As we left the restaurant and were making our way towards the taxi-rank, a bleary-eyed old man wetted his thumb and offered Sebastian or me or both, one of the printed advertisements he was distributing. Neither of us took it, both looked straight ahead, sullen dreamers ignoring the offer. ‘Well, good-bye,’ I said to Sebastian, as he beckoned to a cab.
‘Come and see me one day in London,’ he said and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Wait a1minute,’ he added, ‘this won’t do. I have cut a beggar….’ He left me and presently returned, a small sheet of paper in his hand. He read it carefully before throwing it away.
‘Want a lift?’ he asked.
I felt he was madly anxious to get rid of me.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. I did not catch the address he gave to the chauffeur, but I recall his telling him to go fast.
When he returned to London…. No, the thread of the narrative breaks off and I must ask others to tie up the threads again.
Did Clare notice at once that something had happened? Did she suspect at once what that something was? Shall we try to guess what she asked Sebastian, and what he answered, and what she said then? I think we will not…. Sheldon saw them soon after Sebastian’s return and found that Sebastian looked queer. But he had looked queer before, too…
‘Presently it began to worry me,’ said Mr Sheldon. He met Clare alone and asked her whether she thought Sebastian was all right. ‘Sebastian?’ said Clare with a slow dreadful smile, ‘Sebastian has gone mad. Quite mad,’ she repeated, widely opening her pale eyes.
‘He has stopped talking to me,’ she added in a small voice.
Then Sheldon saw Sebastian and asked him what was amiss.
‘Is it any of your business?’ inquired Sebastian with a kind of wretched coolness.
‘I like Clare,’ said Sheldon, ‘and I want to know why she walks about like a lost soul.’ (She would come to Sebastian every day and sit in odd comers where she never used to sit. She brought sweets sometimes or a tie for Sebastian. The sweets remained uneaten and the tie hung lifelessly on the back of a chair. She seemed to pass through Sebastian like a ghost. Then she would fade away as silently as she had come.)
‘Well,’ said Sheldon, ‘out with it, man. What have you done to her?’
12
Sheldon learnt nothing from him whatsoever. What he did learn was from Clare herself; and this amounted to very little. After his return to London Sebastian had been getting letters in Russian from a woman he had met at Blauberg. She had been living at the same hotel as he. Nothing else was known.
Six weeks later (in September 1929) Sebastian left England again and was absent until January of the following year. Nobody knew where he had been. Sheldon suggested it might have been Italy ‘because lovers usually go there’. He did not cling to his suggestion.
Whether Sebastian had some final explanation with Clare, or whether he left a letter for her when he departed, is not clear. She wandered away as quietly as she had come. She changed her lodgings: they were too close to Sebastian’s flat. On a certain gloomy November day Miss Pratt met her in the fog on her way home from a life-insurance office where she had found work. After that, the two girls saw each other fairly often, but Sebastian’s name was seldom mentioned. Five years later, Clare married.
Lost Property which Sebastian had begun at that time appears as a kind of halt in his literary journey of discovery: a summing up, a counting of the things and souls lost on the way, a setting of bearings; the clinking sound of unsaddled horses browsing in the dark; the glow of a camp fire; stars overhead. There is in it a short chapter dealing with an aeroplane crash (the pilot and all the passengers but one were killed); the survivor, an elderly Englishman, was discovered by a farmer some way from the place of the accident, sitting on a stone. He sat huddled up – the picture of misery and pain. ‘Are you badly hurt?’ asked the farmer. ‘No,’ answered the Englishman, ‘toothache. I’ve had it all the way.’ Half a dozen letters were found scattered in a field: remnants of the air-mail bag. Two of these were business letters of great importance; a third was addressed to a woman, but began: ‘Dear Mr Mortimer, in reply to yours of the 6th inst…’ and dealt with the placing of an order; a fourth was a birthday greeting; a fifth was the letter of a spy with its steely secret hidden in a haystack of idle prattle; and the last was an envelope directed to a firm of traders with the wrong letter inside, a love letter. ‘This will smart, my poor love. Our picnic is finished; the dark road is bumpy and the smallest child in the car is about to be sick. A cheap fool would tell you: you must be brave. But then, anything I might tell you in the way of support or consolation is sure to be milk-puddingy – you know what I mean. You always knew what I meant. Life with you was lovely – and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink «v» in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering «l». Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist…. This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of «another woman». I am desperately unhappy with her – here is one thing which is true. And I think there is nothing much more to be said about that side of the business.
‘I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear race, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say «two» I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
‘Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy of the flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. And so life will go on. I shall joke with the chaps at the office and enjoy my dinners (until I get dyspepsia), and read novels, and write verse, and keep an eye on the stocks – and generally behave as I have always behaved. But that does not mean that I shall be happy without you…. Every small thing which will remind me of you – the look of disapproval about the furniture in the rooms where you have patted cushions and spoken to the poker, every small thing which we have descried together – will always seem to me one half of a shell, one half of a penny, with the other half kept by you. Good-bye. Go away, go away. Don’t write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This blot is not due to a tear. My fountain-pen has broken down and I am using a filthy pen in this filthy hotel room. The heat is terrific and I have not been able to clinch the business I was supposed to bring «to a satisfactory close», as that ass Mortimer says. I think you have got a book or two of mine – but that is not really important. Please, don’t write. L.’
If we abstract from this fictitious letter everything that is personal to its supposed author, I believe that there is much in it that may have been felt by Sebastian, or even written by him, to Clare. He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotesque characters with
