The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [81]
Duport shook with laughter. I saw that one of Dr Trelawney’s weapons was flattery, though flattery of no trite kind, in fact the best of all flattery, the sort disguised as disagreement or rebuke.
‘So you don’t want a sketch of my love life in its less successful moments?’ said Duport.
Dr Trelawney shook his head.
‘There have been some good moments too,’ said Duport. ‘Don’t get me wrong.’
‘He alone can truly possess the pleasures of love,’ said Dr Trelawney, ‘who has gloriously vanquished the love of pleasure.’
‘Is that your technique?’
‘If you would possess, do not give.’
‘I’ve known plenty of girls who thought that, my wife among them.’
‘Continual caressing begets satiety.’
‘She thought that too. You should meet. However, if what you said about a war coming is true – and it’s what I think myself – why bother? We shall soon be as dead as Jenkins’s uncle.’
Duport had a way of switching from banter to savage melancholy.
‘There is no death in Nature,’ said Dr Trelawney, ‘only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation.’
‘All the same,’ said Duport, ‘to take this uncle of Jenkins’s again, you must admit, from his point of view, it was different sitting in the Bellevue lounge, from lying in a coffin at the crematorium, his present whereabouts, as I understand from his nephew.’
‘Those who no longer walk beside us on the void expanses of this fleeting empire of created light have no more reached the absolute end of their journey than birth was for them the absolute beginning. They have merely performed their fugitive pilgrimage from embryo to ashes. They are in the world no longer. That is all we can say.’
‘But what more can anyone say?’ said Duport. ‘You’re put in a box and stowed away underground, or cremated in the Jenkins manner. In other words, you’re dead.’
‘Death is a mere phantom of ignorance,’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘It does not exist. The flesh is the raiment of the soul. When that raiment has grown threadbare or is torn asunder by violent hands, it must be abandoned. There is witness without end. When men know how to live, they will no longer die, no more cry with Faustus:
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!’
Dr Trelawney and Duport were an odd couple arguing together about the nature of existence, the immortality of the soul, survival after death. The antithetical point of view each represented was emphasised by their personal appearance. This rather bizarre discussion was brought to an end by a knock on the door.
‘Enter,’ said Dr Trelawney.
He spoke in a voice of command. Mrs Erdleigh came into the room. Dr Trelawney raised himself into a sitting position, leaning back on his elbows.
‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’
‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’
While she pronounced the incantation, Mrs Erdleigh smiled in a faintly deprecatory manner, like a grown-up who, out of pure good nature, humours the whim of a child. I remembered the same expression coming into her face when speaking to Uncle Giles. Dr Trelawney made a dramatic gesture of introduction, showing his fangs again in one of those awful grins as he lay back on the pillow.
‘Mr Duport, you’ve met, Myra,’ he said. ‘This gentleman here is the late Captain Jenkins’s nephew, bearing the same name.’
He rolled his eyes in my direction, indicating Mrs Erdleigh.
‘Connaissez-vous la vieille souveraine du monde,’ he said, ‘qui marche toujours, et ne se fatigue jamais? In this incarnation, she passes under the name of Mrs Erdleigh.’
‘Mr Jenkins and I know each other already,’ she said, with a smile.
‘I might have guessed,’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘She knows all.’
‘And your introduction was not very polite,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I am not as old as she to whom the Abbé referred.’
‘Be not offended, priestess of Isis. You have escaped far beyond the puny fingers of Time.’
She turned from him, holding out her hand to me.
‘I knew you were here,’ she said.
‘Did Albert say I was coming?’
‘It was not necessary. I know such things. Your poor uncle passed over peacefully. More peacefully than might have been expected.