beddoes, they had seemed to him quite worthless. In the end, he felt seriously ashamed of them and was deterred from actually destroying them only by the fear that Ariel would ask once more to sing them and expose him to the necessity of embarrassingly explaining artistic incompetence and self-derogation. This, however, she never did.

  Days and weeks passed without incident seeming to Carfax in any way remarkable save for its content of beauty and happiness. He had put away the songs in his suitcase; and his struggles with Beddoes, though somewhat unrewarded, were not unpleasurable. Most else that happened was almost pure joy. Once he reflected that his mortification about the songs alone exempted him from that doomed perfection of happiness Ariel had spoken of. He saw the songs as correspondent to the flaw reputedly introduced on purpose by the Chinese into their otherwise perfect works in the hope of thus diverting the envy of heaven. He mentioned this possibility to Ariel.

  ‘Flaws, my dearest,’ she answered, ‘are your delight. I shall dress tonight in odd stockings, to put your mind at rest.’

  So that evening his dinner was shared by a beautiful court fool, with whom he pleasantly argued whether Puck or Oberon or (Prospero’s) Ariel or even Feste should be played by man or woman.

  One day when she was out riding he came upon a book he had noticed her reading. Lying spine upwards on a chair, it brought back to his mind the volume of Voltaire held open by her fingers when first he saw her. He found the book to be Dahlmeier’s collection of Judeo-Arabic fables. It was in German, a language he had studied for Foreign Office purposes, but, like all the other subjects he had mastered for that reason, had never since used. His German was now, accordingly, somewhat piecemeal, and the book, moreover, was made no easier for the unaccustomed by being printed in Gothic script. None the less, Carfax began to translate to himself one or two of the fables picked either at random or for their brevity.

  The first, so far as he could make out, told of a youth who, on being offered by a sage alternative gifts of Wisdom, Wealth, or Virtue, the gifts losing nothing of impressiveness by their Teutonic initial capitals, selected Wealth. The sage thereupon remarked that the choice proved the youth already had Wisdom as he would now be able to afford Virtue.

  Carfax found some trouble in translating the abstract words accurately enough to discern the writer’s meaning. But he embarked upon a second fable, which seemed to tell of a youth presented by an afrit (or perhaps the German word did not imply anything so malevolent) with a book of the kind which is read by winding the manuscript from a roller held in the left hand on to a roller held in the right hand. The afrit (if that is what the creature was) explained that whenever the youth felt unhappy or bored he had only to wind the book, which represented his life, a little faster from one roller to the other, and the time would soon pass. Apparently, and as far as Carfax could make out, the manuscript, left alone, would wind itself at the normal pace of the youth’s life. Apparently also the youth was not granted the power of protracting moments of bliss by retarding the winding process. The fable went on to describe at some length the youth’s life: how he longed for time to pass so that he could be a man, could end his weekly day of fasting, could be with his newest mistress, could hold high office, could be rid of a disease or a duty. And at the end of a life of normal span he proved to have lived for just three months and seventeen days.

  The third fable Carfax embarked upon seemed to describe the pleasurable but dangerous activities among a group of warriors of some visitor from another world. This tale contained a number of words completely strange to Carfax (he suspected that no ordinary dictionary would contain them), which, together with the general difficulty the language caused him and the presence of occasionally apprehended suggestions that the narrative might be of exceptional interest, led him to race down the lines, taking in less and less of the sense the faster he read. Soon he realised that the point was altogether lost, so that further progress, at least without a reference book, seemed futile. After examining the binding and the last page (some kind of moral, apparently), he laid the book down as he had found it.

  Settling to work upon Beddoes, he found, as he had done before, his mind always a little distracted by the frequency with which that poet seemed to echo his own thoughts and experiences: and particularly thoughts and experiences of which Ariel was at the centre. He remembered the case of the armour on the staircase and a hundred other constantly recurring incidents. The profound and unvarying parallelism between external and internal experience began to seem almost a little morbid. Was he obsessed? With Ariel; or with what else? Was there not a disease of the mind which rendered the sufferer (as in childhood) unable to distinguish between subject and object? Was he receiving hints of his own unbalance? Did that possibly explain much?

  The hand which had been lying on the keyboard stopped playing and he realised that he had been striking the same chord again and again. He sat back and reflected. He was not seriously concerned. He did not really believe he was mad: certainly not that his more extravagant experiences since he came to Fleet could be thus explained. He had been very disturbed in mind for several years: quite sufficiently so, he thought, to account for symptoms so minor as those now under immediate consideration; though, on the other hand, hardly more so, perhaps, than almost all his neighbours at home. Ariel, however, had always seemed peculiarly unable to grasp even the existence or occurrence of various things and happenings which had disturbed him profoundly. At first he had thought her unwilling, for some reason of her own, to do so. Now he believed her truly unable. He had on one occasion taken her to the room with the view, and their ideas of what lay visible from the window seemed irreconcilable and deeply disconcerting to both of them. Now he began to wonder whether even the room they were in had seemed alike to them. More and more when occasionally he tried to bring their experiences into harmony or taxed her with enquiries, she seemed truly puzzled as well as merely anxious to comfort an exhausted but much-loved mind. All this, and particularly the outrageous nature of the occurrences themselves, did indeed suggest the possibility of real madness. In one of them: he suddenly thought. He had tried tentative enquiries of the servants; but experienced such difficulty in making his perplexity understood by them that the experiment had proved unavailing. Being used, however, to finding it difficult to communicate with servants, he had not deemed the failure especially notable. With Ariel it came more and more to seem as if in some respects she lived in a world of alien experiences from his; and was herself only slowly coming to real
ise the fact. Carfax thought of the colour-blind who never find out their idiosyncrasy; of the man who only when adult discovered that one eye had lacked sight since birth. The possibility of complete ultimate harmony between Ariel and him seemed for a moment to suggest some almost sinister opportunities.

  He then thought of Ariel’s beauty, kindness, varied accomplishments, and apparent deep happiness. If their psyches differed in certain profound and essential respects, she was beyond doubt the favoured one. Might it not be that he was offered, perhaps alone among his unhappy fellow islanders, a wonderful chance of fulfilment? If so, it seemed clear enough that the gift must be taken with some faith and not overmuch investigation. ‘Faith!’ he exclaimed aloud, as he set himself once more towards Beddoes.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ said a familiar echo. ‘Provided, of course, that love is also present.’ She had returned and come straight to him in her riding costume. He appeared to have been meditating about things for longer than he had supposed.