The Nice and the Good

They were walking now in a narrow lane with high sloping banks up which white flowering nettles and willow herb crawled out of a matrix of tall yellow moss, so dry and dustylooking in the hot sun that it scarcely seemed like vegetation.

There was an old thick powdery smell, perhaps the smell of the moss. A cuckoo called nearby in the wood above, clear, cool, precise, hollow, mad. Kate took hold of Ducane's hand.

'I think I won't come in with you to Willy's,' said Kate. 'He's been rather down lately and I'm sure it's better if you see him alone. I don't think Willy will ever kill himself, do you, John?'

Willy Kost was given to announcing from time to time that his life was an unbearable burden and he proposed shortly to terminate it.

'I don't know,' said Ducane.

He felt that he had not done enough for Willy. Most people who knew Willy felt this. But he was not an easy person to help. Ducane had first met Willy, who was a classical scholar living on a pension from the German government and working on an edition of Propertius, at a meeting in London at which Ducane was reading a rather obscure little paper on the concept of specificatio in Roman law. He had been responsible for removing Willy from a bed-sitter in Fulham and installing him at Trescombe Cottage. He had often wondered since whether this was not a mistake. He had conceived of providing his friend with the protection of a household. But in fact Willy was able to be as solitary as he pleased.

'I don't think that if he was really seriously contemplating suicide he would let the children come to him the way he does,' said Kate. While adult visitors were often barred, the children came and went freely at the cottage.

'Yes, I think that's true. I wonder, when he won't let any of us see him, if he's really working?'

'Or just brooding and remembering. It's awful to think of. U 'I've never felt any inclination to commit suicide, have you, Kate?'

'Good heavens no! But then for me life's always been such fun.'

'It's hard for people like us with ordinary healthy minds,' said Ducane, 'to imagine what it would be like for one's whole mode of consciousness to be painful, to be hell.'

'I know. All those things he must remember and dream about.'

Willy Kost had spent the war in Dachau.

'I wish Theo would try to see more of him,' said Ducane.

'Theo! He's a broken reed if ever there was one. He's just a bundle of nerves himself. You should see more of Willy. You can talk directly to people and tell them what to do. Most of us are afraid to.'

'Sounds awful!' said Ducane and laughed. torcea to tell someway what it was nice in camp .1 tmnx he's never uttered a word about it to anyone.'

'I doubt if you are right. I can even imagine how difficult that might be,' said Ducane. But the same idea had come to him before.

'One must be reconciled to the past,' said Kate.

'When one's suffered injustice and affliction on the scale on which Willy's suffered it,' said Ducane, 'it may just not be possible.'

'Not possible to forgive?'

'Certainly not possible to forgive. Perhaps not possible to find any way of – thinking about it at all.'

Ducane's imagination had often wrestled in vain with the question of what it must be like to be Willy Kost.

'I used to think he'd somehow break down with Mary,' said Kate. 'She really knows him best, apart from you I mean. But she says he hasn't talked to her at all about – that.'

Ducane was thinking, we've nearly reached the wood, we've nearly reached the wood. The first shadows fell across them, the cuckoo uttered from farther off his crazed lascivious cry.

'Let's sit down here for a minute,' said Kate.

There was a clean grey shaft of fallen tree from which a skirt of dry curled golden-brown beech leaves descended on either side. They sat down upon it, their feet rustling the dry leaves, and turned to face each other.

Kate took Ducane by the shoulders, studying him intently.

Ducane looked into the intense streaky smudgy dark blue of her eyes. They both sighed. Then Kate kissed him with a slow and lingering motion. Ducane closed his eyes, turning his head now from the intensity of the kiss, and clutched her very closely against him, feeling the wiry imprint of her springy hair upon his cheek. They remained motionless for some time.

'Oh God, you do make me happy,' said Kate.

'You make me happy too.' He set her away from him again, smiling at her, feeling relaxed and free now, desiring her but not with anguish, seeing behind her the brown carpeted empti49 ness of the wood, while the sun glittered above them in shoals of semi-transparent leaves.

'You look more like the Duke of Wellington than ever. I love that little crest of grey hair that's coming right in the front.

It is all right, isn't it, John?'

'Yes,' he said gravely. 'Yes. I have thought about it a lot and I do think it is all right.'

'Octavian – well, you know what Octavian feels. You understand everything.'

'Octavian's a very happy man.'

'Yes, Octavian is a happy man. And that is relevant, you know.'

'I know. Dear Kate, I'm a lonely person. And you're a generous woman. And we're both very rational. All's well here.'

'I knew it was, John, only I just wanted you to say it, like that. I'm so glad. You're sure it won't be somehow painful for you, sad, you know –?'

