The Family Reunion
Page 4
I think. It seems I shall get rid of nothing,
Of none of the shadows that I wanted to escape;
And at the same time, other memories,
Earlier, forgotten, begin to return
Out of my childhood. I can't explain.
But I thought I might escape from one life to another,
And it may be all one life, with no escape. Tell me,
Were you ever happy here, as a child at Wishwood?
MARY
Happy? not really, though I never knew why:
It always seemed that it must be my own fault,
And never to be happy was always to be naughty.
But there were reasons: I was only a cousin
Kept here because there was nothing else to do with me.
I didn’t belong here. It was different for you.
And you seemed so much older. We were rather in awe of you—
At least, I was.
HARRY
Why were we not happy?
MARY
Well, it all seemed to be imposed upon us;
Even the nice things were laid out ready,
And the treats were always so carefully prepared;
There was never any time to invent our own enjoyments.
But perhaps it was all designed for you, not for us.
HARRY
No, it didn’t seem like that. I was part of the design
As well as you. But what was the design?
It never came off. But do you remember
MARY
The hollow tree in what we called the wilderness
HARRY
Down near the river. That was the block house
From which we fought the Indians. Arthur and John.
MARY
It was the cave where we met by moonlight
To raise the evil spirits.
HARRY
Arthur and John.
Of course we were punished for being out at night
After being put to bed. But at least they never knew
Where we had been.
MARY
They never found the secret.
HARRY
Not then. But later, coming back from school
For the holidays, after the formal reception
And the family festivities, I made my escape
As soon as I could, and slipped down to the river
To find the old hiding place. The wilderness was gone,
The tree had been felled, and a neat summer-house
Had been erected, ‘to please the children.’
It’s absurd that one’s only memory of freedom
Should be a hollow tree in a wood by the river.
MARY
But when I was a child I took everything for granted,
Including the stupidity of older people—
They lived in another world, which did not touch me.
Just now, I find them very difficult to bear.
They are always assured that you ought to be happy
At the very moment when you are wholly conscious
Of being a misfit, of being superfluous.
But why should I talk about my commonplace troubles?
They must seem very trivial indeed to you.
It’s just ordinary hopelessness.
HARRY
One thing you cannot know:
The sudden extinction of every alternative,
The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope:
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you,
Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless
Unrecognised by other men, though sometimes by each other.
MARY
I know what you mean. That is an experience
I have not had. Nevertheless, however real,
However cruel, it may be a deception.
HARRY
What I see
May be one dream or another; if there is nothing else
The most real is what I fear. The bright colour fades
Together with the unrecapturable emotion,
The glow upon the world, that never found its object;
And the eye adjusts itself to a twilight
Where the dead stone is seen to be batrachian,
The aphyllous branch ophidian.
MARY
You bring your own landscape
No more real than the other. And in a way you contradict yourself:
That sudden comprehension of the death of hope
Of which you speak, I know you have experienced it,
And I can well imagine how awful it must be.
But in this world another hope keeps springing
In an unexpected place, while we are unconscious of it
You hoped for something, in coming back to Wishwood,
Or you would not have come.
HARRY
Whatever I hoped for
Now that I am here I know I shall not find it.
The instinct to return to the point of departure
And start again as if nothing had happened,
Isn't that all folly? It’s like the hollow tree,
Not there.
MARY
But surely, what you say
Only proves that you expected Wishwood
To be your real self, to do something for you
That you can only do for yourself.
What you need to alter is something inside you
Which you can change anywhere—here, as well as elsewhere.
HARRY
Something inside me, you think, that can be altered!
And here, indeed! where I have felt them near me,
Here and here and here—wherever I am not looking,
Always flickering at the corner of my eye,
Almost whispering just out of earshot—
And inside too, in the nightly panic
Of dreaming dissolution. You do not know,
You cannot know, you cannot understand.
MARY
I think I could understand, but you would have to be patient
With me, and with people who have not had your experience.
HARRY
If I tried to explain, you could never understand:
Explaining would only make a worse misunderstanding;
Explaining would only set me farther away from you.
There is only one way for you to understand
And that is by seeing. They are much too clever
To admit you into our world. Yours is no better.
They have seen to that: it is part of the torment.
MARY
If you think I am incapable of understanding you—
But in any case, I must get ready for dinner.
HARRY
No, no, don’t go! Please don’t leave me
Just at this moment. I feel it is important.
Something should have come of this conversation.
MARY
I am not a wise person,
And in the ordinary sense I don’t know you very well,
Although I remember you better than you think,
And what is the real you. I haven’t much experience,
But I see something now which doesn’t come from tutors
Or from books, or from thinking, or from observation:
Something which I did not know I knew.
Even if, as you say, Wishwood is a cheat,
Your family a delusion—than it’s all a delusion,
Everything you feel—I don’t mean what you think,
But what you feel. You attach yourself to loathing
As others do to loving: an infatuation
That’s wrong, a good that’s misdirected. You deceive yourself
Like the man convinced that he is paralysed
Or like the man who believes that he is blind
While he still sees the sunlight. I know that this is true.
HARRY
I have spent many years in useless travel;
You have staid in England, yet you seem
Like someone who comes from a very long distance,
Or the distant waterfall in the forest,
Inaccessible, half-heard.
And I hear your voice as in the silence
Between two storms, one hears the moderate usual noises
In the grass and leaves, of life persisting,
Which ordinarily pass unnoticed.
Perhaps you are right, though I do not know
How you should know it. Is the cold spring
Is the spring not an evil time, that excites us with lying voices?
MARY
The cold spring now is the time
For the ache in the moving root
The agony in the dark
The slow flow throbbing the trunk
The pain of the breaking bud.
