The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [429]
In the street outside a barrel organ began playing with its sad hollow iteration. It was a very ancient English barrel organ which old blind Arif had found on a scrap heap and had fixed up in a somewhat approximate manner. Whole notes misfired and several chords were hopelessly out of tune.
‘Listen’ said Keats, with deep emotion, ‘just listen to old Arif.’
He was in that delicious state of inspiration which only comes when champagne supervenes upon a state of fatigue — a melan-choly tipsiness which is wholly inspiriting. ‘Gosh!’ he went on in rapture, and began to sing in a very soft husky whisper, marking time with his finger, ‘ Taisez-vous, petit babouin’ . Then he gave a great sigh of repletion, and chose himself a cigar from Menotti’s great case of specimens, sauntering back to the table where he once more sat before me, smiling rapturously. ‘This war’ he said at last, ‘I really must tell you…. It is quite different to what I imagined it must be like.’
Under his champagne-bedizened tipsiness he had become relatively grave all at once. He said: ‘Nobody seeing it for the first time could help crying out with the whole of his rational mind in protest at it: crying out “It must stop!” My dear chap, to see the ethics of man at his norm you must see a battlefield. The
general idea may be summed up in the expressive phrase: “If you can’t eat it or **** it, then **** on it.” Two thousand years of civilization! It peels off in a flash. Scratch with your little finger and you reach the woad or the ritual war paint under the varnish!
Just like that!’ He scratched the air between us languidly with his expensive cigar. ‘And yet — you know what? The most un-accountable and baffling thing. It has made a man of me, as the saying goes. More, a writer! My soul is quite clear, I suppose you could regard me as permanently disfigured! I have begun it at last, that bloody joyful book of mine. Chapter by chapter it is forming in my old journalist’s noodle — no, not a journalist’s any more, a writer’ s. ’ He laughed again as if at the preposterous notion.
‘Darley, when I look around that … battlefield at night, I stand in an ecstasy of shame, revelling at the coloured lights, the flares wallpapering the sky, and I say: “All this had to be brought about so that poor Johnny Keats could grow into a man.” That’s what. It is a complete enigma to me, yet I am absolutely certain of it. No other way would have helped me because I was too damned stupid, do you see?’ He was silent for a while and somewhat distrait, drawing on his cigar. It was as if he were going over this last piece of conversation in his mind to consider its validity, word by word, as one tests a piece of machinery. Then he added, but with care and caution, and a certain expression of bemused concentration, like a man handling unfamiliar terms: ‘The man of action and the man of reflection are really the same man, operating on two different fields. But to the same end! Wait, this is beginning to sound silly.’ He tapped his temple reproachfully and frowned. After a moment’s thought he went on, still frowning:
‘Shall I tell you my notion about it … the war? What I have come to believe? I believe the desire for war was first lodged in the instincts as a biological shock-mechanism to precipitate a spiritual crisis which couldn’t be done any other how in limited people. The less sensitive among us can hardly visualize death, far less live joyfully with it. So the powers that arranged things for us felt they must concretize it, in order to lodge death in the actual present. Purely helpfully, if you see what I mean!’ He laughed again, but ruefully this time. ‘Of course it is rather different now that the bystander is getting hit harder than the front-line bloke. It is unfair to the men of the tribe who would like to leave the wife and
kids in relative safety before stumping off to this primitive ordination. For my part I think the instinct has somewhat atrophied, and may be on the way out altogether; but what will they put in its place