The Family Reunion

by T. S. Eliot

  Arthur again be sober, though not for very long;

  And everything will go on as before. These mild surprises

  Should be in the routine of normal life at Wishwood.

  John is the only one of us I can conceive

  As settling down to make himself at home at Wishwood,

  Make a dull marriage, marry some woman stupider—

  Stupider than himself. He can resist the influence

  Of Wishwood, being unconscious, living in gentle motion

  Of horses, and right visits to the right neighbours

  At the right times; and be an excellent landlord.

  AGATHA

  What is in your mind, Harry?

  I can guess about the past and what you mean about the future;

  But a present is missing, needed to connect them.

  You may be afraid that I would not understand you,

  You may also be afraid of being understood,

  Try not to regard it as an explanation.

  HARRY

  I still have to learn exactly what their meaning is.

  At the beginning, eight years ago,

  I felt, at first, that sense of separation,

  Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable—

  It’s eternal, or gives a knowledge of eternity,

  Because it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell.

  Then the numbness came to cover it—that is another—

  That was the second hell of not being there,

  The degradation of being parted from my self,

  From the self which persisted only as an eye, seeing.

  All this last year, I could not fit myself together:

  When I was inside the old dream, I felt all the same emotion

  Or lack of emotion, as before: the same loathing

  Diffused, I not a person, in a world not of persons

  But only of contaminating presences.

  And then I had no horror of my action,

  I only felt the repetition of it

  Over and over. When I was outside,

  I could associate nothing of it with myself,

  Though nothing else was real. I thought foolishly

  That when I got back to Wishwood, as I had left it,

  Everything would fall into place. But they prevent it.

  I still have to find out what their meaning is.

  Here I have been finding

  A misery long forgotten, and a new torture,

  The shadow of something behind our meagre childhood,

  Some origin of wretchedness. Is that what they would show me?

  And now I want you to tell me about my father.

  AGATHA

  What do you want to know about your father?

  HARRY

  If I knew, then I should not have to ask.

  You know what I want to know, and that is enough:

  Warburton told me that, though he did not mean to.

  What I want to know is something I need to know,

  And only you can tell me. I know that much.

  AGATHA

  I had to fight for many years to win my dispossession,

  And many years to keep it. What people know me as,

  The efficient principal of a women’s college—

  That is the surface. There is a deeper

  Organisation, which your question disturbs.

  HARRY

  When I know, I know that in some way I shall find

  That I have always known it. And that will be better.

  AGATHA

  I will try to tell you. I hope I have the strength.

  HARRY

  I have thought of you as the completely strong,

  The liberated from the human wheel.

  So I looked to you for strength. Now I think it is

  A common pursuit of liberation.

  AGATHA

  Your father might have lived—or so I see him—

  An exceptionally cultivated country squire,

  Reading, sketching, playing on the flute,

  Something of an oddity to his county neighbours,

  But not neglecting public duties.

  He hid his strength beneath unusual weakness,

  The diffidence of a solitary man:

  Where he was weak he recognised your mother’s power,

  And yielded to it.

  HARRY

  There was no ecstasy.

  Tell me now, who were my parents?

  AGATHA

  Your father and your mother.

  HARRY

  You tell me nothing.

  AGATHA

  The dead man whom you have assumed to be your father,

  And my sister whom you acknowledge as your mother:

  There is no mystery here.

  HARRY

  What then?

  AGATHA

  You see your mother as identified with this house—

  It was not always so. There were many years

  Before she succeeded in making terms with Wishwood,

  Until she took your father’s place, and reached the point where

  Wishwood supported her, and she supported Wishwood.

  At first it was a vacancy. A man and a woman

  Married, alone in a lonely country house together,

  For three years childless, learning the meaning

  Of loneliness. Your mother wanted a sister here

  Always. I was the youngest: I was then

  An undergraduate at Oxford. I came

  Once for a long vacation. I remember

  A summer day of unusual heat

  For this cold country.

  HARRY

  And then?

  AGATHA

  There are hours when there seems to be no past or future,

  Only a present moment of pointed light

  When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand

  To the flames. They only come once,

  Thank God, that kind. Perhaps there is another kind,

  I believe, across a whole Thibet of broken stones

  That lie, fang up, a lifetime’s march. I have believed this.