These are the ones that suffer least:
The aconite under the snow
And the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood.
HARRY
Spring is an issue of blood
A season of sacrifice
And the wail of the new full tide
Returning the ghosts of the dead
Those whom the winter drowned
Do not the ghosts of the drowned
Return to land in the spring?
Do the dead want to return?
MARY
Pain is the opposite of joy
But joy is a kind of pain
I believe the moment of birth
Is when we have knowledge of death
I believe the season of birth
Is the season of sacrifice
For the tree and the beast, and the fish
Thrashing itself upstream:
And what of the terrified spirit
Compelled to be reborn
To rise toward the violent sun
Wet wings into the rain cloud
Harefoot over the moon?
HARRY
What have we been saying? I think I was saying
That it seemed as if I had been always here
And you were someone who had come from a long distance.
Whether I know what I am saying, or why I say it,
That does not matter. You bring me news
Of a door that opens at the end of a corridor,
Sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure
That every corridor only led to another,
Or to a blank wall; that I kept moving
Only so as not to stay still. Singing and light.
Stop!
What is that? do you feel it?
MARY
What, Harry?
HARRY
That apprehension deeper than all sense,
Deeper than the sense of smell, but like a smell
In that it is indescribable, a sweet and bitter smell
From another world. I know it, I know it!
More potent than ever before, a vapour dissolving
All other worlds, and me into it. O Mary!
Don’t look at me like that! Stop! Try to stop it!
I am going. Oh, why, now? Come out!
Come out! Where are you? Let me see you,
Since I know you are there, I know you are spying on me.
Why do you play with me, why do you let me go,
Only to surround me?—When I remember them
They leave me alone: when I forget them
Only for an instant of inattention
They are roused again, the sleepless hunters
That will not let me sleep. At the moment before sleep
I always see their claws distended
Quietly, as if they had never stirred.
It was only a moment, it was only one moment
That I stood in sunlight, and thought I might stay there.
MARY
Look at me. You can depend on me.
Harry! Harry! It’s all right, I tell you.
If you will depend on me, it will be all right.
HARRY
Come out!
[The curtains part, revealing the Eumenides in the window embrasure.]
Why do you show yourselves now for the first time?
When I knew her, I was not the same person.
I was not any person. Nothing that I did
Has to do with me. The accident of a dreaming moment,
Of a dreaming age, when I was someone else
Thinking of something else, puts me among you.
I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,
Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks
Incriminate, but that other person, if person,
You thought I was: let your necrophily
Feed upon that carcase. They will not go.
MARY
Harry! There is no one here.
[She goes to the window and pulls the curtains across.]
HARRY
They were here, I tell you. They are here.
Are you so imperceptive, have you such dull senses
That you could not see them? If I had realised
That you were so obtuse, I would not have listened
To your nonsense. Can’t you help me?
You’re of no use to me. I must face them.
I must fight them. But they are stupid.
How can one fight with stupidity?
Yet I must speak to them.
[He rushes forward and tears apart the curtains: but the embrasure is empty.]
MARY
Oh, Harry!
Scene III
HARRY, MARY, IVY, VIOLET, GERALD, CHARLES
VIOLET
Good evening, Mary: aren’t you dressed yet?
How do you think that Harry is looking?
Why, who could have pulled those curtains apart?
[Pulls them together.]
Very well, I think, after such a long journey;
You know what a rush he had to be here in time
For his mother’s birthday.
IVY
Mary, my dear,
Did you arrange these flowers? Just let me change them.
You don’t mind, do you? I know so much about flowers;
Flowers have always been my passion.
You know I had my own garden once, in Cornwall,
When I could afford a garden; and I took several prizes
With my delphiniums. In fact, I was rather an authority.
GERALD
Good evening, Mary. You’ve seen Harry, I see.
It’s good to have him back again, isn’t it?
We must make him feel at home. And most auspicious
That he could be here for his mother’s birthday.
MARY
I must go and change. I came in very late.
[Exit.]
CHARLES
Now we only want Arthur and John.
I am glad that you'll all be together, Harry;
They need the influence of their elder brother.
Arthur’s a bit irresponsible, you know;
You should have a sobering effect upon him.
After all, you’re the head of the family.
AMY’S VOICE
Violet! Has Arthur or John come yet?
VIOLET
Neither of them is here yet, Amy.
[Enter AMY, with DR. WARBURTON.]
AMY
It is most vexing. What can have happened?
I suppose it’s the fog that is holding them up,
So it’s no use to telephone anywhere. Harry!
Haven’t you seen Dr. Warburton?
You know he’s the oldest friend of the family,
And he's known you longer than anybody, Harry.
When he heard that you were going to be here for dinner
He broke an important engagement t
o come.
WARBURTON
I dare say we’ve both changed a good deal, Harry.
A country practitioner doesn't get younger.
It takes me back longer than you can remember
To see you again. But you can’t have forgotten
The day when you came back from school with measles
And we had such a time to keep you in bed.
You didn’t like being ill in the holidays.
IVY
It was unpleasant, coming home to have an illness.
VIOLET
It was always the same with your minor ailments
And children’s epidemics: you would never stay in bed
Because you were convinced that you would never get well.
HARRY
Not, I think, without some justification:
For what you call restoration to health
Is only incubation of another malady.
WARBURTON
You mustn’t take such a pessimistic view
Which is hardly complimentary to my profession.
But I remember, when I was a student at Cambridge,
I used to dream of making some great discovery
To do away with one disease or another.
Now I’ve had forty years’ experience
I’ve left off thinking in terms of the laboratory.
We’re all of us ill in one way or another:
We call it health when we find no symptom
Of illness. Health is a relative term.
IVY
You must have had a very rich experience, Doctor,