right' what I saw in terms ofleft’ and vice versa.»I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain the thought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what was destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.
«First of all, we shall agree,» she said, «to cancel all such experiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves that what we had been trying to do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle—on the lines of what does right' andleft’ mean in our absence, when nobody is looking, in pure space, and what, anyway, is space; when I was a child I thought space was the inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quite tidy, but still a good clean zero. I don’t want you to go mad or to drive me mad, because those perplexities are catching, and so we’ll drop the whole business of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact with a kiss, but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutes to take us for a spin in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come, and so I propose we meet in the garden, for a minute or two, just before dinner, while he is taking his bath.»
I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. «It was not a dream,» she said. «He just wanted to know if his sister had phoned about a dance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home.»
We repaired for a snack and a drink to the Victoria bar, and presently Ivor joined us. He said, nonsense, he could dance and fence beautifully on the stage but was a regular bear at private affairs and would hate to have his innocent sister pawed by all the rastaquouхres of the Cтte.
«Incidentally,» he added, «I don’t much care for P.’s obsession with moneylenders. He practically ruined the best one in Cambridge but has nothing but conventional evil to repeat about them.»
«My brother is a funny person,» said Iris, turning to me as in play. «He conceals our ancestry like a dark treasure, yet will flare up publicly if someone calls someone a Shylock.»
Ivor prattled on: «Old Maurice (his employer) is dining with us tonight. Cold cuts and a macиdoine au kitchen rum. I’ll also get some tinned asparagus at the English shop; it’s much better than the stuff they grow here. The car is not exactly a Royce, but it rolls. Sorry Vivian is too queasy to come. I saw Madge Titheridge this morning and she said French reporters pronounce her family name `Si c’est riche.’ Nobody’s laughing today.»
9
Being too excited to take my usual siesta, I spent most of the afternoon working on a love poem (and this is the last entry in my 1922 pocket diary—exactly one month after my arrival in Carnavaux). In those days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one, who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the initial, evanescent, savage perfection. The treacherous music of Russian rhythms came to my specious rescue like those demons who break the black silence of an artist’s hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical birds. Another and final deception would come with the Fair Copy in which, for a short while, calligraphy, vellum paper, and India ink beautified a dead doggerel. And to think that for almost five years I kept trying and kept getting caught—until I fired that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable little assistant!
I dressed and went downstairs. The trench window giving on the terrace was open. Old Maurice, Iris, and Ivor sat enjoying Martinis in the orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the act of mimicking someone, with bizarre intonations and extravagant gestures. The marvelous sunset has not only remained as a backdrop of a life-transforming evening, but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers, many years later, to bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets, in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientific value, since some learned celestiologist might be hired to discuss samples from various countries and analyze the striking and never before discussed differences between the color schemes of evening and dawn. The album came out eventually, the price was high and the pictorial part passable; but the text was supplied by a luckless female whose pretty prose and borrowed poetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).
For a couple of moments, while idly attending to Ivor’s strident performance, I stood watching the huge sunset. Its wash was of a classical light-orange tint with an oblique bluish-black shark crossing it. What glorified the combination was a series of ember-bright cloudlets riding along, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape of a pawn or a baluster. «Look at the sabbath witches!» I was about to cry, but then I saw Iris rise and heard her say: «That will do, Ives. Maurice has never met the person, it’s all lost on him.»
«Not at all,» retorted her brother, «he will meet him in a minute and recognize him (the verb was an artist’s snarl), that’s the point!»
Iris left the terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did not continue his skit, which a swift playback that now burst on my consciousness identified as a clever burlesque of my voice and manner. I had the odd sensation of a piece of myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of my being separated from my own self, of flying forward and at the same time turning away. The second action prevailed, and presently, under the holm oak, I joined Iris.
The crickets were stridulating, dusk had filled the pool, a ray of the outside lamp glistened on two parked cars. I kissed her lips, her neck, her necklace, her neck, her lips. Her response dispelled my ill humor; but I told her what I thought of the idiot before she ran back to the festively lit villa.
Ivor personally brought up my supper, right to my bedside table, with well-concealed dismay at being balked of his art’s reward and charming apologies for having offended me, and «had I run out of pyjamas?» to which I replied that, on the contrary, I felt rather flattered, and in fact always slept naked in summer, but preferred not to come down lest a slight headache prevent me from not living up to that splendid impersonation.
I slept fitfully, and only in the small hours glided into a deeper spell (illustrated for no reason at all with the image of my first little inamorata in the grass of an orchard) from which I was rudely roused by the spattering sounds of a motor. I slipped on a shirt and leant out of the window, sending a flock of sparrows whirring out of the jasmin, whose luxuriant growth reached up to the second floor, and saw, with a sensual start, Ivor putting a suitcase and a fishing rod into his car which stood, throbbing, practically in the garden. It was a Sunday, and I had been expecting to have him around all day, but there he was getting behind the wheel and slamming the door after him. The gardener was giving tactical directions with both arms; his pretty little boy was also there, holding a yellow and blue feather duster. And then I heard her lovely English voice bidding her brother have a good time. I had to lean out a little more to see her; she stood on a patch of cool clean turf, barefooted, barecalved, in an ample-sleeved peignoir, repeating her joyful farewell, which he could no longer hear.
I dashed to the W.C. across the landing. A few moments later, as I left my gurgling and gulping retreat, I noticed her on the other side of the staircase. She was entering my room. My polo shirt, a very short, salmon-colored affair, could not hide my salient impatience.
«I hate to see the stunned look on the face of a clock that has stopped,» she said, as she stretched a slender brovm arm up to the shelf where I had relegated an old egg timer lent me in lieu of a regular alarm. As her wide sleeve fell back I kissed the dark perfumed hollow I had longed to kiss since our first day in the sun.
The door key would not work, that I knew; still I tried, and was rewarded by the silly semblance of recurrent clicks that did not lock anything. Whose step, whose
