Progress of Stories

by Laura (Riding) Jackson

  The Hungarian did not expect Lotus to interest herself seriously in his disappointed ambitions, and yet he did expect her to wear a serious look while he spoke to her. The effect on her of this attitude was that instead of thinking about herself or about him she thought only about her bearing. Sam used to call her an Unseen Presence. There was not much difference, she found, between being an Unseen and a Seen Presence. When she was what Sam called an Unseen Presence she had listened to or watched minutely things that she did not take seriously. Now she neither listened nor watched but merely allowed herself to be used as a symbolic statue allows itself to be used. No one would call a symbolic statue an Unseen Presence, though the person the statue was supposed to represent was not actually present in it. A symbolic statue was a Tragic Presence and yet a Seen Presence. It would like to be sympathetic, but it was not really interested; and yet it was there. If, on the other hand, it moved about among people as if of its own accord, listening to what they said or watching what they did, it would not be there. Lotus now understood that in her younger days she had made the mistake of letting herself seem to move about among people of her own accord. And she owed this new understanding of herself as much to the Hungarian as to the fact that having a goitre had somehow brought her to wonder whether, after all, there was not something about herself she ought to try to understand. The Hungarian was the first person who had ever made use of her. She realized that she liked being made use of without having to do anything of her own accord. Was it presumptuous of her to think of herself as a symbolic statue? A statue was only made of stone, whereas she had a living body. And by symbolic she only meant being made use of in a purely theatrical way.

  From Vienna Lotus set out for Tibet. In Tibet she found a monastery where sickened Anglo-Indians went for their health. It was a very large monastery and most of it was in ruins. The monks lived in the ruined part. It was not safe to go into the ruined part, she was told, not only because walls were always collapsing but because the monks did not like to be seen. A very old Indian who never spoke, either because he was under a vow not to speak or because he could not, was in charge of the part where the Anglo-Indians stayed. Lotus only saw him once—when he showed her the room she might have. The room was completely unfurnished. A yellow-faced army chaplain, who had a room near hers, got his servant to find her a bed and invited her to have her meals with him: otherwise she would have to prepare her own food in the kitchen with all the servants—people never came there without their servants. His servant had made quite a pleasant dining-room out of a large tower room, and many of the other visitors had their meals brought there. One morning after breakfast—the other visitors did not, as a rule, take their breakfasts in the tower-room—the army chaplain suddenly kissed Lotus on the forehead. His servant came in at this moment; and knowing that he would tell the other servants and they their masters, the army chaplain immediately threw himself out of the window. He was picked up dead and Lotus had to undergo an unofficial cross- examination by a judge who happened to be one of the visitors. The judge's wife wrote a mysteriously insinuating letter to Lotus's mother, having found Lotus's home address on her passport, which the judge had asked to see.

  This experience was not a painful one for Lotus. The people at the monastery had made use of her, which was gratifying. They were bored, and the incident had given them something to talk about. They were depressed, and it had cheered them up to take sides in the matter. One side called her an adventuress, the other side said that she was the victim of circumstances. To both sides she was an instrument of emotional exercise. Before the incident everyone there had been afraid of saying something which might irritate someone else, since they all suffered from nerves; so they got no good out of one another's company. In talking about Lotus and the army chaplain's death they emerged from the whispering sick-room atmosphere of their poor exacerbated minds. Even the army chaplain had made use of her; those who took her side said that it was just as well that he had killed himself. It had apparently been clear to everyone that he was on the verge of a moral collapse—a thing that often happened with clergymen who had worn themselves out trying to preserve the morals of their countrymen in bad climates.

  Lotus's mother died while she was in Tibet; but Sam had seen the letter written by the judge's wife. When Lotus reached home again Sam was living in her mother's house. Her mother had left him the house and all her money; when she knew that she was going to die she had made him promise to marry Lotus and look after her, no matter what she was like when she came back. In fulfillment of this promise he had got a divorce soon after Lotus's mother died. Lotus was only too pleased to marry him and had strong hopes of making him happy, now that she was so different from what she had been. She was ready to do anything he might want of her; if he wanted her to shed tears she could shed tears.

  But Sam asked nothing of Lotus: he had promised her mother that he would expect nothing of her. He did not notice that Lotus wanted to be made use of. He discouraged other people from expecting anything of her—in the idea that this was the kindest possible way to treat her. Lotus could not bring herself to tell Sam that she was different from what she had been. It would have been impossible for her to explain this to anyone; and without some explanation, indeed, it would have been difficult for anyone to discover in what way she was different from what she had been. Although she no longer sought out trivial adventures in the old way, and dressed more elegantly than she had when she was younger, people took these differences to mean merely that she was older than she had been. They could not help seeing that she bore herself with more poise than before; but they attributed this to the sophisticating influence of foreign travel, rather than to a change of character.

