In a sense I recognized in him, in the very resonance of his voice when he spoke her name, a maturity which I lacked; for he had surmounted his love for her without damaging or hurting it, and allowed it to mature as all love should into a consuming and depersonalized friendship. So far from fearing to die, and importuning her for comfort, he wished only to offer her, from the inexhaustible treasury of his dying, a last gift.
The magnificent sable lay across a chair at the end of the bed wrapped in tissue paper; I could see at a glance that it was not the sort of gift for Melissa, for it would throw her scant and shabby wardrobe into confusion, outshining everything. ‘I was always worried about money’ he said felicitously ‘while I was alive. But when you are dying you suddenly find yourself in funds.’ He was able for the first time in his life to be almost light-hearted. Only the sickness was there like some patient and cruel monitor.
He passed from time to time into a short confused sleep and the darkness hummed about my tired ears like a hive of bees’. It was getting late and yet I could not bring myself to leave him. A dutynurse brought me a cup of coffee and we talked in whispers. It was restful to hear her talk, for to her illness was simply a profession which she had mastered and her attitude to it was that of a journeyman. In her cold voice she said: ‘He deserted his wife and child for une femme quelconque. Now neither the wife nor the woman who is his mistress wants to see him. Well!’ She shrugged her shoulders. These tangled loyalties evoked no feeling of compassion in her, for she saw them simply as despicable weaknesses. ‘Why doesn’t the child come? Has he not asked for her?’ She picked a front tooth with the nail of her little finger and said: ‘Yes. But he does not want to frighten her by letting her see him sick. It is, you understand, not pleasant for a child.’ She picked up an atomizer and languidly squirted some disinfectant into the air above us, reminding me sharply of Mnemjian. ‘It is late’ she added; ‘are you going to stay the night?’ 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 conversation. ‘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 — Alexandria’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 movements 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 bottom drawer of the cupboard before tiptoeing 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 beginning 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 irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines 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.’ You will see in all this the flower of a perfect scepticism which undermines the will to survive. Only love can sustain one a little longer.
I think, too, that something of this sort must have been in Arnauti’s mind when he wrote: ‘For the writer people as psychologies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the writer?’ Perhaps it was the realization of this which made me select this empty place to live for the next few years — this sunburnt headland in the Cyclades. Surrounded by history on all sides, this empty island alone is free from every reference. It has never been mentioned in the annals of the race which owns it. Its historic past is refunded, not into time, but into place — no temples, groves, amphitheatres, to corrupt ideas with their false comparisons. A shelf of coloured boats, a harbour over the hills, and a little town denuded by neglect. That is all. Once a month a steamer touches on its way to Smyrna.
These winter evenings the sea-tempests climb the cliffs and invade the grove of giant untended planes where I walk, talking a sudden wild slang, slopping and tilting the schooner trees.
I walk here with those coveted intimations of a past which none can share with me; but which time itself cannot deprive me of.
My hair is clenched back to my scalp and one hand guards the burning dottle of my pipe from the force of the wind. Above, the sky is set in a brilliant comb of stars. Antares guttering up there, buried in spray…. To have cheerfully laid down obedient books and friends, lighted rooms, fireplaces built for conversation — the whole parish of the civilized mind — is not something I regret but merely wonder at.