My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  4

  As he walked along he stopped at a cafe opposite the town library and gazed at it as if some memory were struggling to emerge from the deep darkness in his mind. He saw himself ascending the steps to the library, then the stairs, past the white statuary on the landing and finally entering the library itself, where he would sit at a table with a miscellany of books around him. Donald was sitting with him at the table, large solid Donald, his Horatio as he often considered him in his princely imagination, Donald who was studying Engineering in his slow amiable way. They would read for some time and at eight leave the room, cross the street and enter the cafe outside which he was now standing. There was a young waitress there at that time—in a cream uniform with a touch of red at the breast—with whom he fancied he was in love though he had never actually spoken to her except to ask for coffee. But there seemed to be an affair of eyes between them which encouraged him and allowed him to leave a possible assignation to a pleasurable future. She would have left school at fifteen, he thought, and the alliance of the educated with the uneducated fascinated him. On one particular occasion he found himself sitting at a corner table with Donald, and Alex who had mysteriously appeared. It was a fine summer evening and he could see through the window with a certain distaste and ennui the statue of Sir Walter Scott looking benevolent and profound in white stone, which however in places was turning a rather plaguey green.

  A sin those days everything turned to intellectual discussion; they began—or rather he began—to talk about the tragic hero in Shakespeare; looking back he thought of his university career as a series of conversations picked up, dropped, continued in cafes, on buses, on trams, in lounges and bedrooms. He was maintaining the not unusual argument that the tragic hero was above all a failure.

  “In what way would you say a failure?” said Alex falling in with his mood as he so often did: Alex was a classicist, devoted to the enigmas of grammar and philology but he liked to “expand his knowledge”.

  “He is a failure because he has not entered the world of power and is continually surprised by what he calls evil.” They were interrupted at that point by the girl who stacked the dirty cups on a tray and substituted clean ones. In her cream dress she looked like a nurse in a hospital and the curve of her back as she bent over the table was infinitely attractive and pathetic and feminine. He noticed with some curiosity that her hands were trembling and that her voice faltered for a moment when she took their order.

  “If he weren’t a failure,” he went on later, chewing a Blue Riband, “he would have studied what goes on in the actual world. The world of nature doesn’t consider itself a failure. The leaf does not pass judgment on itself. That is why I can’t understand why Hamlet is considered intelligent.”

  “But surely,” said Donald, “this is one of the main things about Hamlet. I thought Maxwell said that when we were doing the play at school. I’m sure he did. He was supposed to be more intelligent than the people round him. Isn’t that why he was so much alone?”

  “Yes, I know Maxwell said that. But there is always a reason why people are alone and act like hermits. And the reason is usually not a romantic one, though people insist on making it so. But in what way is he intelligent? What does he use his intelligence for?” He raised his voice so that the girl, bringing the coffees, might hear him though he was quite sure that she wouldn’t understand, having, he was certain, left school at fifteen.

  “Intelligence is a method that allows us to survive, isn’t it? Well, he didn’t, did he? When he was confronted by a choice he did not make the right one or rather he didn’t do anything at all. And why not? The world of nature can’t exist without making choices. Not to make choices is to refuse to live. Hamlet is really a dead man. From the very beginning he is dead.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Donald, “you’re going a bit fast, aren’t you? The fact that he doesn’t survive doesn’t mean that he’s unintelligent. I mean …” He looked genuinely puzzled as if he wasn’t quite sure of what to say next and Mark felt again the familiar sense of power in the workings of his own mind.

  “Couldn’t an intelligent man be run over by a bus?” said Alex, while trails of coffee spume ran down his distinguished chin.

  “If he was intelligent he oughtn’t to have been. In any case, that is not the point …”

  “Before you go any further,” said Donald ruminatively, “I have a feeling Claudius didn’t survive either. Does that make him stupid?”

  “Yes, he too was stupid. But, in any case as I said, you’re missing the point. People say that Hamlet was intelligent because he nattered on about philosophical matters in an amateurish way and because he found himself full of ennui in the small prison of Denmark. Let me ask you a question then. Why didn’t he inherit the throne? And why did the bourgeois Claudius inherit it? Clearly because Hamlet wasn’t fit for it.”

  “Well, you’re an English scholar,” said Alex tolerantly. “After all I’m only a Latin scholar but there may have been a law stating that the brother …”

  The girl who was now attending to a woman at the next table looked as if she had just been crying and for a moment Mark nearly put his hand on her delicate wrist as if to comfort her. But the moment passed and it was Donald who handed her the milk jug from their own table, the one next to them being apparently milkless.

  “I doubt it,” continued Mark after a while, forgetting about the girl, “after all, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern assumed in their conversation with him that he should have inherited. As for what Fortinbras says at the end of the play, that Hamlet would have made a good king had he lived, that’s a lot of waffle. How could a man like that be a good king? He turned reflectively on the world around him. Nature goes on, he went inwards. By passing judgment on the world he no longer proved to be part of it. Anyway, animals don’t commit suicide and he wanted to, only he was too frightened and spiritual to do even that. He knew nothing about people because he was always thinking about himself. The ruined liberal, if there ever was one. Think of what he did to Ophelia. No, everything he touched turned to lead.”

