The Dark Labyrinth

  To John, sitting innocently on the terrasse of the Rotonde it seemed that some pronounced attitude of mind was called for on his part—but precisely what? How did one react to the debauching of one’s wife by some unchristian foreigner? Here again he found himself, in an obscure way, more angry because the act had offended against the laws of hospitality rather than because his personal love was deeply wounded. He discovered with a shock that he himself had disposed with sex as a problem some long time since. Its only relation to himself now seemed as a subject for conversation with lady novelists. Perhaps this was because he had achieved a certain amount of “intellectual detachment”—as he was pleased to call it. Coréze’s behaviour, he thought firmly, was unpardonable in a host. Things like that were not done in England. Or were they?

  The little pile of white saucers rapidly grew on the table before him. Should he attempt a gesture of some sort—drink himself to death or ring up Chloe?

  Drinks only gave him indigestion or made him sleepy. Besides, his love for Alice was so deeply and comfortably based in habit and interest, that he found it hard to bring to the surface for such boring and idiotic interrogations. He would sulk, and probably grow a moustache. Up to now Alice had always refused to let him grow one because it made his chin look so weak and undershot. He would stop at nothing now.

  He looked forward to a mutual retreat and regrouping; something like a month’s holiday. But an unrepenting and violent Alice appeared suddenly at the hotel, thirsting for drama.

  It took all his forbearance to avoid a serious engagement during the first quarter of an hour. Alice piled reproaches upon him for being a bad husband, for taking all the travellers’ cheques with him, and for being too cowardly even to reproach her for what she had done.

  To her distracted mind it seemed unbelievable that John should be standing there in front of her exhibiting the merest pique and disapproval; in her own eyes the crime had been enlarging itself until it seemed now to be worth a more distinct response. But no. There he stood, in the middle of this drama, refusing to be drawn in beyond the gentlemanly limits laid down in Kipling’s “If”. That he should be able to sit in front of a pile of saucers, dressed in his pork pie hat, blue diceboard tie, canary-coloured cardigan and grey slacks, seemed to be almost irreverent. She noticed that he even fingered an incipient moustache once or twice in a furtive manner.

  They continued to sleep in the same bed, though here again John’s caution prevented her from enjoying the scenes of which she fell so much need. He did not even try to make love to her. She had planned a dramatic scene about that. “Don’t touch me,” she had decided to say in a strangled voice, “can’t you see what i’ve been through?’’

  Worse, however, was in store for them. Alice discovered that she was going to have a baby after all. There was every indication that it would be Coréze’s. The thought gave them both a fright. Even John sat up a bit. As for her, she was filled with violent self-loathing for the trick which her body had played upon her. Meanwhile, John conquered his aristocratic disgust sufficiently to carry his inexperience into the consulting-rooms of shabby gynaecologists in the Boulevard Raspail. An operation was arranged and a very cowed Alice thought desperately that poison was really better than dishonour—but submitted herself to science in the person of Dr. Magnoun, a jolly little twig of a Frenchman with an Academy rosette in his button-hole and moustache-ends waxed into a guardee stiffness. “Vous connaissez, Madame,” he said with a certain roguishness, placing her ankles in the canvas hooks hanging from the ceiling and pulling until she was practically standing on her head. “Vous connaissez lépigramme du grand génie Pascal qui dit: ‘Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connait pas’?”

  Alice returned to a little studio overlooking Parc Montsouris which John had taken. She felt old and worn, and full of a sense of dismal insufficiency. Her anger was changed to gratitude for John’s patience and kindness. He looked after her with complete devotion and did not utter a single reproach. If he had she might have rallied more quickly. As it was she spent over a month in bed. This incident effectively disrupted their lives. Their circle of Paris friends seemed to be no longer as “amusing” and as “vital” as heretofore. Alice gave up painting entirely and could not raise enough interest to visit picture galleries to criticize the work of her contemporaries. As for John, the very concerts at the Salle Pleyel became something between a mockery and a bore—so deep a gulf, it seemed, stretched between life and art.

  It was at this time, when the frustrating sense of unresolved conflict was making him unhappy, that he ran into Campion again. The latter was making a name for himself. He lived in a little studio behind Alésia and was painting with his customary facility.

