When the last of his seedlings is in the ground, he straightens himself up, stretches, rubs his aching back, then walks slowly to the end of the garden and stands there motionless, looking out at the view.
In a long shot, we see, as it were through his eyes, a wide prospect of deserted factories and crumbling houses, backed in the distance by a range of mountains that recedes, fold after fold, toward the east. The shadows are gulfs of indigo, and in the richly golden lights the far-off details stand out distinct and small and perfect, like the images of things in a convex mirror. In the foreground, delicately chased and stippled by the almost horizontal light, even the baldest patches of parched earth reveal an unsuspected sumptuousness of texture.
NARRATOR
There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances.
Dr. Poole’s lips move and we catch the low murmur of his words.
» ‘For love and beauty and delight
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.'»
He turns and walks back toward the entrance to the garden. Before opening the gate, he looks cautiously around him. There is no sign of an unfriendly observer. Reassured, he slips out and almost immediately turns into a winding path between sand dunes. Once again his lips move.
» ‘I am the Earth,
Thy mother; she within whose stony veins
To the last fibre of the loftiest tree,
Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,
Joy ran, as blood within a living frame,
When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud
Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy.'»
From the footpath Dr. Poole emerges into a street flanked by small houses, each with its garage and each surrounded by the barren space that was once a plot of grass and flowers.
» ‘A spirit of keen joy,’ » he repeats and then sighs and shakes his head.
NARRATOR
Joy? But joy was murdered long ago. All that survives is the laughter of demons about the whipping posts, the howling of the possessed as they couple in the darkness. Joy is only for those whose life accords with the given Order of the world. For you there, the clever ones who think you can improve upon that Order, for you, the angry ones, the rebellious, the disobedient, joy is fast becoming a stranger. Those who are doomed to reap the consequences of your fantastic tricks will never so much as suspect its existence. Love, Joy and Peace — these are the fruits of the spirit that is your essence and the essence of the world. But the fruits of the ape-mind, the fruits of the monkey’s presumption and revolt are hate and unceasing restlessness and a chronic misery tempered only by frenzies more horrible than itself.
Dr. Poole, meanwhile, continues on his way.
» «The world is full of woodmen,'» he says to himself,
» «The world is full of woodmen, who expel
Love’s gentle dryads from the trees of life
And vex the nightingales in every dell.'»
NARRATOR
Woodmen with axes, dryad-killers with knives, nightingale-vexers with scalpels and surgical scissors.
Dr. Poole shudders and, like a man who feels himself dogged by some malevolent presence, quickens his pace. Suddenly he halts and once more looks about him.
NARRATOR
In a city of two and a half million skeletons the presence of a few thousands of the living is hardly perceptible. Nothing stirs. The silence is total and, in the midst of all these cosy little bourgeois ruins, seems conscious and in some sort conspiratorial.
His pulses quickened by hope and the fear of disappointment, Dr. Poole turns off the road and hurries along the drive that leads to the garage of Number 1993. Sagging on their rusted hinges, the double doors stand ajar. He slips between them into a musty twilight. Through a hole in the west wall of the garage a thin pencil of late afternoon sunshine reveals the left front wheel of a Super de Luxe Four-Door Chevrolet Sedan and, on the ground beside it, two skulls, one an adult’s, the other evidently a child’s. Dr. Poole opens the only one of the four doors which is not jammed and peers into the darkness within.
«Loola!»
He climbs into the car, sits down beside her on the disintegrated upholstery of the back seat, and takes her hand in both of his.
«Darling!»
She looks at him without speaking. In her eyes there is an expression almost of terror.
«So you were able to get away after all?»
«But Flossie still suspects something.»
«Damn Flossie!» says Dr. Poole in a tone that is intended to be carefree and reassuring.
«She kept asking questions,» Loola goes on. «I told her I was going out to forage for needles and cutlery.»
«But all you’ve found is me.»
He smiles at her tenderly and raises her hand to his lips; but Loola shakes her head.
«Alfie — please!»
Her tone is a supplication. He lowers her hand without kissing it.
«And yet you do love me, don’t you?»
She looks at him with eyes that are wide with a frightened bewilderment, then turns away.
«I don’t know, Alfie, I don’t know.»
«Well, I know,» says Dr. Poole decidedly. «I know I love you. I know I want to be with you. Always. Till death do us part,» he adds with all the fervour of an introverted sexualist suddenly converted to objectivity and monogamy.
Loola shakes her head again. «All I know is that I oughtn’t to be here.»
«But that’s nonsense!»
«No, it isn’t. I oughtn’t to be here now. I oughtn’t to have come those other times. It’s against the Law. It’s against everything that people think. It’s against Him,» she adds after a moment’s pause. An expression of agonised distress appears on her face. «But then why did He make me so that I could feel this way about you? Why did He make me like those — like those —» She cannot bring herself to utter the abhorred word. «I used to know one of them,» she goes on in a low voice. «He was sweet — almost as sweet as you are. And then they killed him.»
«What’s the good of thinking about other people?» says Dr. Poole. «Let’s think about ourselves. Let’s think how happy we could be, how happy we actually were two months ago. Do you remember? The moonlight. . . And how dark it was in the shadows! And in the soul a wild odour is felt beyond the sense. . . !»
«But we weren’t doing wrong then.»
«We’re not doing wrong now.»
«No, no, it’s quite different now.»
«It isn’t different,» he insists. «I don’t feel any different from what I did then. And neither do you.»
«I do,» she protests — too loudly to carry conviction.
«No, you don’t.»
«I do.»
«You don’t. You’ve just said it. You’re not like these other people — thank God!»
«Alfie!»
She makes a propitiatory sign of the horns.
«They’ve been turned into animals,» he goes on. «You haven’t. You’re still a human being — a normal human being with normal human feelings.»
«I’m not.»
«Yes, you are.»
«It isn’t true,» she wails. «It isn’t true.»
She covers her face with her hands and starts to cry.
«He’ll kill me,» she sobs.
«Who’ll kill you?»
Loola raises her head and looks apprehensively over her shoulder, through the rear window of the car.
«He will. He knows everything we do, everything we even think or feel.»
«Maybe He does,» says Dr. Poole, whose Liberal-Protestant views about the Devil have been considerably modified during the past few weeks. «But if we feel and think and do the right thing, He can’t hurt us.»
«But what is the right thing?» she asks.
For a second or two he smiles at her without speaking.
«Here and now,» he says at last, «the right thing is this.»
He slips an arm about her shoulders and draws her toward him.
«No, Alfie, no!»
Panic-stricken, she tries to free herself; but he holds her tight.
«This is the right thing,» he repeats. ‘It mightn’t always and everywhere be the right thing. But here and now it is — definitely.»
He speaks with the force and authority of complete conviction. Never in all his uncertain and divided life has he thought so clearly or acted so decisively.
Loola suddenly ceases to struggle.
«Alfie, are you sure it’s all right? Are you absolutely sure?»
«Absolutely sure,» he replies from the depths of his new, self-validating experience. Very gently he strokes her hair.
«‘A mortal shape,'» he whispers, «‘indued with love and life and light and deity. A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning, a Vision like incarnate April.'»
«Go on,» she whispers.
Her eyelids are closed, her face wears that look of supernatural serenity which one sees upon the faces of the dead.
Dr. Poole begins again.
» ‘And we will talk, until thought’s melody
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonising silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound
And our veins beat together, and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in Passion’s golden purity;
As mountain springs under the morning sun,
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! Wherefore two?’ «
There is a long silence. Suddenly Loola opens her