  He hoped that the girl had heard that and saw her standing beside an older waitress in the attitude of one who is being talked at in a quiet urgent but hectoring way. He continued rapidly: “He found himself incapable of dealing with the reality around him. He showed no tenderness to Ophelia. Let us admit that he had a certain gift with words but Cervantes is supposed to have had a low I.Q. Creativity doesn’t necessarily mean intelligence.”

  “But surely,” said Donald spooning his coffee in a desultory manner, “sensitivity and intelligence are allied. An alarm clock is less easily destroyed than a wristwatch.”

  “Touché,” said Mark admiringly. “That seems right but on the other hand I can’t see any obvious connection between sensitivity and intelligence. Hamlet acted incompetently throughout. He didn’t weigh the facts up properly. Look at all the people who were killed at the end. He lost control of himself often and acted like a child. He was immature. Conduct which would be inexcusable in others is forgiven in him. Why? I’ll tell you why. It’s because the scholars have a vested interest in approving of him since he was a scholar himself. What would General Montgomery say about him? Or Patton?” He burst out laughing when he said this.

  “Well what about Macbeth then?” said Alex suddenly.

  “Touché again. You mean the alliance of sensitivity and brutality. Yes, a bit like Lawrence of Arabia perhaps, or wouldn’t you say?”

  The girl was now alone in the corner pulling absently at her apron. Perhaps I should ask her out, Mark thought idly. Sometime.

  “His treatment of Ophelia was inexcusable,” he continued. “No, once for all, intelligence is a faculty which allows us to deal competently with reality. Hamlet didn’t have that faculty. Fortinbras had it. Hamlet made blunder after blunder killing Polonius and his student friends who were far less guilty than Claudius. The man was a walking plague. He was responsible for more deaths than even Claudius was a
nd yet we say, ‘Oh, but he was so very intelligent’.” As Mark talked, range upon range of mountains opened in front of him and then a desert through which he walked, drunkenly talking.

  “The fact is that he had a highly developed consciousness which was hostile to life. Why else was he always talking about death? Claudius was right. One should accept death. He couldn’t do so. This is not a fact to be admired. Nature goes forward, he was going backwards. His mind was reflecting backwards.”

  “But why should we accept nature?” said Donald. “If we were to accept nature we wouldn’t invent anything to cure people of diseases.”

  “Exactly. We shouldn’t.”

  “I never knew you were a Christian Scientist,” said Alex wryly. Alex was the kind of person who wore a university tie and a university scarf, a clean living, clean limbed boy, who wrote notes very neatly in his exercise book. “In any case,” he continued, “all you’re saying is applicable to all men of thought. Do you rate Montgomery higher than Mozart?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Mark defiantly. “I do.”

  “In that case,” said Alex seriously, “there’s nothing more to be said, is there?”

  “You see,” continued Mark in an excited voice as if he were a politician putting forward a manifesto whose contents ought to be acceptable to all right thinking constituents, “ordinary people think that intelligent people are bookish people. But books don’t exist in nature. I maintain that if you can’t deal with reality then you are a stupid man. That is why Hamlet was stupid. Why did he keep everything to himself? Why was he so excessive? And then he took himself so seriously, thinking that he was the centre of the universe and that his melancholy was a fact of the world and that everybody else ought to be the same. I like to think of Fortinbras striding in there and letting in the sun and enjoying himself. He was the cool man, he had no objection to inheriting the throne. And he probably didn’t work after five o’clock. After all life should be enjoyed too.”

  “Stalin had no objection to inheriting the throne either,” said Alex.

  Mark continued as if he hadn’t heard the interruption. “And he spent his time mocking an old man who was trying to do his best. What sort of behaviour is that? Yet we approve it. Those scholars approve of it in fiction though they wouldn’t approve of their students doing that to them. And he threw away the love of a girl who was sincere and who loved him. There was a streak of cruelty in him, you know. No, you can keep Hamlet as far as I’m concerned.” He got up from the stained table, feeling, as it were, an invisible cloak around his shoulders, and himself in the centre of a clear pearly light.

  When they were going he noticed that the girl was furtively wiping her eyes. He half stopped again as if there was something he might say to her. But he couldn’t think of anything—anything, that is, humanly comforting—though the hands now folded in front of her were white with the effort of keeping them from trembling.

  Out again, he felt the air around him as apt for a prince, his head danced with as many thoughts as the stars, with a dry autumnal power, and he felt himself not a Hamlet but a Fortinbras able to hold the world like an apple in his hand; so much so that as he saw the people in their white gloves coming out of the theatre opposite he felt that he should call them back in and put on for them a performance such as they had never seen in their lives before. But they were already chatting with each other—the women in their long gowns and furs, and the men with their white scarves and top hats and tails—and they all looked so contented that he felt that they would not be able to listen to anything he might say.

