The Resurrection, page 16
“It’s an interesting theory,” Chandler said, somewhat skeptical.
Horne nodded ferociously, hunting through his pockets. He found a piece of tissue and mopped his forehead. “Art is atonement,” he said. “Good poets atone for the evil in their lives, evil poets atone for the evil in their very souls, which they cannot help but continue to affirm. By writing the poem, the poet hopes to exorcise his devil. God help him.”
It was hard to know what to say. All the man said and did was frantic, violent, but it did not seem madness, exactly—though heaven only knew what a psychiatrist might think. To Chandler, at least, it seemed quite the opposite of madness, more like the terrible sanity that so frightened Bishop Berkeley. To look at him, one would have said that John Horne was a man who would never dare speak to anyone, a man who would shy from human contact as a bat shies from light. Like a man desperately timid, humiliated from the first, he kept his shoulders hunched; his glowing eyes were evasive; and his lips trembled almost constantly, like those of a man in mortal terror. And yet he forced out his confession not as if compelled, driven by an irresistible impulse, but like a man taking an almost impossible course because he had chosen to do so. It was less a confession than a sermon, judging from the tone; a hell-fire warning from a creature newly returned, if only for a moment, from the burning lake. Whether Chandler was right or wrong about why the man spoke, that is, right or wrong in his intuition that John Horne knew what he was saying and spoke for a reason—if only in the hope of discovering a reason—Chandler was prevented from turning the talk to something else (supposing that were possible) or interrupting the monologue so obviously discomforting to them both. Horne asked now, pacing back and forth between the two tables—over to the window, back to Chandler, over to the window, back again, reaching out to the large, dusky world-globe to give it a spin each time he started back—“What if it should be true? Think of it! Suppose men really do have no freedom at all. Or rather, suppose that only certain of us—the elect, let us say—can freely choose, while the rest, damned by predestination, corrupt in our very chemistry, have no choice? How can we be born again?” He stopped short, bug-eyed, waiting for an answer; but there was none.
“I might tell you,“ Horne said, “for the sake of dramatizing my state, that I’m a pederast, that a blind old man (a dear friend of the family) very early set the ugly pattern of my life; or I might say I’m a drinker, or an opium eater, or that without especially meaning to, I butcher little girls. But I will not stoop to melodrama. The case is much simpler. I despair, Mr. Chandler. There it is. I despair.”
“Surely a great many people—” Chandler began.
“It’s irrelevant what many people do.” He was suddenly enraged, his eyes like a crazy toad’s. “I’m an old man. No interest whatever in the pastures of the herd, some cheap and miserable consolation. I’ll tell you a fact of experience: The question ’What is the meaning of life?’ is a meaningless question to the simple, saintly plowman—which is to say, most of mankind. He looks at the life of the man beside him, and he sees the meaning of life at a glance: An end in itself. ’This man beside me is beautiful, and beauty justifies itself. As for my own life, if it’s revolting to me, it’s sweet as a rose to my good wife Madge.’ Thus the fundamental law of Nature becomes the law for man, Mr. Chandler: Just as the components of an atom are components of anything at all only if you give them time to establish their rhythm—or just as (to put it more elegantly) the molecules within a rock are molecules within a rock only if you give them time to work out Zeno’s paradox of the arrow in flight—so the meaning of man is defined by his relationships in time and space. In sort, as physicists tell us, form is function. And what is a man to do if he has no function—whether by virtue of his character or by virtue of his social condition?”
“Come now,” Chandler said, his voice more tentative than he felt, “talk is function.”
“Ha!” Horne cried. “But is rhetoric?” He stood motionless now, his head drawn back, smiling wildly. “Properly speaking, rhetoric is purposeless proliferation of once-utile figures. Do you deny that there is such a thing as love?”
Chandler squinted, trying to find the connection. After an instant he gave up the search and answered, “No, of course I don’t deny it.”
“You affirm that there is love?”
“Certainly. It’s not debatable. To question whether one has experienced one’s experience is misplaced argument.”
