by Evelyn Waugh
St. Mary’s clock strikes twelve.
It is raining again.
Adam is alone.
HALF AN HOUR LATER.
AN HOTEL BEDROOM.
Adam is lying on his face across the bed, fully clothed. He turns over and sits up. Again the vision of the native village; the savage has dragged himself very near to the edge of the jungle. His back glistens in the evening sun with his last exertion. He raises himself to his feet, and with quick unsteady steps reaches the first bushes; soon he is lost to view.
Adam steadies himself at the foot of the bed and walks to the dressing table; he leans for a long time looking at himself in the glass.
He walks to the window and looks out into the rain.
Finally he takes the blue bottle from his pocket, uncorks it, smells it, and then without more ado drinks its contents. He makes a wry face at its bitterness and stands for a minute uncertain. Then moved by some odd instinct he turns out the light and curls himself up under the coverlet.
At the foot of a low banyan tree the savage lies very still. A large fly settles on his shoulder; two birds of prey perch on the branch above him, waiting. The tropical sun begins to set, and in the brief twilight animals begin to prowl upon their obscene questings. Soon it is quite dark.
A photograph of H.M. the King in naval uniform flashes out into the night.
GOD SAVE THE KING.
The cinema quickly empties.
The young man from Cambridge goes his way to drink a glass of Pilsen at Odenino’s.
Ada and Gladys pass out through ranks of liveried attendants. For perhaps the fiftieth time in the course of the evening Gladys says, “Well, I do call it a soft film.”
“Fancy ’er not coming in again.”
There is quite a crowd outside, all waiting to go to Earls Court. Ada and Gladys fight manfully and secure places on the top of the bus.
“Ere, ’oo are yer pushing? Mind out, can’t yer?”
When they arrive home they will no doubt have some cocoa before going to bed, and perhaps some bread and bloater paste. It has been rather a disappointing evening on the whole. Still, as Ada says, with the pictures you has to take the bad with the good.
Next week there may be something really funny.
Larry Semon or Buster Keaton—who knows?
Conclusion
I
The tea grew cold upon the chamber cupboard and Adam Doure stared out into the void.
The rain of yesterday had cleared away and the sun streamed into the small bedroom, lighting it up with amiable and unwelcome radiance. The distressing sound of a self-starter grappling in vain with a cold engine rang up from the yard below the window. Otherwise everything was quiet.
He cogitated: therefore he was.
From the dismal array of ills that confronted him and the confused memories that lay behind, this one proposition obtruded itself with devastating insistence. Each of his clearing perceptions advanced fresh evidence of his existence; he stretched out his limbs fully clothed under the counterpane and gazed at the ceiling with uncomprehending despair, while memories of the preceding evening, of Ernest Vaughan with swollen neck and staring eye, of the slum bar and the eager faces of the two pimps, of Henry, crimson and self-righteous, of shop girls in silk blouses eating plum cake, of the Ford wrecked in the broken window, fought for precedence in his awakening consciousness until they were established in some fairly coherent chronological order; but always at the end there remained the blue bottle and the sense of finality rudely frustrated. It stood upon the dressing table now, emptied of all its power of reprieve, while the tea grew cold upon the chamber cupboard.
After all the chaotic impressions which he had thus painfully and imperfectly set in order, the last minutes before he had turned out the light stood out perfectly clearly. He could see the white, inconsolable face that had stared out at him from the looking glass; he could feel at the back of his tongue the salt and bitter taste of the poison. And then as the image of the taste began to bulk larger in his field of consciousness, as though with the sudden breaking down of some intervening barrier another memory swept in on him blotting out all else with its intensity. He remembered as in a nightmare, remote, yet infinitely clear, his awakening in the darkness with the coldness of death about his heart; he had raised himself from the bed and stumbled to the window and leant there, he did not know how long, with the cold air in his face and the steady monotone of the rain fighting with the drumming of blood in his head. Gradually, as he stood there motionless, nausea had come upon him; he had fought it back, his whole will struggling in the effort; it had come again; his drunken senses relaxed their resistance, and with complete abandonment of purpose and restraint, he vomited into the yard below.
Slowly and imperceptibly the tea grew cold on the chamber cupboard.
II
Centuries ago, in his dateless childhood, Ozymandias had sprung to the top of the toy cupboard tired of Adam’s game. It was a game peculiar to himself and Ozymandias which Adam had evolved, and which was only played on the rare occasions of his being left alone. First, Ozymandias had to be sought from room to room, and when at last he was found, borne up to the nursery and shut in. He would watch him for some minutes as he paced the floor and surveyed the room with just the extreme tip of his tail expressing his unfathomable contempt for European civilization. Then armed with a sword, gun, battledore, or an armful of bricks to throw, and uttering sadistic cries, Adam would pursue him round and round the room, driving him from refuge to refuge, until almost beside himself with rage and terror, he crouched junglelike with ears flattened back and porpentine hair. Here Adam would rest, and after some slight pause the real business of the game began. Ozymandias had to be won back to complacency and affection. Adam would sit down on the floor some little way from him and begin calling to him softly and endearingly. He would lie on his stomach with his face as near Ozymandias as he would allow and whisper extravagant eulogies of his beauty and grace; mother-like he would comfort him, evoking some fictitious tormentor to be reproached, assuring him that he was powerless to hurt him any more; Adam would protect him; Adam would see that the horrible little boy did not come near him again. Slowly Ozymandias’ ears would begin to come forward and his eyes begin to close, and the delectable exercise invariably ended with caresses of passionate reconciliation.