  Then Lotus began having a baby. She looked forward to being a mother. In motherhood one was made use of; and the more passive one was, the better a mother one was considered. But Sam decided that the baby would probably encourage further morbidities in her, and that, in any case, she would probably not be a good mother to it. And so, soon after the baby was born, he urged her to leave it to the care of a nurse and to take another trip round the world. She could not bring herself to explain that she did not want to go away from the baby, or from Sam himself. Perhaps in sending her away Sam was putting her to some use.

  She went to Paris and looked up Grace. Grace introduced her to a Catalan called Luis, who was professionally a hairdresser, socially an adventurer. He was very small and thin and pale; but he had eyes that shone like little purple apples. He would do anything for the sake of a joke, no matter how infamous. Indeed, he enjoyed being known as a rascal. People who were known as virtuous and respectable characters often got into trouble over trifles, because everyone suspected them of being hypocrites and so watched them carefully. Luis never got into trouble, although he was always involved in some illicit money-making scheme—half fraud, half farce. And as his schemes never got beyond the theoretical stage, he had all the pleasure of being a rascal, and none of the hard work. Whenever he needed money to live on he would work as a hairdresser for a month or so. His money-making schemes always started in the conversations he carried on to amuse his customers. "That wouldn't be a bad idea, eh?" he would say jokingly. Then afterwards he would say to himself seriously, "No, that wouldn't be a bad idea."

  Lotus and Luis became inseparable. Luis said, "I do not think of you as a woman but as a piece of statuary. For a woman I would not choose a piece of statuary. I need you to give a touch of splendour to my life. I would not expect or want this from a real woman. Dante's Beatrice was not a woman, but a piece of statuary. Yet without her he would have been a mere adventurer. Without her The Divine Comedy would have been a comedy. Without you I would be contemptible. It is a matter of superstition. Without superstitions all men are contemptible." Lotus asked no more than to be talked to in this way. She let Luis take charge of her money and her movements. They travelled from place to place together; he managed everything for her as if she were a prima donna. Sam see
med only too pleased to send her more and more money. She could not bring herself to ask many questions about the baby, and he said little about it.

  In Africa Luis got into trouble with the French authorities by mixing in with the natives and taking sides in their quarrels, thus confusing judicial procedure. At the Cape he fell in with a gang of Portuguese betting-men and gave them an idea for making money out of bogus races. The men were caught by the police and put the blame on Luis. He did not deny that the idea was his. "But how was I to know that they took me seriously?" he said to the police, shrugging his shoulders. From the Cape Lotus and Luis went to Japan. This was Luis's idea; but Lotus had always wanted to go to Japan. On the boat Luis got into a quarrel with a Spaniard to whom he insisted talking Catalan. "If you talk to me in your language," he said, "I have the right to talk to you in mine." One night when both of them were very drunk they had a fight on deck and Luis somehow fell overboard. No one had been present, and so it was impossible to accuse the Spaniard of having thrown him over. Lotus, at any rate, was not sorry. She felt that now at last there was a chance of her becoming a definite personality. She was old enough and she was alone. All her unhappiness had really been due to a fear of being a definite kind of person; for it generally happened that a definite kind of person was a wrong kind of person. The sensible people in the world were not particular kinds of persons; they did not harden. But being sensible was not the whole story; there was also the problem of one's personality—if one had one. It was curious that in avoiding being a definite kind of person she had hardened into a piece of statuary. But that was over now. She had died a sort of death with Luis; her fear had died, the fear of being herself. With Luis she had actually been nothing, and she had learned that she did not like to be nothing. She wanted to be made use of, but she also wanted to be something real. She had died a sort of death with Luis, and perhaps now she would begin to live.

  And now she was on her way to Japan, and for a long time she had had a wish to go to Japan, she did not know why. It was not merely a capricious notion that the Japanese student had put into her head, or the feeling that the Japanese were a doll-like people who, like herself, did not take things heartily and yet did things in a serious way. It was more like fate, as if in Japan something would happen to her that would make the rest of her life easy. Was this not the feeling that one got from Japanese prints? They were complicated and yet simple: complicated as far as they went, as if the rest, all that was left out of the picture, was easy. For a long time, however, it seemed that nothing was going to happen to her in Japan. She did not, in fact, feel that she was in Japan—or in any particular place. She lived in a large European hotel and rarely went out. There were little shops in the hotel where she could buy everything she needed, and all her friendships were with people staying at the hotel—people who, like herself, did not quite know why they were there and had no immediate reason for going away. They did not talk to one another, but merely sat in the same room together telling themselves that they were in Japan. The strongest emotion that travellers feel in Japan, without any disrespect to it, is that they have had enough of travelling. "This is the place where you turn back," it seems to say. Sometime soon they will be home again. Sitting with these people, Lotus too felt that sometime soon she would be home again. Afterwards she could not remember how long she had waited in Japan for the time to go home. She never heard from her hotel friends again. The hotel had been badly damaged during the earthquake; the ceiling of her room had fallen in on her. Perhaps some of them had been injured too. But they would all be home by now.

