But it was a medium he wanted to be, an anti-spiritualist medium for all the others, for the salvation-seekers who still didn’t know where their enemy was, and that’s why he wanted to defeat the captain first, really flatten him, on behalf of the others.
There’s a while to go yet before dusk, and far away to the west clouds are being sprayed in through a hole in the horizon like puffs of steam. Somebody suddenly gets the idea it’s the smoke from a steam ship cruising towards the island, and gazes at the spot where the black funnel will first appear like a periscope, but the clouds just keep on rising and turn into mountains and then even bigger mountains and all hope is dashed.
‘I don’t believe it’s as meaningless as you think, captain,’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘You say it’s pointless to make that statue just because nobody will see it when it’s ready, always assuming of course we really could make a statute, but I can’t believe it would be as pointless as that, even if the situation is so awful that no boat will ever go past and be attracted to the island by the wreck. The way you think, the way you argue, anybody who’s alone would never be able to act at all just because he knows that nobody else in the world will ever get to know about it, and so anybody who’s alone ought to be completely paralysed and think he might just as well put an end to such a meaningless existence.’
‘That’s exactly what I do think,’ said the captain, with a hint of hostility, ‘that’s my way of looking at it exactly. Life is completely meaningless for a solitary person, in fact, and he would die, might just as well die as you put it, if it weren’t for one thing, if he didn’t have one thing to live for, namely: his solitude. It’s in order to be able to make the most of that solitude he chooses to stay here for a while and carry out all the meaningless acts life demands of him. Great and formless meaning-lessness, that’s the price of a ticket to solitude.’
‘But in that case,’ counters Lucas Egmont, ‘I don’t see why you object so much to the meaningless nature of the statue. To dedicate a statue to solitude is surely no more pointless than, for instance, opening a gate even though there are so many gates open already, or building a road to add to the many unnecessary ones that exist already.’
‘For the solitary person,’ replies the captain, pulling off his boot with a sigh and placing it on his knee, ‘for the solitary person there’s only one kind of permissible meaninglessness, and that’s the kind of meaningless acts which help him to achieve his solitude, and there are many impermissible, indeed forbidden meaningless acts, and the most meaningless of all these meaningless acts are of course the ones which take him back to any kind of threatening, all-consuming, inexhaustible fellowship.’
‘But there’s something there which doesn’t hold water,’ Lucas Egmont points out. ‘You maintain that everything we do in this life is meaningless, but on the other hand you claim that in so far as you’re a solitary, life actually has a meaning, and that is, solitude for its own sake. But solitude which can be compared with a blissful existence in a combined snake pit and concert hall, this state doesn’t just take possession of you for no reason, it’s no good just lying down in a basement and waiting for it to come over you from out of the darkness; oh no, the most craved-for demands the most positive action on your part, demands that you should play a positive role in what you called the meaning-lessness of the world — but that’s where I think you make a big, terminological error. In so far as they assure you of the meaning of life, unshakeable solitude, it can’t really be true that these actions are as meaningless as all that, not for you that is; in fact they’re on the contrary very important and meaningful actions, and it seems to me what you should be drawing distinctions between is not meaningless and very meaningless actions, but meaningful and meaningless actions. Although you’re so keen to deny it, therefore, there are meaningful actions even for you, just as in my view there are others for whom there are meaningful actions in life, even if life itself is meaningless. Of course, no doubt there’s nothing here which is meaningful in itself, or we’d never be able to forgive life; but everything we do and everything we have done is surely meaningful for ourselves, for our own feelings of fear, for our own feelings of guilt. Hence action, ridiculous, meaningless, paradoxical action, is so full of meaning, so weighed down with responsibility even for the many of us who are longing for fellowship but wandering around as isolated as heavenly bodies in space which is growing more barren for every pulse-beat that passes. That’s why one has to carve one’s bit out of the world’s meaninglessness and confess before one puts the knife between one’s teeth for good: I believe in the meaningless nature of the whole, but the unintentional meaningful nature of the part.
‘And since we’ve got a rock,’ he goes on, and they all stand up and look down at this white rock, this white, virginal back which has become so endlessly white by dint of having spent a few hundred thousand years waiting for the sun, ‘since we’ve got a rock, it’s pointless not to use it, but extremely pointless to do anything with it. There can be no question of a statue, of course, as, apart from anything else, we don’t have the necessary tools; but we should be able to do something else. You can carve things into a rock, for instance. There are white rocks that, with a bit of effort, you can scratch black or green lines on to if you use sharp enough stones.’
‘What should we carve into it?’ asked the captain caustically. ‘That there were seven of us to start with, but that one of us died more or less straight away because we thought he smelt so awful, we couldn’t bear to do anything about his illness and get him on his feet — a little arrow pointing to his grave — and that somebody else murdered us by means of emptying our drinking water, and that a third one served us up with glass beads when we were at our hungriest, saying, here you are, eat these.’
Then Tim Solider gives a yell and he runs at the captain with his hands clenched pathetically over his iguana wounds like the heroes in old melodramas.
‘Shut your gob, will you! Shut up!’
He stands opposite him, panting, and his wounds suddenly start bleeding and two little streams trickle slowly down towards his navel where they join and pause briefly and, throwing caution to the winds, he hurls himself violently at the captain, but of course he falls to the ground, falls right on to the rock, knees first. The captain helps him up and Tim is so weak again he hasn’t the strength to do anything but hold on to the hated hands stretched out towards him.
Then the captain whips round with a nastily powerful movement, the brutal turn of a soldier, and faces Lucas Egmont and the visor falls open in the empty suit of armour but the hatred sparkles forth through the narrow eye-holes like the beams from a lighthouse and as he stands there with his back-plates glittering with hostile solitude and the copper shield at his chest beautifully curved by its longing for a lance, he says so firmly and decisively that everyone can tell he’s made up his mind long beforehand, perhaps even before they found the rock, perhaps even before the catastrophe took place, perhaps even as he was trembling at the very start of his solitude: ‘We’ll carve a lion.’
‘A lion?’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘Who can remember what a lion looks like? It’d be better to do an iguana.’
But Madame remembers what a lion looks like. There’s a tree swaying in the breeze over the lion cage at Bretano’s zoo and an escaped monkey’s sitting in the tree, trembling with cold and despair; people bring a long ladder and she points up at the brown monkey and says to the boy that monkeys are dangerous, especially ones that have escaped; they can swing down out of the tree and split your head open before you know where you are; but the boy isn’t scared, he just looks as uncomprehending as usual, just as bereft of humanity, and in despair she drags him over to the lions’ cage. Look, she whispers, look at the lions, you can’t believe how dangerous they are, look how soft their paws are so they can slink around, you can’t hear a sound, you might think they’re the nicest animals in the world — and then suddenly there’s a terrifying growl and a roar of anger as they fling themselves at the bars, do you see how thick they are, you only need to annoy them the slightest little bit and they hurl themselves at you and try and tear you to bits. Just stick your arm in through the bars, and you’ll see, that’s it, further, a lot further. But nothing happens, nothing at all, except that the biggest lion lies down in the middle of the cage and meets her wild eyes with its bleak gaze. Look at me, she says then to the boy and he pulls his arm slowly back, look at me; and she wants to scream when she sees his eyes, no lion can call them to life, no hungry, roaring lion can touch his soul. Does it ever happen, she says excitedly to the keeper as he climbs down the ladder with the trembling monkey clutched tightly to his chest, does it ever happen that a lion tries to escape? Never happens, answers the keeper like an echo, never happens. Like an echo.