On this particular afternoon, however, Ozymandias had refused to play, and the moment Adam brought him into the nursery, had established himself in unassailable sanctuary at the top of the toy cupboard. He sat there among the dust and broken toys, and Adam, foiled in his purpose, sat gloomily beneath calling to him. But Adam—at the age of seven—was not easily discouraged, and soon he began pushing up the nursery table towards the cupboard. This done he lifted the soldier box into it, and above this planted a chair. There was not room, turn it how he might, for all four legs to rest on the box, but content with an unstable equilibrium, Adam poised it upon three and mounted. When his hands were within a few inches of Ozymandias’ soft fur an unwary step on to the unsupported part of the chair precipitated him and it, first on to the table and then with a clatter and cry on to the floor.
Adam had been too well brought up to remember very much of his life in the days before he went to his private school, but this incident survived in his memory with a clearness, which increased as he became farther removed from it, as the first occasion on which he became conscious of ill as a subjective entity. His life up till this time had been so much bounded with warnings of danger that it seemed for a moment inconceivable that he could so easily have broken through into the realm of positive bodily harm. Indeed, so incompatible did it seem with all previous experience that it was some appreciable time before he could convince himself of the continuity of his existence; but for the wealth of Hebraic and mediaeval imagery with which the idea of life outside the body had become symbolized, he could in that moment easily have believed in his own bodily extinction and the unreality of all the sensible
objects about him. Later he learned to regard these periods between his fall and the dismayed advent of help from below, as the first promptings towards that struggle for detachment in which he had, not without almost frantic endeavour, finally acknowledged defeat in the bedroom of the Oxford hotel.
The first phase of detachment had passed and had been succeeded by one of methodical investigation. Almost simultaneously with his acceptance of his continued existence had come the conception of pain—vaguely at first as of a melody played by another to which his senses were only fitfully attentive, but gradually taking shape as the tangible objects about him gained in reality, until at length it appeared as a concrete thing, external but intimately attached to himself. Like the pursuit of quicksilver with a spoon, Adam was able to chase it about the walls of his consciousness until at length he drove it into a corner in which he could examine it at his leisure. Still lying perfectly still, just as he had fallen, with his limbs half embracing the wooden legs of the chair, Adam was able, by conscentrating his attention upon each part of his body in turn, to exclude the disordered sensations to which his fall had given rise and trace the several constituents of the bulk of pain down their vibrating channels to their sources in his various physical injuries. The process was nearly complete when the arrival of his nurse dissolved him into tears and scattered his bewildered ratiocinations.
It was in some such mood as this that, an hour or so after his awakening, Adam strode along the towing path away from Oxford. He still wore the clothes in which he had slept, but in his intellectual dishevelment he had little concern for his appearance. All about him the shadows were beginning to dissipate and give place to clearer images. He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.
And at length, as he walked by the river, the shapes of the design began to advance and recede, and the pattern about him and the shadows of the night before became planes and masses and arranged themselves into a perspective, and like the child in the nursery Adam began feeling his bruises.
Somewhere among the red roofs across the water bells were ringing discordantly.
Two men were fishing on the bank. They looked curiously at him and returned their attention to their barren sport.
A small child passed him sucking her thumb in Freudian ecstasy. And after a time Adam left the footpath and lay down under a bank and by the Grace of God fell asleep.
III
It was not a long or an unbroken sleep, but Adam rose from it refreshed and after a little while resumed his journey.
On a white footbridge he paused, and lighting his pipe, gazed down into his ruffled image. A great swan swept beneath him with Spenserian grace, and as the scattered particles of his reflection began to reassemble, looking more than ever grotesque in contrast with the impeccable excellence of the bird, he began half-consciously to speak aloud:
“So, you see, you are after all come to the beginning of another day.” And as he spoke, he took from his pocket the envelope addressed to Imogen and tore it into small pieces. Like wounded birds they tumbled and fluttered, until reaching the water they became caught up in its movement and were swept out of sight round the bend of the river towards the city, which Adam had just left.
The reflection answered: “Yes, I think that that was well done. After all, ‘imperatrix’ is not a particularly happy epithet to apply to Imogen, is it? — and, by the way, are you certain that she can understand Latin? Suppose that she had had to ask Henry to translate it to her!
“But, tell me, does this rather picturesque gesture mean that you have decided to go on living? You seemed so immovably resolved on instant death yesterday, that I find it hard to believe you can have changed your mind.”