  HARRY

  I have known neither.

  AGATHA

  The autumn came too soon, not soon enough.

  The rain and wind had not shaken your father

  Awake yet. I found him thinking

  How to get rid of your mother. What simple plots!

  He was not suited to the rôle of murderer.

  HARRY

  In what way did he wish to murder her?

  AGATHA

  Oh, a dozen foolish ways, each one abandoned

  For something more ingenious. You were due in three months time;

  You would not have been born in that event: I stopped him.

  I can take no credit for a little common sense,

  He would have bungled it.

  I did not want to kill you!

  You to be killed! What were you then? only a thing called ‘life’—

  Something that should have been mine, as I felt then.

  Most people would not have felt that compunction

  If they felt no other. But I wanted you!

  If that had happened, I knew I should have carried

  Death in life, death through lifetime, death in my womb.

  I felt that you were in some way mine!

  And that in any case I should have no other child.

  HARRY

  And have me. That is the way things happen.

  Everything is true in a different sense,

  A sense that would have seemed meaningless before.

  Everything tends towards reconciliation

  As the stone falls, as the tree falls. And in the end

  That is the completion which at the beginning

  Would have seemed the ruin.

  Perhaps my life has only been a dream

  Dreamt through me by the minds of others. Perhaps

  I only dreamt
I pushed her.

  AGATHA

  So I had supposed. What of it?

  What we have written is not a story of detection,

  Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation.

  It is possible that you have not known what sin

  You shall expiate, or whose, or why. It is certain

  That the knowledge of it must precede the expiation.

  It is possible that sin may strain and struggle

  In its dark instinctive birth, to come to consciousness

  And so find expurgation. It is possible

  You are the consciousness of your unhappy family.

  Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame.

  Indeed it is possible. You may learn hereafter,

  Moving alone through flames of ice, chosen

  To resolve the enchantment under which we suffer.

  HARRY

  Look, I do not know why,

  I feel happy for a moment, as if I had come home.

  It is quite irrational, but now

  I feel quite happy, as if happiness

  Did not consist in getting what one wanted

  Or in getting rid of what can’t be got rid of

  But in a different vision. This is like an end.

  AGATHA

  And a beginning. Harry, my dear,

  I feel very tired, as only the old feel.

  The young feel tired at the end of an action—

  The old, at the beginning. It is as if

  I had been living all these years upon my capital,

  Instead of earning my spiritual income daily:

  And I am old, to start again to make my living.

  HARRY

  But you are not unhappy, just now?

  AGATHA

  What does the word mean?

  There’s relief from a burden that I carried.

  And exhaustion at the moment of relief.

  The burden’s yours now, yours

  The burden of all the family. And I am a little frightened

  HARRY

  You, frightened! I can hardly imagine it.

  I wish I had known—but that was impossible.

  I only now begin to have some understanding.

  Of you, and of all of us. Family affection

  Was a kind of formal obligation, a duty

  Only noticed by its neglect. One had that part to play.

  After such training, I could endure, these ten years,

  Playing a part that had been imposed upon me;

  And I returned to find another one made ready—

  The book laid out, lines underscored, and the costume

  Ready to be put on. But it is very odd:

  When other people seemed so strong, their apparent strength

  Stifled my decision. Now I see

  I might even become fonder of my mother—

  More compassionate at least—by understanding.

  But she would not like that. Now I see

  I have been wounded in a war of phantoms,

  Not by human beings—they have no more power than I.

  The things I thought were real are shadows, and the real

  Are what I thought were private shadows. O that awful privacy

  Of the insane mind! Now I can live in public.

  Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

  AGATHA

  I only looked through the little door

  When the sun was shining on the rose-garden:

  And heard in the distance tiny voices

  And then a black raven flew over.

  And then I was only my own feet walking

  Away, down a concrete corridor

  In a dead air. Only feet walking

  And sharp heels scraping. Over and under

  Echo and noise of feet.

  I was only the feet, and the eye

  Seeing the feet: the unwinking eye

  Fixing the movement. Over and under.