“Excellent! Yes! And you mean love, not ego-gratification, the effect of what Coleridge calls delight in the agreeable?” He added quickly, jabbing his finger in Chandler’s direction, “Because if so, you see, you’re defining love as delight apart from any interest. And that’s the idealist definition of the beautiful—and we’re back where we started! A man incapable of love—incapable of aesthetic response—is a man congenitally damned. For such a man, providing he has the intellect to perceive his condition, life must be a continual but hopeless search for something he can find it in his heart to die for.” He stood with clenched fists, his face dark red as if with rage.
Abruptly, mildly, Chandler said, “I refuse to believe that any such man exists.”
“You refuse?” Horne echoed, furious, shaking like a leaf.
Chandler nodded, touching the side of his glasses.
Horne’s eyes bulged with indignation. “Then I am annihilated.” He laughed grimly.
“That’s one possibility, yes,” Chandler acknowledged.
“The other being, I suppose, that I’m a liar.”
“Well, yes, perhaps. Or that you trick yourself—spirit cuckolded by brain.” Chandler looked at him for a long time, squinting as if he saw John Horne not as a man but as a problem in formal logic. He said at last, as if tentatively, tilting his head, looking up at the top of the window,
O Rose, thou art sick; the invisible worm
That flies in the night, on the howling storm. …
Horne’s eyes widened and he began to laugh raucously, like a creature deeply hurt. It was as if it were the poem that gave pain, and he laughed to drown it out. He stopped suddenly and nodded, beginning to weep. “Yes. Forgive me,” he said. “God forgive me.” He sobbed—a great, whooping noise—and Chandler winced.
After a moment Chandler asked suspiciously, “Do you really understand?”
“Oh I do! Yes, yes! I do!” He clutched his face in his hands.
“You insist on finalities,” Chandler said, “—if not final salvation then final damnation, no mixture of judgments, no confusion of—”
“Say no more, I beg you!” Horne shouted, bending down, beating the table with his fist. “I understand!”
Chandler stood watching the incredible performance, wincing, unable to make out what he ought to do. At last, still uncertain, he withdrew, removing his glasses to polish them as he walked. At the door he startled three middle-aged ladies in bathrobes, who had obviously been listening with considerable interest and amusement. He took in their faces irritably, with a part of his mind: one was long and rectangular, with broken veins on the cheeks and nose; one was small and round and white; one was tipped back with obesity. They did not hide their leers from him; it was Horne they mocked from the heights of their virginal stupidity. Rage swept over him without warning. He turned back to the door of the library, his anger hammering in his chest. He shouted, “I wanted to talk to you, Horne.” The great frog-face turned, gaping, bleary with self-pity, but Chandler turned away again and left him. His explosion left him shaken and frightened, and at the first chair he came to in the hallway he had to sit down.
11
WHETHER it was a memory or a dream, or the memory, perhaps, of a dream, he could not make out.
