The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [46]
I was about to make a move, but the sleeper awoke and clutched at my hand once more. ‘Don’t go’ he said in a deep fragmented but sane voice, as if he had overheard the last few phrases of our con-versation. ‘Stay a little while. There is something else I have been thinking over and which I must reveal to you.’ Turning to the nurse he said quietly but distinctly, ‘Go!’ She smoothed the bed and left us alone once more. He gave a great sigh which, if one had not been watching his face, might have seemed a sigh of plenitude, happiness. ‘In the cupboard’ he said ‘you will find my clothes.’
There were two dark suits hanging up, and under his direction I detached a waistcoat from one of them, in the pockets of which I burrowed until my fingers came upon two rings. ‘I had decided to
offer to marry Melissa now if she wished. That is why I sent for her. After all what use am I? My name?’ He smiled vaguely at the ceiling. ‘And the rings —’ he held them lightly, reverently in his fingers like a communion wafer. ‘These are rings she chose for herself long ago. So now she must have them. Perhaps….’ He looked at me for a long moment with pained, searching eyes. ‘But no’ he said, ‘you will not marry her. Why should you? Never mind. Take them for her, and the coat.’
I put the rings into the shallow breast-pocket of my coat and said nothing. He sighed once more and then to my surprise, in a small gnome’s tenor muffled almost to inaudibility sang a few bars of a popular song which had once been the rage of Alexandria, Jamais de la vie, and to which Melissa still danced at the cabaret. ‘Listen to the music!’ he said, and I thought suddenly of the dying Antony in the poem of Cavafy — a poem he had never read, would never read. Sirens whooped suddenly from the harbour like planets in pain. Then once more I heard this gnome singing softly of chagrin and bonheur, and he was singing not to Melissa but to Rebecca. How different from the great heart-sundering choir that Antony heard — the rich poignance of strings and voices which in the dark street welled up — Alexandr ia’s last bequest to those who are her exemplars. Each man goes out to his own music, I thought, and remembered with shame and pain the clumsy move-ments that Melissa made when she danced. He had drifted now to the very borders of sleep and I judged that it was time to leave him. I took the coat and put it in the bot-tom drawer of the cupboard before tip-toeing out and summoning the duty-nurse. ‘It is very late’ she said.
‘I will come in the morning’ I said. I meant to.
Walking slowly home through the dark avenue of trees, tasting the brackish harbour wind, I remembered Justine saying harshly as she lay in bed: ‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’
* * * * *
We have been told so often that history is indifferent, but we always take its parsimony or plenty as somehow planned; we never really listen….
Now on this tenebrous peninsula shaped like a plane-leaf, fingers outstretched (where the winter rain crackles like straw among the rocks), I walk stiffly sheathed in wind by a sealine choked with groaning sponges hunting for the meaning to the pattern. As a poet of the historic consciousness I suppose I am bound to see landscape as a field dominated by the human wish — tortured into farms and hamlets, ploughed into cities. A landscape scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs. Now, however, I am be-ginning to believe that the wish is inherited from the site; that man depends for the furniture of the will upon his location in place, tenant of fruitful acres or a perverted wood. It is not the impact of his freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresis-tible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doc-trines of variation and torment. She has chosen this poor forked thing as an exemplar. Then how idle it seems for any man to say, as I once heard Balthazar say: ‘The mission of the Cabal, if it has one, is so to ennoble function that even eating and excreting will be raised to the rank of arts.