  Campion at this time was already an expatriate of several years’ standing who had found that the life of Paris, which in those days seemed miraculously to exist only for and through the artist, was more congenial to his temper than the fogs and rigours of London. Baird was having a cognac at the Dome when he saw the small self-possessed figure approach from among the tables with the curious swiftness and stealth that always reminded him of a cat. He had seen Campion about quite often in Paris, had visited his exhibitions, and had even bought one of his nudes for Alice. They had never spoken to one another and he was surprised now to see that Campion was smiling in recognition. Baird wondered whether he was perhaps out to cadge a meal as he watched the small figure in the soiled blue shirt and grey trousers. He half-rose to greet him.

  Campion was a little drunk and his eyes sparkled. As it was he had just come from a party and was looking for a victim upon whom to fasten and pour out all the dammed-up feelings of persecution and envy which the society of English people seemed to foster in him. “Baird,” he said, with a smile, “a very long time since we met.”

  They sat down and ordered drinks, and Baird found not only that Campion remembered him perfectly, but he had even read two small articles he had written in which his work was mentioned favourably. It was not this, however, that was his business, for Campion almost immediately plunged into a description of his party to ease those pent-up feelings within him. Baird at once recognized behind the acid and brilliant sketches he drew of other people the familiar motive: the sense of social inferiority which had made so many artists difficult companions for him. He remembered one horrible occasion when D. H. Lawrence, upset by some imagined slight, refused to talk to him except in an outlandish Derbyshire dialect—which was intended to emphasize his peasant upbringing. Something of the same discomfort possessed him now as he heard Campion talk, and reflected that he had been born probably in Camberwell, and had left a Secondary school at sixteen. His accent sounded suspiciously correct. It was probably the result of studying the B.B.C. announcers.

  Campion had been patronized by a gentleman and he was reacting to it now. His description of Lady Sholter barking like a shotgun and dropping her monocle to shake hands with him, was a masterpiece of ferocious miming. “The English, my God, the English,” he said, pleased to have found an audience that did not contest his opinions. “The granite-bound idiocy and moral superiority. The planetary atmosphere of self-satisfaction each of them carries around, to look at himself through. It is staggering.” He moved his toes in his sandals as he talked with exquisite pleasure. He was enjoying himself. “The sense of ritual they had evolved to cover their disastrous negation—their impotence.”

  Baird listened carefully and politely, observing his man with interest. Campion’s small round face gleamed golden in the light of the street-lamps. His white, well-kept hands moved as he talked in a series of small graphic gestures as if they were drawing very lightly in the air the scenes he was describing.

  Campion was doubly annoyed, because, in going to this party, he had broken a self-imposed rule. He had thought perhaps that this time it might be different—but no. Ferocious, and full of a suffocating sense of self-limitation, he had left it after a quarter of an hour. “To be patronized, to be permitted entry bec
ause of my talent rather than because of myself—that’s what angers me.”

  Baird asked why he had gone. Campion gave a mirthless bark of a laugh. “I was told by old Mrs. Dubois that Lady Sholter was anxious to meet me, not only because she thought I was a significant artist, but because she wanted to commission someone to design her a studio for her castle. Idiot that I am, I went partly out of flattery and partly because I cannot afford to turn down two hundred pounds at my time of life.” He drank deeply and ordered another drink. “Not a bit of it,” he said. “She took one look at my clothes and said: ‘Oh, but there’s some mistake. You can’t be Archie Worm’s friend can you? Were you at Eton with Archie?’ Madame Dubois whispered ‘Lord Worms’ in my ear in an ecstatic voice. Was I at Eton with him? Well, my dear Baird, it turned out that I had been mistaken for Campion the couturier.”

  Baird protested that this might have happened to anyone, but Campion would not hear of it. Only the English, it seemed, could be boorish or ignorant. “It’s because they despise art in England,” said Campion. “The artist is expected to be a sort of potboy or bagman.” He laughed again. “Architectural drawings for Lady Sholter! English architecture, like the English character, is founded on the Draught. You should have seen them. What a fool I am!”

  Baird was getting a little tired. “Schwabe says that the Englishman deserves neither his literature nor his penis—caring so little for either,” he said in a half-hearted attempt to be jocular. Campion was staring at him with his peculiar wide-eyed stare which seemed to combine impudence and candour in equal parts. “As a victim of an English upbringing I suppose I ought to defend myself,” said Baird. Campion was no longer listening. He scratched his foot through the web of his sandal. “A world of druids and bores,” he said softly. The greater part of his rage had evaporated and he was once more becoming the pleasant and equable companion he normally was.