They were sitting on a high, green hill that fell away like a cliff toward the Pacific—Susan, Karen, Marie, himself, Wilma and Ken Roos. Marie was perhaps eight months pregnant with Anne. It was the time of some sort of vacation—semester break, probably—for the world was like a lowering animal, the grass and the stunted, wind-battered trees gray-green, touched, on the seaward side, with a supernatural yellow, and the bare earth, where the sun hit it, was red as blood, and the sea and the sky were gray as lead in a mold. There were gulls, hundreds of thousands of them, caracoling over the water, below them, and screaming. When the lunch was finished, Susan and Karen danced away over the rim of the hill to look for treasures—pine cones, pretty rocks, some tough little winter blossom. Ken and Wilma and he fell into intense conversation about something or other; yes, now he had it: the show at the Legion of Honor. Ken was detached, amused, as always, sitting in the highest tower of his inexpugnable castle. “Introspective,” he said. “The last gasp of Romanticism.” He smiled, a smile that made one think of a minister at a baptism, or a dentist making x-rays. He was flatly wrong about the show, in Chandler’s opinion. Wrong as he was about many things that demanded more than a reasonable response. (He remembered now, vaguely, huge obscene images by Rico LeBrun, corruption lifted to the full heroic—great manlike turtles, struggling upward against the weight of their own monumental deformity—in another room sculpture by Mallary, old clothes cast in bronze, in human poses but no figure inside—lifeless gestures of inextricable terror and joy. He, Chandler, had been wild with excitement, and Wilma Roos had said “Oh my God, my God!” and clutched her temples. Marie had simply smiled with pleasure, her hands resting in the pockets of her maternity smock; it was as if she had seen it all before and was perfectly at ease with it. She too was a grotesque, she knew—her face lean and dull with pregnancy, arms and legs thin, ankles large, her belly riding before her like the prow of a ship. And she too was a tangle of emotions: at once proud of herself and ashamed, joyful and full of dread. Chandler went over to her quickly, ashamed that for a time he had forgotten her vulnerability and had left her side. He hovered around her now like a sycophant without a function, as if eagerly hoping for the fall of a royal handkerchief. They were both aware of the ridiculous figure he cut beside her, and they reveled in their absurdity. But Ken Roos polished his glasses, Wilma’s glove slipped through his arm, and with his head slightly cocked he considered the texture and composition of the rags cast in bronze.) Now out on the hillside, Wilma hugged herself, her head thrown forward—black hair neatly parted in the middle and brushed straight down, severe, eyes wide and full of nightmare, lips dry and slightly parted, as usual, as if pleading that Ken come kiss her again and hold her, reassure her. They were always kissing, as it seemed to Chandler. When you came out of a restaurant with them, they would drop back for a moment; when you went to the kitchen to fix them drinks she would cross to him at once; when you glanced into the rear-view mirror, saying, “There’s Paoli’s, the place we were telling you about,” they would be clamped together. Chandler would feign extreme near-sightedness; Marie’s reaction, usually, was to fan herself or clasp her hands and look heavenward for strength. Wilma’s father was a psychologist. Wilma was saying, shuddering, “I couldn’t stand many creations like that. It’s all so true.” Ken grinned and drew her hand to his lips, and Chandler labored over his pipe. Marie hadn’t said a word all afternoon—she seldom had much to say to the Rooses except when she felt like teasing them—but all at once she said, with enormous conviction: “This is much truer—whatever that may mean.” All three of them looked at the same time, as if perfectly understanding her, at the miles of gray-green, dwarfish trees, the cliffs to the right, the ocean falling away to Japan, the wide storm of birds. What Chandler, at least, had seen that instant was Death, wheeling and howling, and two little girls in red coats running down the path toward them, laughing. Marie sat like the Buddha, her legs out like sticks, her red hands resting tranquilly on her enormous belly. Her face was full of light.
When Chandler awakened, sometime toward the middle of that night, there was someone standing at his window, beyond the uncomfortable chair where Marie slept. The back of his neck knew before his conscious mind made out who it was. The room was dark, but it was a starry night, and he could see the woman at the window very clearly. A slight woman with long white hair (her face was turned away from him), a gray shawl, a gray, old-fashioned dress that came to a little above her shoes. He knew at once that his mind must be playing some trick on him, that he was caught up in one of the favorite experiences of philosophers, the twilight impression of an animal sitting on the chair by one’s desk, or the inkstain seen at dusk on one’s table, which a moment from now will resolve itself into the form of one’s sleeping cat. He himself had observed and recorded a hundred such experiences, had culled from the writing of others a hundred more, and had arranged them as well as possible into their proper classes, derived from Collingwood’s Philosophical Method: false distinction, false disjunction, precarious margin. He knew that his eyes had made some mistake, that his mind had fallen—not by accident, of course—into a kind of rigidity, a refusal to shift to a new angle of vision, perhaps more accurate depth perception. He waited for the transformation, but it refused to come, and he remembered all at once a queer, essentially ridiculous experience that had frozen him to the bone one night in his undergraduate days. He’d been a counselor in the men’s dorm, morals of freshmen and sophomores in the dorm. One that is, an upperclassman responsible for the manners and Friday night when he was studying down in the lobby, all alone in the dorm—or so he’d thought—he’d heard (or perhaps, just conceivably, had dreamed he’d heard) someone walking in the hallway upstairs, opening and closing the doors of the rooms one after another. He’d gone up, expecting to find some prankster, but there was no one. He’d looked carefully through all the rooms, but there was no mistake; there was nothing. He’d gone out to stand on the fire escape. There was no one in sight, and no way onto the roof. He’d stood thinking, rubbing his nose, and then, just to be on the safe side, he’d locked all the doors, including the john, with his master key. Then he’d gone downstairs again, dismissing the whole thing from his mind, and had settled down once more with his book. After a moment, as clearly as before, he heard—he was as sure of this as of anything on earth—footsteps in the hall upstairs, and one of the locked doors opened, then closed again. That was all. He had never managed to explain it, nor were there campus legends.