'There will be some pain,' he said, 'but pain that I can deal with. And so much happiness too.'

'Yes. One doesn't want to be just painless and content, does one? You and I can be so much to each other. Loving people matters, doesn't it? Really nothing else matters except that.'

'Come in,' said Willy Kost.

Ducane entered the cottage.

Willy was sitting stretched out in a low chair beside the hearth, his heels dug into a spilling of grey wood ash. The gramophone behind him was playing the slow movement of something or other. It seemed to Ducane that Willy's gramophone was always playing slow movements. The noise immediately irritated Ducane, who was unmusical to the point of positively disliking the concourse of sweet sounds. His mood as he approached the cottage had been elevated and intense. The harmony generated by his scene with Kate, the perfect understanding so quickly reached between them, had enabled him to switch his thought with a peculiar singleness of attention to the problem of Willy. The music was now like an alien presence.

Willy, who knew how Ducane felt about music, got up and lifted the playing arm off the record and turned the machine off.

'Sorry, Willy.'

'S'all right,' said Willy. 'Sit down. Have something. Have some tea or something.'

Willy limped into his little kitchen where Ducane heard the hiss and then the purr of the oil stove. The single main room of the cottage was filled with Willy's books, some on shelves, some still in boxes. Kate, who could not conceive of life without a large personal territory of significantly deployed objects, constantly complained that Willy had never unpacked. She had forgiven him his shudder when she once suggested that she should unpack for him.

The big table was covered with texts and notebooks. Here at least was an area of significance. Ducane touched the open pages, pretending to look at them. He felt a slight embarrassment as he often did with Willy.

'How goes it, Willy?'

'How goes what?'

'Well, life, work.'

Willy came back into the room and leaned on the back of a chair, observing his guest with amused detachment. Willy was a small man, delicate in feature, with a long thin curvy mouth which seemed always a little moist and trembling. He had a great deal of longish white hair and a uniformly brown rather oily and glistening face and sardonic narrow brown eyes.

A velvety brown mole on one cheek gave him a curious air of prettiness.

' «Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge."'

Ducane smiled encouragingly.'Good!'

'Is it good? Excuse me while I make the tea.'

He returned with the tea tray. Ducane accepted his cup and began to perambulate the room. Willy with a large glass of milk resumed his chair.

'I envy you this,' said Ducane. He indicated the table.

'No, you don't.'

It was true that he did not. There was always a period of time, more or less brief, when they met after an interval, when Ducane fumbled, flattered. He was patronizing Willy now, and they both knew it. The barrier created between them by this spontaneous, this as it seemed automatic, flattery and patronage could be broken easily by Willy's directness if Willy had the sheer energy to break it. Sometimes he had. Sometimes he had not, and would sit by listlessly while Ducane struggled with their meeting. Ducane in fact could overcome this automatic falseness in himself unaided, but it took a little time and a very conscious measure of seriousness and attention. Willy was always difficult.

'I envy something,' said Ducane. 'Perhaps I just wish I had been a poet.'

'I doubt if you even wish that,' said Willy. He lay back and closed his eyes. It looked as if it was one of his listless days.

'To live with poetry is next best,' said Ducane. 'My daily bread is quite other.' He read out at random a couplet from the open page.

'Quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes: non satis est ullo tern pore longus amor.'

A physical vision of Kate came to him out of the words of Propertius, especially out of that final amor, so much stronger than the lilting Italian amore. He saw the furry softness of her shoulders as he had often seen them in the evening. He had never caressed her bare shoulders. Arnor.

'Stuff, stuff, stuff,' said Willy. 'These were cliches for Propertius.

In couplets like that he was talking in his sleep. Well, most human beings are talking in their sleep, even poets, even great poets.' He added, 'The only amor I know anything about is amor fati.'

'Surely a manifestation of pure wickedness,' said Ducane. 'Do you really believe that?'

'That it's wicked to love destiny? Yes. What happens is usually what oughtn't to happen. Why love it?'

'Of course destiny shouldn't be thought of as purposive,' said Willy, 'it should be thought of as mechanical.'

'But it isn't mechanical!' said Ducane. 'We aren't mechanical!'

'We are the most mechanical thing of all. That is why we can be forgiven.'

'Who says we can be forgiven? Anyway that needn't imply love of fate.'

'It's not easy of course. Perhaps it's impossible. Can a thing be required of us and yet be impossible? I don't see why not.'

'Submit to fate but don't love it. To love it one must be drunk.'