  The two men talked in a desultory fashion, and Baird confessed that he wanted to get away for a complete rest. “And how are your wife’s paintings?” asked Campion, who had once seen Alice and thought her beautiful. Baird made some evasive remark and they parted.

  He wound his way home slowly to find that Alice was already in bed, reading. “I’ve decided to go away for a bit,” he said, surprising himself, for he did not know that he had come to any decision. “I need a rest.”

  She did not even look up from her book.

  She had been cultivating a stoical and speechless reserve of late. “Very well,” she said in a tone which was tinged ever so slightly with anxiety. It was the first time in their lives that he had shown any initiative.

  That was how Baird began his travels, drifting south into Italy and Greece, gradually emptying his ambitions one by one into the slow wake of a life which, curiously enough, seemed only now to be beginning. A year in Athens, a winter in Syria, confirmed the first fugitive feelings of happiness at being alone. When he got a letter from Alice asking for a divorce it was with a curious indifference that he read it, sitting in an olive-grove in Poros. A casual friend from Paris whom he encountered in Beirut told him that Alice was going to marry Campion—or said she was. Old Madame Dubois, whose trail he crossed as she was on her way to winter in Egypt, told him that Campion would never marry anyone and asked politely whether he was happy. Sitting on the terrace of the Café Moka, he admitted that he was very happy. “You have become a Mediterranean man, eh?” said the old lady, with her distinguished face concentrated upon his like a burning-glass in the shadow of that absurd straw hat. “It happens to people sometimes, you know.” Baird tried to tell her something of his recent journeys, but found them completely lacking in the kind of detail which could make small-talk. No, he had not looked up the Adlers in Jerusalem, nor the Habib family in Beirut. He had, in fact, done none of the things he had been advised to do. He had presented not a single letter of introduction. He had been drifting vaguely about, he told her, becoming a sub-tropical man by degrees. The old lady sucked her iced coffee through a straw, watching his face closely all the time. There was just a tinge of mockery in her eyes. “You’ve got broader and older-looking,” she said at last, removing the small creamy moustache she had allowed to form upon her upper lip with a lace handkerchief. “No doubt you are beginning to enjoy love-making too, without all your silly Anglo-Saxon sentiment?” He had indeed become broader and older-looking; it was partly due to the moustache. But he searched for some way to make the change more concrete so that it could be expressed in words. What could one say? The fundamental factor could, it seemed, only be expressed in negatives, like the first principle of the Hindu religions. “Nothing means very much any more,” he said, and added anxiously, lest the phrase should bear a false interpretation. “I mean by that I am quite happy and full of life; but I don’t try to feel through books any more. I can’t.” She smiled with her beautiful young-girl face, and laid a small tender hand on his wrist. “The world is so large,” she said, “and a lifetime so short, and people so lovable and cruel and exciting.”

  It was indeed large, he thought, letting his mind slip back across the kaleidoscope of the last few years, from the courtyard of the fortune-teller in Fez to the day spent under the fig-tree in Poros: from a face reflected in a Damascus water-jar to a cafe in Horns.

  “I think that it is only in the south that they warm themselves at life instead of transforming it into bad literature,” said the old lady. Baird lit a cigarette.

  He said: “I’ve begun a novel inside. It should take five years to experience and a year to write. It will be my only justification for taking such a long holiday from myself.” He was surprised to see from this that he did consider himself (his English self) as someone quite separate, and his present life not simply an extension of the past—that peach-fed existence of parties and pretensions.

  Madame Dubois settled her hands more deeply in her gloves.

  “Let me tell you why I come to Egypt every year,” she said, with the faintest suspicion of archness. “Fifteen years ago, in spring (she said the word with that little upcast inflexion of pleasure, as Parisians do) I fell in love. I was already married. I was in the temple at Baalbec and I met a young Greek officer. He was also married. We determined that though experience was to be respected—and ours was that spontaneous unfolding inevitable sequence of meetings which one covers with the inadequate word I have just used for the experience of love; while that had to be respected, the common forms of life too had their due. He had two children. I had a husband so gracious and human that I could not bear to hurt him. I come to Egypt every year, leaving George to his banking, and relive the experience which a year’s domestic propinquity would kill but which had not died throughout these years. He has a little studio in the Arab quarter. We meet in secret. Each year it gets better. Oh my friend, all this was fifteen years ago, and here I am, an old lady. But this secret friendship, so superficial that a week of marriage would kill it, is one of the lovely things of my life.”

