It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had been
making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in
particular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out into
the garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object--the
large red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly and
busily scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. The
temptation was great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elastic
band that kept it discreetly closed.
“Private. Not to be opened,” was written in capital letters on the
cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote in
one’s Latin Grammar while one was still at one’s preparatory school.
“Black is the raven, black is the rook,
But blacker the thief who steals this book!”
It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He
opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had been
struck.
Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed.
He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the
palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself.
His weaknesses, his absurdities--no one knew them better than he did.
Indeed, in a vague way he imagined that nobody beside himself was aware
of them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear
to other people as they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever
spoke of him among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be
quite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk
of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege
reserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he was surely an image
of flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.
On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to
the ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own severest
critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.
The fruit of Jenny’s unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature
of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a
dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend:
“Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes.” Fascinated and horrified,
Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious
Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The
expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered
by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of
studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the
turned-in feet--these things were terrible. And, more terrible still,
was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which his physical
peculiarities were all recorded and subtly exaggerated.
Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of other
people: of Priscilla and Mr. Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne
and Gombauld; of Mr. Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light that
was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and
Ivor. He scarcely glanced at them. A fearful desire to know the worst
about himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves, lingering at
nothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted to
him.
“Private. Not to be opened.” He had disobeyed the injunction; he had
only got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid the
rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out on
to the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employed
the leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her a
simple-minded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was the
fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing
wasn’t Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her red
book represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolised. They
represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they
symbolised something that in his studious solitariness he was apt not to
believe in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the
crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious,
intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed,
somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as
elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically
he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the
horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The red
notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put
beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.
Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasant
truth for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively down
towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby
finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks,
thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity
of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The
fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate
their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the
truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece
of stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking it
was something to eat.
He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like
a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.
“Under the spreading ilex tree...”
He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn’t.
“The smith, a brawny man is he,
With arms like rubber bands.”
Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises more
regularly.
He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him,
reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the
summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne’s bare arms and seal-sleek
bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.
“And little Luce with the white legs,
And bouncing Barbary...”
Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able
to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was
truly his own, or was it simply an education?
He walked slowly round the water’s edge. In an embayed recess among
the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a
pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless
mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.
“Hullo!” he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say
something.
Mary looked up. “Hullo!” she answered in a melancholy, uninterested
tone.
In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to
Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the
pudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.
At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard
of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a facade sixteen
windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding
out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times
and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty
years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They
will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the
moment, however, Mary’s mind was not moved by these considerations.
On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor’s
bold, large hand, a single quatrain.
“Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!
Like bright plumes moulted in an angel’s flight,
There sleep within my heart’s most mystic cell
Memories of morning, memories of the night.”
There followed a postscript of three lines: “Would you mind asking one
of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left in
the drawer of my washstand. Thanks.--Ivor.”
Seated under the Venus’s immemorial gesture, Mary considered life
and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing the
expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and
hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor...She couldn’t do without him
now. It was evident, on the other hand, from the poem on the back of the
picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at
Gobley now, so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last
verse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.
“Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage
Aurait donne moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
A Lisette donnait pour rien.”
Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her
life before.
It was Denis who first broke the silence. “The individual,” he began in
a soft and sadly philosophical tone, “is not a self-supporting universe.
There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when
he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes
besides himself.”
He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminary
to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that
was to lead up to Jenny’s caricatures.
“True,” said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added, “When one
individual comes into intimate contact with another, she--or he, of
course, as the case may be--must almost inevitably receive or inflict
suffering.”
“One is apt,” Denis went on, “to be so spellbound by the spectacle of
one’s own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents
itself to other people as well as to oneself.”
Mary was not listening. “The difficulty,” she said, “makes itself
acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact
with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or
inflict suffering. If on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks
the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As
you see, it’s a dilemma.”
“When I think of my own case,” said Denis, making a more decided move in
the desired direction, “I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people’s
mentality in general, and above all and in particular, of their opinions
about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to
the outside world.” He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of the
drawing off of a rubber band.
“It’s an awful problem,” said Mary thoughtfully. “One has to have had
personal experience to realise quite how awful it is.”
“Exactly.” Denis nodded. “One has to have had first-hand experience.” He
leaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. “This very morning,
for example...” he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deep
voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated
down from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically Mary rose to her
feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate
anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual
experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without
speaking.