  HARRY

  In and out, in an endless drift

  Of shrieking forms in a circular desert

  Weaving with contagion of putrescent embraces

  On dissolving bone. In and out, the movement

  Until the chain broke, and I was left

  Under the single eye above the desert.

  AGATHA

  Up and down, through the stone passages

  Of an immense and empty hospital

  Pervaded by a smell of disinfectant,

  Looking straight ahead, passing barred windows.

  Up and down. Until the chain breaks.

  HARRY

  To and fro, dragging my feet

  Among inner shadows in the smoky wilderness,

  Trying to avoid the clasping branches

  And the giant lizard. To and fro.

  Until the chain breaks.

  The chain breaks,

  The wheel stops, and the noise of machinery,

  And the desert is cleared, under the judicial sun

  Of the final eye, and the awful evacuation

  Cleanses.

  I was not there, you were not there, only our phantasms

  And what did not happen is as true as what did happen,

  O my dear, and you walked through the little door

  And I ran to meet you in the rose-garden.

  AGATHA

  This is the next moment. This is the beginning.

  We do not pass twice through the same door

  Or return to the door through which we did not pass.

  I have seen the first stage: relief from what happened

  Is also relief from that unfulfilled craving

  Flattered in sleep, and deceived in waking.

  You have a long journey.

  HARRY

  Not yet! not yet! this is the first time that I have been free

  From the ring of ghosts with joined hands, from the pursuers,

  And come into a quiet place.

  Why is it so quiet?

  Do you feel a kind of stirring underneath the air?

  Do you? don’t you? a communication, a scent

  Direct to the brain . . . but not just as before,

  Not quite like, not the same . . .

  [The EUMENIDES appear.]

  and this time

  You cannot think that I am surprised to see you.

  And you shall not think that I am afraid to see you.

  This time, you are real, this time, you are outside me,

  And just endurable. I know that you are ready,

  Ready to leave Wishwood, and I am going with you.

  You followed me here, where I thought I should escape you—

  No! you were already here before I arrived.

  Now I see at last that I am following you.

  And I know that there can be only one itinerary And one destination. Let us lose no time. I will follow.

  [The curtains close. AGATHA goes to the window, in a somnambular fashion, and opens the curtains, disclosing the empty embrasure. She steps into the place which the EUMENIDES had occupied.]

  AGATHA

  A curse comes to being

  As a child is formed.

  In both, the incredible

  Becomes the actual

  Without our intention

  Knowing what is intended.

  A curse is like a child, formed

  In a moment of unconsciousness

  In an accidental bed

  Or under an elder tree

  According to the phase

  Of the determined moon.

  A curse is like a child, formed

  To grow to maturity:

  Accident is design

  And design is accident

  In a cloud of unknowing.

  O my child, my curse,

  You shall be fulfilled:

  The knot shall be unknotted

  And the crooked made straight.

  [She moves back into the room.]

  What have I been saying? I think I was
saying

  That you have a long journey. You have nothing to stay for.

  Think of it as like a children’s treasure hunt:

  Here you have found a clue, hidden in the obvious place.

  Delay, and it is lost. Love compels cruelty

  To those who do not understand love.

  What you have wished to know, what you have learned

  Mean the end of a relation, make it impossible.

  You did not intend this, I did not intend it,

  No one intended, but . . . You must go.

  HARRY

  Shall we ever meet again?

  AGATHA

  Shall we ever meet again?

  And who will meet again? Meeting is for strangers.

  Meeting is for those who do not know each other.

  HARRY

  I know that I have made a decision

  In a moment of clarity, and now I feel dull again.

  I only know that I made a decision

  Which your words echo. I am still befouled,

  But I know there is only one way out of defilement—

  Which leads in the end to reconciliation.

  And I know that I must go.

  AGATHA

  You must go.

  [Enter AMY.]

  AMY

  What are you saying to Harry? He has only arrived,

  And you tell him to go?

  AGATHA

  He shall go.

  AMY

  He shall go? and who are you to say he shall go?

  I think I know well enough why you wish him to go.

  AGATHA

  I wish nothing. I only say what I know must happen.

  AMY

  You only say what you intended to happen.