“Now Geraint, don’t talk like that. They tell me you are doing nicely, considering everything. You are not going to die, so put that idea right out of your head. You will be up and around in about three weeks, they say, and must be quiet and help the medical people all you can.”
“A positive attitude! That’s what they keep telling me. ‘You must take a positive attitude, because it helps greatly with the healing, and in a few weeks you’ll be right as rain.’ But I don’t want to be right as rain! I don’t deserve it. Let the tempest rage!”
“Oh, come on, Geraint! Don’t carry on like that!”
“Carry on? Carry on? Sim bach, that is a bruising expression. Oh, how my head hurts!”
“Of course your head hurts when you shout like that. Just whisper. I can hear you if I come really close. Now tell me what happened.”
“Malory, Sim bach. Malory is what happened. The night before last I was reading Malory; it quiets the mind, and it brings me very near to Arthur—King Arthur, I mean—and his court and his great schemes and his afflictions. My book fell open at the Madness of Lancelot. You know it? You must; everybody does.”
“I remember it.”
“Then you know what it says: ‘he lepte oute at a bay-wyndow into a gardyne, and there wyth thornys he was all to-cracched of hys vysage and hys body, and so he ranne furth he knew not whothir, and was as wylde as ever man was. And so he ran two yere, and never man had grace to know him.’ “
“And that is what you did?”
“In modern terms, that is what I did. I had been having a few, naturally, and reflecting on my outcast state, and the more I thought, the more of a miserable wretch I knew I was, and suddenly I couldn’t hold in any longer. I leapt out of my window—not a bay—and on the ground floor by the mercy of God. I got into my car, and drove like hell, I don’t remember where, but I ended up in that park and you know how spooky woods are at night, and as I drove the feeling became more and more Arthurian and Maloryesque, and there I was, roaring around among the trees, making sharp turns and narrow circles—all at incredible speed, boy; a great racing driver has been lost in me—and I became conscious that courtly pavilions were appearing out of the woods to the right and left—”
“The public conveniences, I understand. You very nearly smashed into them.”
“That be damned! It was a great pavilion, a mighty tent, with flags floating.”
“That must have been the Festival Theatre.”
“Armed men and peasantry were skipping about among the trees, marvelling at me.”
“The police certainly. I don’t know about the peasantry, but there were plenty of witnesses. That’s a very easily identified car you drive.”
“Don’t belittle my agony, Sim bach; don’t reduce it to mere every-day. This was an Arthurian madness—the madness of Lancelot. Then everything went black.”
“You hit a tree. You were crazy-drunk and driving very much to the public danger in a public park, and you hit a tree. I’ve been reading the papers on my way here. Now look, Geraint: I don’t underestimate your temperament, or your involvement with Malory, but facts are facts.”
“Yes, but what are the facts? I am not talking about police-court facts, or newspaper lies, but psychological facts. I was in the grip of a great archetypal experience, and what it looked like to outsiders doesn’t count. Listen; listen to me.”
“I’m listening, but you mustn’t expect me to rush off into the moonshine with you, Geraint. Understand that.”
“Sim—Sim, my dear old friend. Sim, who out of all mankind I look to for sympathetic understanding, hear me. You are very harsh, boy. Your tongue is so sharp it would draw blood from the wind. Sim, you don’t know what I am. I am the son of a man of God. My father, now singing a rich bass in the Choir Invisible, was a very well known Calvinistic Methodist minister in Wales. He brought me up in the knowledge and fear of God. You know what that means. You are a man of God yourself, though of the episcopal, ritualist sort, for which I forgive you, but you must have the true knowledge in you someplace.”
“I hope so.”
“Sim—I have never forgotten or really forsaken my early doctrine, though my life has taken me into the world of art, which is God’s world too, though horribly flawed in many of its aspects. I have sinned greatly, but never against art. You know what has been my downfall?”
“Yes. Booze.”
“Oh, Sim, that is unworthy! A drop now and then to ease deep inner pain, but never my downfall. No, no; my downfall was the flesh.”
“Woman, you mean?”
“Not woman, Sim. I have never been dissolute. No, not woman, but Woman, that highest embodiment of God’s glory and goodness, with whom I have tried to enlarge myself and raise myself. But, wretch that I am, I took the wrong path. The flesh, Sim, the flesh!”
“Your best friend’s wife?”
“The last—and undoubtedly the greatest—of many. You see, Sim, God tempts us. Oh yes, He does. Don’t let us pretend otherwise. Why do we pray not to be led into temptation?”
“We pray not to be put to the test.”
“All right, but we are put to the test, and for some of us the test is a right bugger, let me tell you, Sim bach. Look here: why did God endow me with a Byronic temperament, Byronic beauty efface, a Byronic irresistibility?”
“I have no idea.”
“No, you haven’t. You are a great soul, Sim; a great, calm soul, but nothing to speak of in the way of physical attraction, if I may be allowed the frankness of a friend. So you don’t know what it’s like to see some marvellous woman and think, ‘That’s mine, if I choose to put out my hand and take it.’ You’ve never felt that?”
“No, I haven’t, really.”
“There you are, you see. But that has been my life. Oh, the flesh! the flesh!”
The man on the other side of the white curtain was pushing it as hard as he could with his hand. “Hey, knock it off, you guys, will you? How do you expect me to hear the game if you yell like that?”
“Shhh! Keep your voice down, Sim, like a good man. This is confidential. Call it a confession, if you like. Where was I? Yes, the flesh; that was it.
You know that? Santayana—and there are people who say he wasn’t a fine poet! That was me; my love was all self-love and I have been a flesh-imprisoned man.”
Geraint’s face was wet with tears. Darcourt, who felt that this interview was going all wrong, but who had not a hard heart, wiped them away with his own handkerchief. But somehow he had to reduce this outpouring to order.
“Are you telling me that you seduced Maria just to test your power? Geraint, this two-bit Byronic act of yours has brought great unhappiness into the life of Arthur, whom you insist is your friend.”
“It’s this opera. Sim. You can’t pretend a thing like that is just a stage-piece. It’s a huge influence, if it’s any good at all, and this thing is going to be good. I know it. This opera has brought me back to Malory, and Maria—whom I truly love as a friend and not as a man desires a woman—is nonetheless a real Malory-woman. So free, so direct, so simple, and yet so great in spirit and so enchanting. You must feel that?”
“I know what you are talking about.”