Coupled with the memory, the figure at the window filled his chest with panic. He closed his eyes, getting control of himself, and he reasoned calmly that when he opened his eyes again, if he opened them quickly and looked at once toward the window, his perception would get a fresh start, so to speak, and the figure he thought he saw standing there would snap into what it really was—a curtain, a tree outside, a shadow on the glass.
When he opened his eyes there was nothing. There was nothing, even, that could conceivably have suggested the apparition. And then, with a sudden flush of terror, he realized that the door of his room—firmly shut before, he was certain of it—was open. He turned his head quickly, and for just an instant he thought he saw her again, looking in at him with remote eyes and smiling; and then she was gone. Chandler got out of bed and crossed to the door to look out. The hallway was empty. He closed the door and snapped on the light. Marie continued to sleep.
He could not remember getting back into bed, but when he awakened the second time, he was lying as before, the room dark now. Marie was still asleep in the chair. He thought of waking her and even raised his hand, preparing to do it, but on second thought he decided to let her sleep. She’d get little enough rest, sitting up as she was, and today had been the day of the family trip to Letchworth. He knew without asking that something had happened, though nothing serious, finally. Otherwise she’d have talked about the outing. He wished he had a pencil—he’d somehow misplaced the one he’d been using earlier today. It was a habit with him, thinking on paper. He needed it as some men need their cigarettes, or as others need to pace. He closed his eyes.
It was all very well to say that all logic, all common sense must flatly deny the apparition’s existence. But the senses were not easy to send packing. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, but his hand was as wet with perspiration as his forehead. He could describe her clothing in minute detail—the close-set buttons down the front, the wrinkles in her skirt, the faint discoloration on her sleeve—mold? he wondered in panic. She had smelled of newly turned earth, or old wet boards, the pungent scent of the fruit cellar in his grandmother’s house, where he’d gone in the dark sometimes at night to steal a mason jar of canned peaches. There were rats there, and sometimes the pump would start up suddenly behind him, or a bat would explode into flight three inches from his groping hand.
He checked himself.
Very well, he had seemed to see the old woman clearly. No doubt he had imagined or perhaps dreamed her clearly. Which was to say—because the “unconscious” was a myth, a handy device for scientists, a latter-day phlogiston, a fancy description of ordinary selection and interpretation of experience, but more feeble than that in ordinary consciousness. … He paused, panicky again. He’d lost his place. Then it came back: Which was to say, then, that he himself had made her up. And the question, obviously, was Why? And the answer equally obvious: Because the mind could not take hold of the idea of dying. It was unthinkable, as unthinkable as the idea of total reality. And so his mind had constructed a symbol, so ambiguous as to be completely satisfying, a perfectly symmetrical paradox. Her return from the grave, a denial of the power of death; her seeming to come for him—or for Marie? Was that the dodge his mind had taken?—her seeming to come for someone, an acceptance of death’s power. And so it was as simple as that. Again he wiped his forehead. His hand was dry and he knew that somewhere in the middle of a thought he had slept—perhaps for hours. He forced himself back to the problem. Understanding the monster he himself had created, he had now the power to destroy it. He was not mad, then, after all. Intelligence was still in control.