  She excused herself for a moment and crossed the café to the counter to buy some cakes. She had left her book and handbag on the table. Somewhere a radio played the piercing quarter-tones of some Arabic dance. Baird picked up the book and idly turned the pages. It was a little anthology of aphorisms. He noticed that she had placed an exclamation mark beside one of the aphorisms. “L’ amour maternel est le seul bonbeur qui dépasse ce qu’ on en espérait,” he read. Madame Dubois, of course, had only that adopted daughter who was always away in Montreux at a Convent. The pencil-mark had scored into the soft white paper. “L’amour maternel!” Well, there remained mountain-ranges to be crossed for all of us; paradoxically enough, travel was only a sort of metaphorical journey—an outward symbol of an inward march upon reality.

  Madame Dubois returned with a packet of crystallized fruit and some cream cakes of deleterious hue. “We have feasts,” she said. “Orgies of iced cakes and Russian tea in the little studio. And I tell him once more the plot of the novel which I shall never write; and he brin
gs me the presents he has had six months to choose.” Blessed are the happy.

  The war was approaching, he reflected, as he rode eastward across the deadly green Egyptian delta to Alexandria. There was perhaps only a year of this life to spend before the barriers came down. He stood up and examined his face in the pocket mirror of the carriage, steadying himself against the swaying of the train by placing his braced legs far apart. The face that stared back at him was certainly the face of a person. It was good, very good, to feel at last a responsibility for his own mind and body: to be rich with increase.

  Madame Dubois had said, on that last evening: “I think, you know, that you have discovered the south, and you know that the only life for you is one of curiosity—sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation.”

  In Haifa he was pounced upon, as he was having his shoes cleaned, by Miss Dombey, of all people. Rufous-red, burnt to brickdust by the sun and her perpetual pent-up rage against people for having dark skins, Miss Dombey was travelling for a missionary society. “Fancy seeing you here,” she said. “I heard you were drifting round the Mediterranean.”

  “Drifting,” thought Baird. It could not have been better put; in Miss Dombey’s mouth the word carried a suppressed pejorative inflexion. Drifting was something that “remittance men” did. It was, however, impossible to escape from her. They had a cup of tea, and between them reconstructed the fragments of that old overcast life when Miss Dombey cycled to Thorsham every Saturday to change her books at the library and take Bible class for the vicar. The rain, the steaming fields. He heard fairly regularly from his father. Outside in the dusky street a thin rain began to fall, as if to heighten the verisimilitude of the atmosphere created by the tea-cups and the scrannel-harsh voice of Miss Dombey. She was fuller of freckles than a peacock’s tail, he found himself thinking. Each freckle an eye, and every eye an inquisition. Now she wanted to talk about Alice. He changed the subject abruptly and told her about his little Moorish house in Fez, omitting any mention of the kohl-painted pair of dark eyes that watched the dusty road by the cypresses so anxiously for him. Miss Dombey had been sent east upon what she described as “the Lord’s business.” Leaving England had been a revelation. She had always heard of the “backward” races, she said, but had never realized how backward and savage they were. “The filth,” she said challengingly, when he tried to defend Cairo and Jerusalem. Miss Dombey obliged with two examples of Egyptian life which were incontestably true to character. Walking down Kasr El Nil she had seen a little man in a black suit and hat approaching her. He had no nose, but in the space where the nose should have been was the cork of a bottle, across which lay the rim of his spectacles. On another occasion, travelling third the better to observe her quarry (the fellah), she had noticed that a strange smell of burning was emanating from the man seated next to her. He had a lighted cigarette in his hand which had burnt down to the flesh of the finger. He felt nothing. She realized that the smell was that of burnt flesh. The man was a leper! She recounted these ancedotes with triumphant gestures and Baird had to admit that his Middle East was dirty; but how varied, and how delightful. “It’s the same everywhere,” said Miss Dombey, “same people saying the same things.” That also was true. Everywhere there was the conventional Latin situation—hopeless broken-down provincial societies talking Lycée French and making Cirque Medrano love. But everywhere, too, the seduction of blue water and islands, and the occasional slant-eyed dark person who demanded only a fugitive devotion of the body, being unable to touch the heart or perhaps not even desiring it. How could one make this clear to Miss Dombey? He could imagine the expression on her face if he should say that he had become a sub-tropical man. “I must go,” he said, “the taxi for Beirut is leaving in a few minutes.” He shook her warmly by the hand and left her standing there in her torn mackintosh, with her uncombed, untidy red hair shaking in the wind from the open door.