But if Miss Man would not have disappeared from Port Huntlady in the manner already described, it is certain that she would have disappeared one day at Foolish Island during a picnic undertaken with the object, principally, of cheering up Miss Bookworth. Miss Bookworth, it will be remembered, now had two babies to look after, the baby adopted by herself and Diana, and Diana's own baby. Miss Bookworth did not complain; she had an unpleasant life, and she was glad that she had an unpleasant life. She disapproved of babies, of herself, of everyone who came to Port Huntlady—of Miss Man most of all. Miss Man dealt with her disapproval as a mother treats her child's dislike of having its face washed, not believing that it really minds. She did not believe that Miss Bookworth really disliked her, or being cheered up, or going on picnics to Foolish Island. But Miss Bookworth consented to go on these picnics only because Lady Port-Huntlady also went. Miss Bookworth thought Lady Port-Huntlady noble. To her mind Lady Port-Huntlady suffered because she understood everything; she admired her because she did not show her suffering. Miss Bookworth did not claim to suffer, because she did not claim to understand everything, but she did claim that she had no enthusiasms, and this was true.
At that first five-o'clock of Dan's, Baby's and Slick's she distinctly said, after a soft remark of Lady Port-Huntlady's— "What one does for others makes one old and ugly, but what one does for oneself comes as easy as breathing"—she distinctly said, "And never do anything for yourself, it's always someone else that benefits in the end anyway." And at the picnic during which Miss Man would in any case have disappeared, and Miss Bookworth's two babies along with her, Miss Bookworth would have given many similar bitter twists to Lady Port-Huntlady's soft remarks. Miss Bookworth made things strike home; she interpreted everything literally. She said that Port Huntlady was hell, and she meant this literally. People found their fate there, and fate was never anything happy. If they ran away from Port Huntlady they were running away from fate. But in the end there was nothing but fate. In the end there was nothing. Some people, when they first came to Port Huntlady, said, "Isn't it heavenly?" without really meaning it. Then little by little they began to hate it there. Why? Because there was no such place as heaven. Port Huntlady seemed heavenly at first because the strangest things happened so naturally there. Yes, fate, than which nothing was stranger, happened naturally, if you didn't resist. But in hell you couldn't resist. In Port Huntlady you couldn't resist. It took all the meaningless strength and fight out of you, if you stayed there long enough. Miss Bookworth did not believe in fighting fate. It was curious, considering this, what a militant person she was in some ways.
Once in the boat-house, having conscientiously prevented the babies from falling overboard several times during the crossing, Miss Bookworth would have sent them below to play with the ginger cats—"to get scratched," as she would have said, "and to learn manners." Miss Bookworth was a very conventional person. "Manners mean swallowing disappointment and digesting it well," she would say. "The things children would like to do to cats!" And Miss Bookworth's babies would have tried to do all these things to the affectionate ginger cats, while she sat upstairs at an appreciative distance from Lady Port- Huntlady, Miss Man, of course, edging up close as usual. Miss Bookworth would have rocked in and out of the air-cushion at her back, let out a little air to make it less buoyant and said, "These are better than ordinary cushions, not so much give. It's a pity they can't be got here." And Lady Port-Huntlady would have said, "If you want another, perhaps Cards can find you one—he can produce almost anything. He'll say, 'Ah, yes, as a matter of fact I have an air-cushion somewhere, if I can only remember where.' " And Miss Man would have leaned over the arm of her chair and confided loudly to Lady Port-Huntlady, "Cards is full of mysteries, and the less said the better, what?" And Lady Port-Huntlady would have looked sideways at Miss Man and away again, just failing to nod. And perhaps, while they were sitting there, Miss Bookworth's babies would be shoving a lunch-hamper full of new kittens (from two new litters) towards the water to launch it like a boat. They would follow it out as it sank and had to be pulled up again, gradually stumbling in deeper and deeper. And sounds of mother- rage from the cats on the shore would tear into the inert quiet of the lounge.
How Miss Man would have given her life in vain to save Miss Bookworth's babies, not being able to swim well and taking less note of the current than she might have had she not at the same time been involved in upbraiding Miss Bookworth for her coldness in the most unforgivable terms she could think up under the pressure of feeling that she was doing something that she did not want to do and that would not, moreover, make Miss Bookworth like her any better; and how Cards would have watched the scene disgustedly from the store-room window, secretly wishing that it would end as it would have been bound to end had Miss Man not been perhaps already disposed of in an equally final way; and how Lady Port- Huntlady would have consoled the cats by bringing down the remains of their lunch from the lounge; and how Miss Bookworth would have left Port Huntlady soon after to take up a post as secretary to a wealthy invalid whose hobby was corresponding with patients in tuberculosis sanatoria, in which he had spent much of his own life; and how a story may go on indefinitely unless there is perfect understanding at the start of the limitations that keep a story from being anything but a story.. . .