  Sam came to Japan and took Lotus home. "The rest will be easy now," she said to herself. But she was very slow in getting well. "Soon I shall be well and really begin to live," she kept saying to herself. She lay on a sofa all day long and shed many tears—she thought them happy tears. Her little boy was now six years old and sat with her a great deal, asking her questions about the places she had been to. She could not give him very accurate answers, but he did not seem to mind. It seemed to please him that his mother was a stranger; and she remained a stranger—invalids are always strangers to the people about them. And Sam behaved tenderly to her. He spent as much of his time at home as he could, talking or reading to her. "How lonely he must have been all this time," she said to herself. She did not know that Sam spent so much time with her because when she was alone she cried to herself and the doctor said that this was not good for her. It did not occur to her to think that Sam might be sorry for her; she was not sorry for herself— soon she would really begin to live. She felt, indeed, that she had begun to live already. She did not notice that she was dying.

  II: Stories of Ideas

  REALITY AS PORT HUNTLADY

  l

  DAN the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and Slick. Port Huntlady was not a town as other towns are towns. It was rather like a place where one felt a town might one day be, or where one felt that perhaps there had once been a town. And yet, breathing in the air of Port Huntlady, people fancied that they were breathing in vitality. Perhaps nothing had ever happened there: perhaps they would make things happen there.

  Port Huntlady was a seaside town; but its peculiar influence seemed to come rather from the houses than from the sea. The character of a place is determined not so much by its climate as by the kind of houses that have been built in it, which means the kind of people that have lived in it, which, in turn, means the degree to which the place may be said to be static, or unique, or apart from the rest of the world, which, in turn, depends on other things—on the people who have not gone there to live, for instance. It is odd that the places where people go to live—really live—should seem out of the world; and yet this is so, and especially so in the case of Port Huntlady, where people not only went to live, but from which people went away again, back to other places, to be busy and die.

  The kind of people who did not go to Port Huntlady were exactly those whose minds were entirely given up to being busy and dying. Such people often go away for a rest to places, but Port Huntlady was not such a place, nor did such people go to it. The kind of people who went to Port Huntlady were those whose minds were divided between being busy and dying, on the one hand, and living—really living—on the other. They went there with a feeling that quite possibly they might not go back again to where they had come from. They were different from ordinary people in that they were honourable people. That is, they were not sure which was the right thing to do: to be busy and die like other people, or to live—really live. They were not sure which sort of people to be: people who thought only about themselves, or people who thought about things in general. And this partial interest in things in general, combined with the peculiar close influence of Port Huntlady, made them feel that Port Huntlady was a place where things might happen; not the things that happened in the world proper, which were personal experiences, but universal experiences, such as the end of the world, or great turning-points in the course of human events. Such things, they felt, really meant living; and to such things they felt that they owed at least a part of their attention.

  People came to Port Huntlady for the good of their souls, as they said: to give their minds up to the really important things. And while they remained in Port Huntlady they all wore a look of intense interest in certain undefined really important things. But in the end they always went away because they were not fatedly intense people. Little by little their intensity began to trouble them as much as their lack of it had troubled them in the world proper. But, indeed, they were neither so intense in Port Huntlady as they imagined themselves, nor so lacking in intensity as they had previously accused themselves of being. So they went back to the world proper in a very even frame of mind. They went back promising themselves that one day they would return to Port Huntlady—really to live; but without feeling any longer that, if they did not one day begin really to live, they would, necessarily, be missing very much. And as they soon forgot Port Huntlady
, they naturally forgot their promise to themselves.

  The houses in Port Huntlady were, on the whole, commodious, earnestly built, and tempered with familiar comforts and a little discreet decoration. Nearly all of them were nearly always occupied by temporarily permanent residents. Only one was occupied by a really permanent resident who was really entirely interested in the really important things. This person, because of her real permanence in Port Huntlady, was locally known as Lady Port-Huntlady. Besides her own house, she owned many other houses in Port Huntlady, all of which she rented to temporarily permanent residents. The rest of the houses were owned by previous really permanent residents who rented them through an agent called 'Cards'. Cards was the only permanent native of Port Huntlady. His family had settled there a long time ago, when Port Huntlady was only an experimental pleasure-colony. They had come there experimentally, without any money, knowing that in newly sprung places there are equal chances of good luck and bad luck— while a properly matured place is either all good luck, or all bad luck. And so they had established themselves in an experimental structure on the beach made out of a small pleasure- yacht that someone had left behind; they had waited. And as Port Huntlady never really matured, they had equal turns of good luck and bad luck—always waiting. Nothing, indeed, had come their way except the boats that people left behind when they went away, though more and more were left behind as Port Huntlady grew, from a pleasure-colony, into a place where people went to live permanently.