  Soon he had forgotten the girl and was never in fact to see her again, for she disappeared from the cafe as if she had never been. Once or twice he thought he might ask what had happened to her but he couldn’t bring himself to do so.

  In any case she had no real place in his poetic and intellectual world. She lived in a world of tables and dishes and he could not imagine what that might be like, though he sometimes thought of it and had a hankering for it as Hamlet himself had a hankering for violence and skulls and an ennui which bred such desires. Donald and Alex on the other hand were normal enough to follow without question the route they had got on to, career, children and marriage. He half despised them for this. He couldn’t understand why they never seemed to feel the irrevocable absence which he himself felt so that sometimes he would stop and wonder why he was in a particular place rather than another and at other times, especially in the evening, his mind was transformed by a radiance as if from another world, so that this world became like a glass of water through which he could see quite tranquilly and in an elated way to the other side. The girl in the cafe however didn’t appear in that otherworldly place any more than probably Ophelia appeared in the mind of Hamlet when he was clairvoyant and clear. At moments like these he felt great love for his Horatios, Donald and Alex, who were such three-dimensional beings in this world.

  5

  He wandered about all the following day, going into pubs and meeting no-one, eating now and again, now and again staring vacantly at a newspaper. Around five he found himself in the draughty Art Gallery staring at a picture by Paul Klee which showed boats which might have been triangles or triangles which might have been boats and a purple moon and various reddish lights. Its drifting precision—its combination of geometry and play—satisfied his eyes and as he looked at it he felt that this was perhaps how life might be, playful and controlled, colourful and disciplined. There was no-one in the gallery but himself and a large bearded student in a duffle coat and, as he sat there, he snuggled into his own coat shivering now and again and feeling that disorientation which racked him. Lorna painted but did paintings of people never of abstractions: there was, for instance, that one which she had done of the hermit, sitting upright against a chair rather like a Graham Sutherland. He had quite liked her work though he had never admitted to doing so: there was another one for instance of a black nun set against a red sunset background, showing an explicit simplicity of the contrasting two colours. He wondered if she would have liked the Klee, studying it as if it contained some secret that might eventually be made known to him. Were these shapes boats or merely geometrical shapes? Were they meant to be on a sea or in space? And was that purple circle really a moon? After a while he wanted to leave but he didn’t know where to go. He was tired of drinking rum in pubs and tea in draughty cafes. Then the thought came to him that he might go to that address after all. 32 something street. For a dreadful second he thought that he wouldn’t remember it and then he knew that he wanted to go. 32 … no, 36 Claremont Street. He would take a bottle of whisky and a cake or something. After all it was Christmas-time. And a taxi.

  He went out into the drifting snow and bought a bottle of whisky at a supermarket, and a cake. The assistant had to call him back to give him his change. But eventually everything was all right and he was settled in a taxi taking him out to the place. All the time he was sitting in the taxi he felt impatient and thought he was being cheated as the meter clicked and the taxi man stared deafly ahead. So he gave him only a very small tip, the taxi spraying him with a mixture of snow and water as it accelerated townwards. He found himself in front of a block of tenements of good stone and eventually located No. 36. He paused at the door, the snow falling on his face, and felt he should not go in, but screwed his courage up and rang the bell.

  A young moustached man came to the door and stared at him curiously. “Your mother met me on the train and invited me in. I bought these.” He shoved the bottle forward and the cake as if they were passports and the man said, “That’s all right. Come in.” Mark liked the unsurprised matter of fact way he did it, perfectly spontaneously. He entered a smallish room lit with reddish light and containing a Christmas tree. “My mother’s out just now,” said the young man, “but she won’t be long. A neighbour took her out shopping. The name’s Harrison. But call me Iain.”

  “Mark Simmons.”

  A girl whom Mark thought must be his wife was pu
tting green rollers in her hair in front of a mirror, her arms bare, while a boy and girl were sitting on the floor playing with models of trains and trucks. The girl seemed to be wearing rather large shoes, as if in fact they were her mother’s. The room itself was warmed by a coal fire (he himself was more used to electric fires) and decorated with red wallpaper. In one corner of it was a piano, in another a TV set, and there was a bookcase containing some romantic novels and detective stories.

  “Sit you down and take your coat off,” said Harrison. “This is Mark,” he told his wife. “Mark Simmons. He knows my mother.”

  “She told me to call. I can’t stay long,” said Mark awkwardly. He felt himself in a very tranquil place and rather ill at ease as if his credentials weren’t enough.

  “Oh nonsense, you sit down there and I’ll get you a drink. Hey, you two, you’re in Mr. Simmons’ road.”

  “No, it’s all right. Please.”

  Mrs. Harrison took his coat and he sat down on a chair near the fire. After a while she came back in and sat down on the sofa. Soon afterwards her husband came in with drinks, laying a glass of lager and a glass of whisky beside Mark on a round varnished table.

  “Do you take water in your whisky?”

  “No, thanks, I prefer it neat. I’m sorry I …”

  “Nonsense. What are you sorry for? It’s Christmas-time, isn’t it?’