So we might go on, were there not perfect understanding between us about the futility of trying to give more meaning to certain things than they have—things that attach themselves like hollow parasites to the really important things and that yet—can we deny it—interest us perhaps more than the really important things? And even because—can we not admit it here—they demand of us just what sympathy for wasted time that we would not otherwise know how to express, unless by wasting time ourselves? Indeed, do we not, even the best of us, prefer to waste time somehow or other to doing nothing at all, so long as we are not reminded—for the time being—that there are more important things to think about? But the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady should give us a lesson in the dangers of making a story too unimportant in our desire to prove to ourselves that a story is not very different from the things that, in the ordinary way, make up life. For do we not all of us now feel that we have been trifling with time perhaps a little too recklessly? And will there not now be a tendency to plunge a little too earnestly into the really important things, perhaps with a not altogether successful result? An eventuality that we might perhaps have avoided if we had made something more of the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady. If we had, say, hinted at an ingenious machine (or idea) for making artificial turning-points in the lives of people who did not actually live—by sweeping them into an artificial death where they could pretend to one another that they had actually lived, and sweeping them back again to where they had come from, if they survived, as to actual living again. And explained how, in being swept back again to where they came from, they left many of their possessions behind—false fragments of their false souls, in fact. But have we not, after all, hinted at, and explained, exactly this? And is the trouble not, after all, that no amount of ingenuity can save a story from seeming, in the end, just a story—just a piece of verbal luggage, belonging to anybody who cares to be bothered with it—to Cards on Lady Port-Huntlady's behalf, or to Lady Port-Huntlady on behalf of that Lady Whatever-Her-Name-Is who absurdly bothers herself to be interested in (not to mention understanding) everything? Or, at least, is it not our good fortune to be in a position to distribute our interest without prejudice and deceive our sincerity as we please—in the confidence that at the appropriate moment we shall tire and turn away, leaving the door of truth open behind us?
MISS BANQUETT, OR
THE POPULATING OF COSMANIA
l
Miss BANQUETT undertook this voyage because she was beautiful, not for a holiday. In beauty there are no holidays; beauty is a steady occupation. Miss Banquett had made her beauty known to everyone possible in her own country. She had then to undertake th
is voyage, to make herself still better known. In a more systematic world Miss Banquett would not have needed to make all these efforts herself; it would have been sufficient for her to be beautiful to be known everywhere as beautiful. Instead, Miss Banquett had not only to be beautiful, but to make herself known as beautiful. For the unsystematic world in which she lived was founded on syllogisms; such as, that one is only a thing that it is possible to be if one is known to be it, that beautiful is a thing that it is possible to be, and that therefore if one is not known to be beautiful, one is not beautiful.
And so, when Miss Banquett's ship suffered shipwreck and she was cast alone on a strange shore, her first thought was to acquaint the inhabitants of the country with her beauty. But, though for seven days she sought them, and though in seven days she had been everywhere imaginable, she could find no inhabitants in this country, and she was forced to conclude that there were none.
And not only were there no inhabitants; there was no anything. What was Miss Banquett to do? If she was at all, she was beautiful; but she was not beautiful, she was not, unless she was known to be beautiful. And she could not be known to be beautiful without people to know her to be beautiful. Two things were clear: first that this country had no inhabitants; second, that it must soon have them if her memory that in the place she came from she had been beautiful was not fast to disappear, and so herself.
And thus began the populating of Cosmania by Miss Banquett. And everything happened in the most methodical manner possible. For this was not the ordering of things already existent and disordered: the original disorder would have lingered on, then, in the violence with which it was necessary to impose and keep order. It was an ordering of things that amounted to a bringing of them into existence; it was an arrangement of them not according to their existence, but rather according to their non-existence—not according to their disorder, but rather according to how they came into her head. She brought them to her instead of herself to them; she was beautiful by will, not logic. What Miss Banquett did, in fine, was to recast these seven empty days as days she had created— not days that had merely come to pass. And had she not created them: were they not empty? From waning memory she now squeezed a here and a there; here were the seven days which were hers, there were the seven days which came to pass.
There was all uncertainty and disorder. There was the world of knowledge, which out of hearsay, or uncertainty, made facts —gossip reported in the language of truth. There was all uncertainty and disorder so extreme that it seemed an arrangement of certainty and order—since certainty and order themselves were not known.
Here was the world of self—that is, the world of Miss Banquett, which she made out of fear of uncertainty. And this was the difference between the world of self and the world of knowledge: that the world of knowledge was only an endless prolongation of uncertainty, while the world of self was a prolongation of fear of uncertainty. On this difference hinges the whole story. For in the world of knowledge nothing true could happen because of the uncertainty which was the knowledge. But in Miss Banquett's world, fear of uncertainty, on which it was founded, could turn into a consciousness of uncertainty, which could turn into a desire for certainty, which could turn into order. And this is exactly what happened. Miss Banquett made a world of self, she made order. Not that order is certainty. Order is a world, and a world is a prolongation. Miss Banquett's order was only a desire for certainty spelt in a wakeful fear of uncertainty. The wakeful fear sharpened the desire for certainty, but it also delayed certainty, which cannot come until all that is less than certainty—all that makes fear—goes. Certainty is desire's end, truth is certainty's end; but it must all be as an instant which devours the time that went before it, and permits no time after it. This instant we must not see Miss Banquett as having yet reached.