'And one should not be drunk?'
'Of course not.'
'Supposing being drunk is the only way to carry on?'
'Oh stop this, Willy!' said Ducane.
These conversations with Willy frightened him sometimes.
He was never sure if Willy meant what he said or meant the opposite of what he said. He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him. Like a baffled witness, he was afraid of being deliberately led to make some damaging, some perhaps fatal, admission. He felt both powerless and responsible. He said, 'There must be other ways of carrying on.'
'Even without a God!'
'Yes.'
'I don't see why,' said Willy.
Ducane felt, as so often before, yawning between them the terrible gulf which divides the mentally healthy from the mentally crippled.
'But you are working?' said Ducane. He knew that he was falling back into the tone of patronizing. Yet he feared Willy's obscure intensities and feared that he might be at such moments employed by Willy to confirm unwittingly some final edict of despair.
'No.'
'Oh come!' Ducane knew that Willy had looked forward to this visit. He knew too that the visit was rendering Willy unspeakably miserable. This had happened before. In fact it often happened in spite of the fiction kept up briskly by everyone, including the two protagonists, that Ducane was eminently 'good for' Willy.
Ducane thought, if I were not the tied-up puritan that I am I would touch him now, take his hand or something.
'What seat?' Willy was observing his friend. He spoke the question caressingly, exaggerating his foreign accent. It was a ritual question.
Ducane laughed. Some current flowed again, but flowing away from Willy, leaving him more isolated and unreadabl' than ever. 'Oh, I'm just worrying about you.'
'Do not do so, John. Tell me of your own things. Tell me about life at that famous place «the office». Do you know I have never been in that place where so many people spend their lives. Tell me about the office.'
The wraith of Radeechy rose before Ducane like a physical presence in the room, and with it came the puzzlement and the curious fear which he had felt before. He knew that he must not tell Willy about Radeechy. Suicide is infectious, which is one reason why it is wrong. But he felt too that there was some germ of craziness here, perhaps even of evil, to which he should not expose the organism of Willy's soul, frail in ways which he could not determine or even imagine.
He said 'It's very dull in the office. You are well out of it.' He said to himself, I must remember to tell the others not to mention Radeechy to Willy. He thought, if Willy were ever to commit suicide I should never forgive myself, I should know it was my fault. Yet his affection was impotent. What could he do? If he could only persuade Willy to talk to him about the past.
He said abruptly, 'You sleeping all right these days?»
'Yes, fine, until the cuckoo wakes me up about four thirty!'
'No bad dreams?'
They stared at each other, Ducane still standing with his tea cup and Willy stretched out in the chair. Willy smiled a slow rather cunning smile and began to whistle softly.
There was a sharp rap on the door which then flew open to admit the twins, marching abreast and talking at once.
'We've brought you something!' cried Edward. 'You'll never guess what it is!' cried Henrietta.
They marched up to Willy and laid a light soft spherical object on his knees. Willy straightened up to lean over it exclaiming with interest.
'Whatever can it be? What do you think it is, John?'
Ducane moved over to look at the elongated ball of dull green, a few inches long, which Willy was touching with a curious finger. 'Some sort of bird's nest, I suppose,' he said.
He felt himself de trop, a spoilsport, an intruder upon a scene of intimates whose rhythm he could not catch.
'It's a long-tailed tit's nest,' cried Edward.
'They've brought up their babies,' cried Henrietta. 'We watched them building the nest, we watched them all through, and now they've gone away. Isn't it a beautiful nest? You see, outside it's made of moss and lichen, see how they've woven it together, and inside it's all lined with feathers.'
'One man counted more than two thousand feathers in a long-tailed tit's nest!' cried Edward.
'It's very beautiful,' said Willy. 'Thank you, twins!' He looked up at Ducane over the nest which he was holding lightly in his hands. 'Goodbye, John, thank you for coming.'
'A bad crow tried to drive them away,' Henrietta was explaining, 'but they were so brave '
Willy and Ducane smiled at each other. Ducane's smile was ironical and rueful. Willy's smile was apologetic and very sad in some way which Ducane could not fathom. With a salute, Ducane turned to the door.
Willy shouted after him, 'I'm all right, you know. Tell them I'm all right.'
Ducane walked down the meadow path of clipped grass and into the spotted shade of the beech wood. When he came to the smooth grey tree trunk on which he had embraced Kate he did not sit down upon it. He stood for a moment or two quite still. Then he knelt down in the crisp dry beech leaves, leaning his arms on the warm shaft of the tree. He was not thinking about Willy, he was not being sorry for Willy. He was being infinitely sorry for himself because the power was denied to him that comes from an understanding of suffering and pain.
He would have liked to pray then for himself, to call suffering to him out of the chaos of the world. But he did not believe in God, and the kind of suffering which brings wisdom cannot be named and cannot without blasphemy be prayed for.