CHAPTER XXIV.
It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had beenmaking an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing inparticular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out intothe garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object--thelarge red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly andbusily scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. Thetemptation was great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elasticband that kept it discreetly closed.
"Private. Not to be opened," was written in capital letters on thecover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote inone'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. Heopened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had beenstruck.
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 thepalpitating 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 awareof them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appearto other people as they appeared to him; inconceivable that they everspoke of him among themselves in that same freely critical and, to bequite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talkof them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilegereserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he was surely an imageof flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.
On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed tothe ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own severestcritic after all. The discovery was a painful one.
The fruit of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricatureof himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background adancing 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, ingloriousRouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. Theexpression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority temperedby a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude ofstudious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of theturned-in feet--these things were terrible. And, more terrible still,was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which his physicalpeculiarities were all recorded and subtly exaggerated.
Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of otherpeople: of Priscilla and Mr. Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anneand Gombauld; of Mr. Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light thatwas more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary andIvor. He scarcely glanced at them. A fearful desire to know the worstabout himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves, lingering atnothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted tohim.
"Private. Not to be opened." He had disobeyed the injunction; he hadonly got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid therubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out onto the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employedthe leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her asimple-minded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was thefool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thingwasn't Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her redbook represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolised. Theyrepresented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; theysymbolised something that in his studious solitariness he was apt not tobelieve in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch thecrowds 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 aselaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodicallyhe would make some painful discovery about the external world and thehorrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The rednotebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It putbeyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.
Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasanttruth for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively downtowards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabbyfinery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks,thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanityof their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. Thefabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustratetheir tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all thetruthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a pieceof stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking itwas something to eat.
He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Likea 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 moreregularly.
He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him,reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of thesummer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne's bare arms and seal-sleekbathing-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 ableto call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that wastruly his own, or was it simply an education?
He walked slowly round the water's edge. In an embayed recess amongthe surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of apleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some namelessmason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.
"Hullo!" he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to saysomething.
Mary looked up. "Hullo!" she answered in a melancholy, uninterestedtone.
In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed toDenis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of thepudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.
At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcardof Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a facade sixteenwindows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns recedingout of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard timesand Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fiftyyears, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. Theywill have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At themoment, however, Mary's mind was not moved by these considerations.
On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor'sbold, large hand, a single quatrain.
"Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell! Like bright plumesmoulted in an angel's flight, There sleep within my heart's most mysticcell Memories of morning, memories of the night."
There followed a postscript of three lines: "Would you mind asking oneof the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left inthe drawer of my washstand. Thanks.--Ivor."
Seated under the Venus's immemorial gesture, Mary considered lifeand love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing theexpected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new andhitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor...She couldn't do without himnow. It was evident, on the other hand, from the poem on the back of thepicture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was atGobley now, so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the lastverse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.
"Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage Aurait donne moutons et chien Pour unba
iser que le volage A Lisette donnait pour rien."
Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all herlife before.
It was Denis who first broke the silence. "The individual," he began ina soft and sadly philosophical tone, "is not a self-supporting universe.There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, whenhe is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universesbesides himself."
He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminaryto a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation thatwas to lead up to Jenny's caricatures.
"True," said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added, "When oneindividual comes into intimate contact with another, she--or he, ofcourse, as the case may be--must almost inevitably receive or inflictsuffering."
"One is apt," Denis went on, "to be so spellbound by the spectacle ofone's own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presentsitself to other people as well as to oneself."
Mary was not listening. "The difficulty," she said, "makes itselfacutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contactwith another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive orinflict suffering. If on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risksthe equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. Asyou see, it's a dilemma."
"When I think of my own case," said Denis, making a more decided move inthe desired direction, "I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people'smentality in general, and above all and in particular, of their opinionsabout myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened tothe outside world." He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of thedrawing off of a rubber band.
"It's an awful problem," said Mary thoughtfully. "One has to have hadpersonal experience to realise quite how awful it is."
"Exactly." Denis nodded. "One has to have had first-hand experience." Heleaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. "This very morning,for example..." he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deepvoice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floateddown from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically Mary rose to herfeet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperateanxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritualexperiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house withoutspeaking.