The beauty of Miss Banquett, then, was as far as the world of knowledge could go in knowledge. And when Miss Banquett came to be alone with nothing but her beauty, she began to have a great fear of uncertainty; she began to realize that her beauty was uncertain. So out of her beauty she made a world of self. Or it might be put in this way: that having (all because of the magnitude of her beauty) got beyond knowledge, there was nothing to do—if she was not to disappear—but think.
2
First was the first day, then was the second day: Miss Banquett made Day and Night, a rhythm of everlastingness. On the third day she provided herself with a second self, of lesser but more manifest beauty than her very self; and this she called Earth. And Earth she provided with an orderly growth, sufficient in quantity and variety to the appetite for quantity and variety which her beauty gave her. And it must be understood that the seed of all this was in herself. Then Miss Banquett said: "I have made Day and Night, and a restrained second self of me to be with these patiently; but I shall need to make also an overflowing third self of me in which to flee widely from the constrictions of appearance when impatience comes upon me like infinite doubt, and it seems for the moment more truth to have been never, in no wise."
So Miss Banquett made a sun and a moon and a round number of stars and an unbounded stretch of forgetfulness. And there were now Days and Nights. And Miss Banquett said: "My Heavens are beautiful." This was the fourth day. On the fifth day she suffered extremely from pride of melancholy, that all here was herself—although she would not have had it otherwise. And so there were seas. Having made the sea she was pleased, as after tears; and in this pleasure she sent birds up into her Heavens, which told her pleasure, and fish down into her seas which told her melancholy. "My Birds, my Fish, my Earth, my Heavens," she said, "are beautiful." But she meant: "I am beautiful, they are the ways of my world, which I have made out of my beauty."
And the pride that she had on the fifth day became on the sixth day love, so that on the sixth day she made creatures, some that could be sensible of her beauty, which were human, some that could be insensible, which were brute, and the second to be dear by innocence of her beauty, and the first by intelligence of it. On the seventh day she rested. Her thought stopped. And the seventh day was the day of things.
Miss Banquett's world was now all around her. The rest was leisure to examine it and to find in it prolonged proof of her beauty, which was now her thought. Day and Night, Land and Water and the Sky—these were only memory-foundations. And the flowering things and the swimming things and the flying things, and the brute creatures which were insensible to her beauty, and the things of the seventh day which were as something else and yet nothing else—these were all mere scenic emanations of her beauty. But she had a people, and these were its dramatic gist. They were the citizens of her thought, and she was to them the thought of their citizenship. And she went among them.
She went first among her black people. These lived in the hottest part of Cosmania. They discovered Miss Banquett asleep under a palm-tree, which was sacred to her, as was, likewise, the drink brewed from its tenderer parts, which took seven years to be brought to perfection. Miss Banquett awoke in a large hut, unfurnished except for the central dais where she lay and undecorated except for a large picture of her at the back, opposite the entrance. In this picture, which was the first thing Miss Banquett noticed, she was not only without clothes, but she was also black, like the people among whom she found herself. She was black and she was naked and she was beautiful, and she lay on a dais in the middle of a large round hut, and she was worshipped by a round number of black people all of whom rightly believed that they had been made by her. They had all drunk of the drink which was sacred to her and were smiling, and a tall priest, upon whose arms her face was tattooed a round number of times, gave her to drink of it too, and she too smiled.
Smiling and naked and black Miss Banquett descended from her dais and walked among her people, who were also smiling and naked and black. With the tall priest at her side she walked out into the black country. In this country there was no work. Red-haired apes tossed fruit from the trees, which the people caught and ate tidily o
n the spot. And because there was no work there was no talking. They smiled up to the apes, who grinned down at them. They smiled to each other all day long, for there was nothing else to do. Their smiling, their blackness and their nakedness was their whole story, which might be otherwise summed up by saying that they depended on Miss Banquett (whom they prettily called "Mother"), with childish confidence, for everything. "These people," Miss Banquett said to herself, smiling, "represent the dark, lazy, self-contented side of my beauty." She walked among them till she came to the palm-tree under which they had found her, which also marked the end of their country. Here a marriage was made between her and the tall priest, the form of which was that both of them were made drunk with the drink that was sacred to her, and in this condition put to sleep under the tree. Before she fell asleep Miss Banquett whispered to the tall priest: "They will live as long as you keep them bemused by my beauty." "And that will be," the priest whispered back, "as long as you wish."
3
Miss Banquett went next among her yellow people, who lived in a sun-bright but somewhat historically sun-bright portion of Cosmania. They were a laughing people, but precise, and hence cruel; though nowhere were there any signs of cruelty. Their cruelty lay simply in the preciseness with which they laughed. "These people," Miss Banquett said to herself when she had observed them, "represent the tireless, fastidious side of my beauty, its ever-ancient preoccupation with itself." And she fell among them in pieces of glass, which they put together into a correct image and called their Ancestress. And they placed her on a shining hill, from which she could see all they did and hear all they said. For their voices were long and sharp and thin, and tinkled slyly with laughter; this was how they prayed.
Progress of Stories Page 15