Adam: I find it hard to believe that it was I who yesterday was so immovably resolved. I cannot explain but it seems to me as though the being who survives, I must admit, with very great clearness in my memory, was born of a dream, drank and died in a dream.
The Reflection: And loved in a dream, too?
Adam: There you confound me, for it seems to me that that love of his alone does partake of reality. But perhaps I am merely yielding to the intensity of the memory. Indeed I think that I am. For the rest that being had no more substance than you yourself, whom the passage of a bird can dissolve.
Reflection: That is a sorry conclusion, for I am afraid that you are trying to dismiss as a shadow a being in every way as real as yourself. But in your present mood it would be useless to persuade you. Tell me instead, what was the secret which you learned, asleep there in the grass?
Adam: I found no secret—only a little bodily strength.
Reflection: Is the balance of life and death so easily swayed?
Adam: It is the balance of appetite and reason. The reason remains constant—the appetite varies.
Reflection: And is there no appetite for death?
Adam: None which cannot be appeased by sleep or change or the mere passing of time.
Reflection: And in the other scale no reason?
Adam: None. None.
Reflection: No honour to be observed to friends? No interpenetration, so that you cannot depart without bearing away with you something that is part of another?
Adam: None.
Reflection: Your art?
Adam: Again the appetite to live—to preserve in the shapes of things the personality whose dissolution you foresee inevitably.
Reflection: That is the balance then—and in the end circumstance decides.
Adam: Yes, in the end circumstance.
Continuation
They have all come over to Thatch for the day; nine of them, three in Henry Quest’s Morris and the others in a huge and shabby car belonging to Richard Basingstoke. Mrs. Hay had only expected Henry Quest and Swithin, but she waves a plump hand benignly and the servants busy themselves in finding more food. It is so nice living near Oxford, and Basil’s friends always look so charming about the place even if they are rather odd in their manners sometimes. They all talk so quickly that she can never hear what they are saying and they never finish their sentences either—but it doesn’t matter, because they always talk about people she doesn’t know. Dear boys, of course they don’t mean to be rude really—they are so well bred, and it is nice to see them making themselves really at home. Who are they talking about now?
“No, Imogen, really, he’s getting rather impossible.”
“I can’t tell you what he was like the other night.”
“The night you came down here.”
“Gabriel was giving a party.”
“And he didn’t know Gabriel and he hadn’t been asked.”
“And Gabriel didn’t want him—did you, Gabriel?”
“Because you never know what he is going to do next.”
“And he brought in the most dreadful person.”
“Quite, quite drunk.”
“Called Ernest Vaughan, you wouldn’t have met him. Just the most awful person in the world. Gabriel was perfectly sweet to him.”
Dear boys, so young, so intolerant.
Still, if they must smoke between courses, they might be a little more careful with the ash. The dark boy at the end—Basil always forgot to introduce his friends to her—was quite ruining the table.
“Edwards, give the gentleman next to Lord Basingstoke another ash-tray.”
What were they saying?
“D’you know, Henry, I think that that was rather silly of you? Why should I mind what some poor drunk says about me?”
What a sweet girl Imogen Quest was. So much easier
than her father. Mrs. Hay was always rather afraid of Imogen’s father. She was afraid Henry was going to be like him. How charming she looks now. She cannot understand why all the boys aren’t in love with her. When Mrs. Hay was young, they would have been. None of Basil’s friends seemed quite the “marrying sort” somehow. Now if only Basil would marry someone like Imogen Quest…..
“But do you know, I think I’ve met Ernest Vaughan? Or at least someone pointed him out to me once. Didn’t you, Swithin?”
“Yes. You said you thought he was rather attractive.”
“Imogen!”
“My dear.”
“I think he is. Isn’t he short and dirty with masses of hair?”
“Always drunk.”
“Yes, I remember. I think he looked very charming. I want to meet him properly.”
“Imogen, you can’t, really. He is too awful.”
“Didn’t he do those pictures in Richard’s room? Richard, will you invite me to meet him one day?”
“No, Imogen, really I couldn’t.”
“Then someone must—Gabriel, you will, please. I insist on meeting him.”
Dear children, so young, so chic.
“Well, I think it’s perfectly beastly of you all. But I will meet him all the same. I’ll get Adam to arrange it.”
The table was ruined.
“Edwards, I think it’s almost fine enough to have coffee outside.”
A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLKS
I
I arrived at Vanburgh at five to one. It was raining hard by now and the dreary little station yard was empty except for a deserted and draughty-looking taxi. They might have sent a car for me.
How far was it to Stayle? About three miles, the ticket collector told me. Which part of Stayle might I be wanting? The Duke’s? That was a good mile the other side of the village.
They really might have sent a car.
With a little difficulty I found the driver of the taxi, a sulky and scorbutic young man who may well have been the bully of some long-forgotten school story. It was some consolation to feel that he must be getting wetter than I. It was a beastly drive.