Then, two days after the sack of Nanking, Tom had published a volume of comic verses. (Curious how many English Catholics take to comic versifying.) Meanwhile, he was steadily gaining weight; between the Anschluss and Munich he had put on eleven pounds. Another year or two of Farm Street and power politics, and Tom would turn the scale at fourteen stone and have written the libretto of a musical comedy. No! Jeremy said to himself with decision. No! it simply wasn’t admissible. Better Peter Pan and apron strings and infinite squalor in a little room. Better a thousand times. Better to begin with, aesthetically; for this getting fat on realpolitik, this scribbling of comic verses on the margins of an engraving of the Crucifixion—really, it was too inelegant. And that wasn’t all; it was better even ethically; for of course the old Propter-Object was right: if you can’t be sure of doing positive good, at least keep out of mischief. And there was poor old Tom, as busy as a beaver and, now that he was a Papist, as happy as a lark, working away at the precise spot where he could do the maximum amount of harm to the greatest possible number of people.
(The other scab came loose. Jeremy sighed and leaned back in his chair.)
One scratched like a baboon, he concluded; one lived, at fifty-four, in the security of one’s mother’s shadow; one’s sexual life was simultaneously infantile and corrupt; by no stretch of the imagination could one’s work be described as useful or important. But when one compared oneself with other people, with Tom, for example, or even with the eminent and august, with cabinet ministers and steel magnates and bishops and celebrated novelists—well, really, one didn’t come out so badly after all. Judged by the negative criterion of harmless-ness, one even came out extremely well. So that, taking all things into consideration, there was really no reason why one should do anything much about anything. Having decided which, it was time to get back to the Hauberks.
Chapter II
VIRGINIA did not wake up that morning till nearly ten; and even after having had her bath and eaten her breakfast she remained in bed for another hour or more, her eyes closed, leaning back motionless against the heaped-up pillows, like a beautiful young convalescent newly emerged from the valley of the shadow.
The valley of the shadow of death; of the greater deaths and all the little deaths. Through deaths come transfigurations. He who would save his life must lose it. Men and women are continually trying to lose their lives, the stale, unprofitable, senseless lives of their ordinary personalities. For ever trying to get rid of them, and in a thousand different ways. In the frenzies of gambling and revivalism; in the monomanias of avarice and perversion, of research and sectarianism and ambition; in the compensatory lunacies of alcohol, of reading, of day-dreaming, of morphia; in the hallucinations of opium and the cinema and ritual; in the wild epilepsies of political enthusiasm and erotic pleasure; in the stupors of veronal and exhaustion.
To escape; to forget one’s own, old, wearisome identity; to become someone else or, better, some other thing—a mere body, strangely numbed or more than ordinarily sentient; or else just a state of impersonal mind, a mode of unindividualized consciousness. What happiness, what a blissful alleviation! Even for such as were not previously aware that there was anything in their condition that needed to be alleviated. Virginia had been one of those—happy in limitation, not sufficiently conscious of her personal self to realize its ugliness and inadequacy, or the fundamental wretchedness of the human state. And yet, when Dr. Obispo had scientifically engineered her escape into an erotic epilepsy more excruciatingly intense than anything she had known before or even imagined possible, Virginia had realized that after all there was something in her existence that required alleviating and that this headlong plunge through an intenser, utterly alien consciousness into the darkness of a total oblivion was precisely the alleviation it required.
But like all the other addictions, whether to drugs or books, to power or applause, the addiction to pleasure tends to aggravate the condition it temporarily alleviates. The addict goes down into the valley of the shadow of his own particular little death—down indefatigably, desperately down in search of something else, something not himself, something other and better than the life he miserably lives as a human person in the hideous world of human persons. He goes down and, either violently or in delicious inertia, he dies and is transfigured; but dies only for a little while, is transfigured only momentarily. After the little death is a little resurrection, a resurrection out of unconsciousness, out of self-annihilating excitement, back into the misery of knowing oneself alone and weak and worthless, back into a completer separateness, an acuter sense of personality. And the acuter the sense of separate personality, the more urgent the demand for yet another experience of assuaging death and transfiguration. The addiction alleviates, but in doing so increases the pains demanding alleviation.
Lying there, propped up against her pillows, Virginia was suffering her daily resurrection from the valley of the shadow of her nocturnal deaths. From having been epileptically something else, she was becoming her own self again—a self, it was true, still somewhat numbed and bewildered by fatigue, still haunted by the memory of strange scenes and overpowering sensations, but none the less recognizably the old Virginia; the Virginia who admired Uncle Jo for his success and was grateful to him for having given her such a wonderful time, the Virginia who had always laughed and thought life grand and never bothered about things, the Virginia who had made Uncle Jo build the Grotto and had loved Our Lady ever since she was a kid. And now this Virginia was double-crossing her poor old admired Uncle Jo—not just telling a few little fibs, which might happen to any one, but deliberately and systematically double-crossing him. And not only him; she was also double-crossing poor Pete.
Talking to him all the time; giving him the glad eye (as glad an eye, at any rate, as she was capable of giving in the circumstances); practically making love to him in public, so that Uncle Jo wouldn’t suspect Sig. Not that she wouldn’t be glad in some ways if Uncle Jo did suspect him. She’d love to see him getting a punch on the jaw and being thrown out. Just love it! But meanwhile she was doing everything she could to cover him up; and in the process making that poor, idiot boy imagine she was stuck on him. A double-crosser—that was all she was. A double-crosser. The knowledge of this worried her, it made her feel unhappy and ashamed; it prevented her laughing at things the way she used to; it kept her thinking, and feeling bad about what she was doing, and resolving not to do it again; resolving, but not being able to prevent herself doing it again, even though she really hated herself for doing it and hated Sig for making her and, above all, for telling her, in that horrible, hard-boiled, cynical way, just how he made her and why she couldn’t resist it.
And one of the reasons why she had to do it again was that it stopped her feeling bad about having done it before. But then, afterwards, she felt bad again. Felt so bad, indeed, that she had been ashamed to look Our Lady in the face. For more than a week now the white velvet curtains across the front of the sacred doll’s house had remained drawn. She simply didn’t dare to open them, because she knew that if she did and if she made a promise there, on her knees, to Our Lady, it just wouldn’t be any good. When that awful Sig came along again, she’d just go all funny inside, like her bones had all turned into rubber, and the strength would go out of her and, before she knew where she was, it would all be happening again. And that would be much worse than the other times, because she’d made a promise about it to Our Lady. So that it was better not to make any promise at all—not now, at any rate; not until there seemed to be some chance of keeping it. Because it just couldn’t last this way for ever; she simply refused to believe she’d always have that awful rubber feeling in her bones. Some day she’d feel strong enough to tell Sig to go to hell. And when she did she’d make that promise. Till then, better not.
Virginia opened her eyes, and looked with a nostalgic expression at the niche between the windows and the drawn white curtains that concealed the treasure within—the cunning little crown, the seed pearls, the mantle of blue silk, the benignant face, the adorable little hands. Virginia sighed profoundly and, closing her eyes again, tried, by a simulation of sleep, to recapture the happy oblivion from which the light of morning had forced her unwillingly to emerge.
Chapter III
MR. STOYTE had spent his morning at the Beverly Pantheon. Very reluctantly; for he had a horror of cemeteries, even his own. But the claims of money-making were sacred; business was a duty to which all merely personal considerations had to be sacrificed. And talk of business! the Beverly Pantheon
