Poor judge I was! I was ignorant of the comedy, the comedy of parallel powers, high and low, upon which he relied to enlighten me as to the pawn I was when I had been elevated to the judgement seat.
Pawn and judgement seat! Here was another parallel of opposites I had missed. I had chalked up “hope and hopelessness” upon Mr Delph’s blackboard in Waterfall Oracle but “pawn and judgement seat” struck me as new, though upon reflection I saw it had subtly appeared in Mr Quabbas’s cave when he had elevated my father to wear the mask of Thomas. I reflected again and saw that “pawn and judgement seat” placed a special emphasis upon “freedom and unfreedom”. I drew Amaryllis into my arms. I was free to declare my love to her, free to marry her, free to live with her — a freedom that did not exist in other countries, in South Africa for example — and I suddenly saw with a shock that our two selves ran in parallel with unfree selves (unfree lives) in many spheres of hell, not only political hells but moral hells, the moral hell that Quabbas and unsuspecting Alice lived in in New Forest. He could not declare his sensuous love for her there, however intrinsically profound or poetic it was, but the depth of his affection, his unfreedom, in cosmic space nourished my insight into precious, invaluable freedom to love, freedom of spirit and mind and body in Amaryllis and me.
“Such,” he said to me, “is the law of initiations and the price of freedom in the vows you consecrate with Amaryllis. Freedom is partial and as such your private freedoms, the sacred inner vows you take for granted, relate you to — interlink you with — others who are in chains and whose vows are mute.
“Take the golden chain, my dear Weyl, upon which I descend again and again into hell.”
I held Amaryllis close to me.
“I hid it from you in Waterfall Oracle, Weyl, and had I attempted to explain my behaviour in 1958 it would have been premature. But now the two occasions may blend and move us anew through the lapses of dream, the lapsed dream of reality that is the theme of your book, the capacity to revisit occasions, to return again and again to vacancies of memory and to first things and last things that are neither last nor first in the kingdom of spirit.”
He suddenly broke off and spoke rather harshly.
“I was an overseer on a rich plantation, Weyl. Do I have to tell you that? You know it already. Yes, I do have to tell you, if only to endorse the obvious. The plantation is the corner-stone of the economy of the poor world. The factory is the cornerstone of the economy of the rich world.”
“Is it obvious?” I murmured as much to myself as to him. “You said rich plantation.”
“Rich, yes. Rich plantation, rich world, poor world. Rich sets up a dense echo or connection between the plantation and the sophisticated industrial inferno or factory. A connecting doorway. Follow me Weyl. It’s for your sake and Amaryllis’s that I descend. I bequeath you my wages.”
“What wages?”
“The wages of descent. They are my gift to you and to Amaryllis.”
“Gift!”
“Wedding gift,” he emphasized. I mouthed the words after him as if it was my turn to be dumb, as dumb as Quabbas. Laughter hit me, laughter and sorrow. It was unusual, to say the least, to bring a wedding gift to a man and his wife close on twenty-five years after the wedding. Unless the deed of coition, however marvellous and apparently complete, remains suspended in the parallels of royalty within servant and master, parallel losses and gains. Was the dead king our master guide, were we his servants who stood indebted to him? To see such losses and gains, such a debt, in a new light alerted us to the wages of freedom and unfreedom in every chain of being that ran through ourselves and others. Unbearable as all this was I began to link together three concepts in Masters’ chain — the law of initiations, private marriage or freedom to be with whom one wished, the intolerance of hell or unfreedom to be with whom one wished.
What price did freedom pay to maintain its heart and mind? Amaryllis and I had purchased a legal certification of marriage a year or so after we consummated our private vows.
Purchased! What wages did freedom need to earn in the purchase of privacy and the sacrament of body and mind?
I saw in a flash within the golden chain of spirit upon which Masters seemed to dangle how necessary it was for him to descend into the Inferno. He sought to open new links in that chain, new equations and links and parallels beween the sweat of love and the sweat of industry, between the fires of hell and the fires of purification. Without master spirits who descend into hell the wages that make freedom possible would burn so fiercely that we would lose all distinction between grace and fury; we would become the prey of meaningless consumption, meaningless fire.
*
October was closing in when he led me down a hill to catch his first bus to the factory. He led me into an industrial labyrinth even before he came to the workplace. It was his mood. The labyrinth commenced the moment he boarded the bus. It would have been different, I dreamt, if he had been on his way to a great palace to receive the Order of Merit. The bus would have been overshadowed then by a kingdom or a throne. All doors, all stages, all buses, are multi-faceted, reversible frames of emotion in the chain that runs through parallels of humanity.
Thus, that October evening, I sensed a frame of emotion upon him that was already draped by the huge cave of a factory at which he arrived an hour or so later.
A lapse or disjunction of time marks every important appointment with fate. Had he been on his way to a palace — I saw again as he dangled on his golden chain above the Inferno — that timeless lapse, rooted in anticipation, would have embodied a degree of awe perhaps, a degree of pride or privilege perhaps interwoven with other curious emotions. No such luck. He was on his way to the factory and the timeless lapse encompassing him, as he drove to a place where he already was, embodied a degree of bleak present and presence.
He blended the dying light of the evening sky into the faint arc of the new moon and into the chain by which he pulled me or led me to descend into the Inferno.
The din in the factory was tremendous. And yet through it all I could hear the rush, the clamour, of phantom El Doradan rapids. It was drought, a drought that ignited a torrent etching its premises into rock utensils, smooth stripped half-bodied ice boxes, agitated washing machine souls, skeleton birthday funeral stream and dance. Each half-bodied boulder subsisted upon rhythmic cradle-in-epitaph, processional epitaph-in-cradle of industry, yet was a doorway into lapses of time. The dead king was on the threshold of despair in the intense racket but succeeded in slipping through a lapse and found himself walking at the edge of the still Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.
It was as if he had lengthened the chain forwards into tomorrow’s noon and though lapsed time had taken us there I felt we were still in the factory and the noonday sun remained an arc-light in the roof of the cave. Masters was a new factory recruit but already he felt that he had worked in the cave of boulder-machines for years. I saw that his body was imbued with the rhythm of the factory floor as a sailor who comes ashore from his ship moves still upon an involuntary wave. Masters led me within lapsed time to gaze almost sightlessly across the beautiful parkland of Kensington Gardens, through the beautiful trees, across the beautiful water.
Beautiful water! Sightless eyes. Deaf ears. Yes, sightless, deaf. But listen all the same to the distant roar of the traffic running toward and from Marble Arch. A sounding waterfall! Listen! Listen to the friction of wheels in the waterfall, listen to the gallop of horses in the waterfall, listen to the brakes and gears of engines in the waterfall.