A Garden of Trees (14 page)

“A horse?” Peter said, with a wild and miserable laugh. “Do you mean a horse?”

“Not a horse,” Marius said.

“Do you mean love?” Annabelle said. “And if you do, then that is nothing new and we already know about it and indeed it is as old as the world.”

“I do mean love,” Marius said.

“Tell me,” Peter said.

Marius stood with his back to us, by the window, looking out into the dark. There was a quietness in the room which had come with the night. “I mean this,” he said, “that the old love is dead. It is dead because the means that it had to express itself are dead. I don't know if they ever existed. I am talking about love of people, love of humanity, the love between several individuals. The old love said, ‘Love thy neighbour,' but it didn't say how. And it is the ‘how' that matters, it is the only thing that matters, and it never said how. It might as well have said nothing. Because everybody wants to love their neighbours, of course they do, but they can't. They find it impossible. They don't know how to set about it. So they are stuck, and they fail, and they hate each other. The world is turning to hate because it has forgotten the means of love.

“They tried, of course. They said all the words. But if you go to your neighbour and try loving him in the old way he will think you a fool. He won't want it, in the old way. And I am talking about the best kind of neighbours, too—the people who are still in the hope of love, who have not yet become bitter through failure. But they still won't want the old love. If you offer it to them they will feel hollow, enclosed, indifferent, they will think you are getting at them, they will be bored with you, that is the terrible thing, bored. They
won't
accept it from you. The old love is meaningless to people now.”

“The old love did not say, ‘Love thy neighbour,' first,” Annabelle said.

“I know, but it said it second, and it did not say how. That is why it has failed. It is just words; it leaves people empty; it is a statement of the self. Yes this is it,” he said, turning towards Annabelle, “—when you talk about love in the old way you are making a statement about yourself, nothing more. The statement on its own has no relevance to the people to whom it is addressed. And the old behaviour, too, that has no relevance either.”

“That's right,” Annabelle said.

“Well?” Marius said.

“But what is this old love that you are talking about, and what was it that the old love that I am talking about said first?”

“Well?” Peter said.

“It must be something new,” Marius said. “A new behaviour. An entirely new means of expressing love.” He said this obstinately, as if for the first time he and Annabelle were in disagreement.

“But how?” Peter said. “That is your question.”

“I don't know,” Marius said.

“You do,” Peter said.

“I don't.” He was still looking at Annabelle.

“The old love that you have been talking about has never been love at all,” Annabelle said. “And the old love that I am talking about did not make the statement ‘Love thy neighbour' on its own.”

“No?”

“No,” Annabelle said. “But go on with what you were saying.”

“Go on,” Peter said.

“I was going to say this,” Marius said. He spoke slowly, as if his mind were only half on his words, and half on a problem that lay somewhere beyond them. “I do not know what love either has been or will be, but I know what it is not. It is not the statement of desire. It is not the behaviour of the imposition of desire. It has nothing to do with the self at all. The means haven't. It is the means that I am talking about. For the means of loving the self must be dissolved.”

“Into what?” Peter said.

“Look,” Marius said. “This.” He spoke more quickly now, as if the problem beyond him, which lay somewhere in the distance between him and Annabelle, had now come into sight. “Into what you have created. This is similar to the creation of an artist. There is no communion between the artist himself and his audience. The artist has to create something beyond himself in order that there may be communion. When a great dancer dances he is not himself, he is his part, he becomes his part in order that he may project himself upon his audience. He loses himself, and he creates something new;—and this created part is the only meeting-ground between audience and dancer. Once this meeting-ground has been created, then, and only then, will there be communion. And it is the same with love. A lover must lose himself in order that his love may be communicable. He must create something out of the loss of himself in order that his love may be acceptable. What his technique is—how it may be defined—I do not know. It may be different in every instance. But I know this:—that every successful creation is a reflection of eternity: the technique will deal in symbols which are reflections of reality. Reality is what one desires—it is not what is. To create it there has to be movement which is in awe of eternity. One has first to be aware of the tragedies of eternity, and then to reflect them. So that two things are necessary:—to have the eyes of a man who sees these tragedies and the technique of a craftsman who can create their symbols in terms which will reach to others. Then what is becomes what one desires. Technique is the throwing of reality across the ground that separates loneliness. Perhaps, in memory, in the loss of self which is execution, one could throw communion across these spaces like one throws a ball.”

Annabelle said: “The meeting ground has already been created. What is needed is the technique of finding it, not the technique of creating it oneself.”

“Of finding it then. It doesn't matter. The act of creation has to be created again in each individual before he can find it. It doesn't matter. Lose yourself and draw your symbols from the subconscious or the super- conscious or call it God, if you like, it's all the same—any old tragedy will do. I know that you must have your God. I know what you mean by your first commandment. Have it then. But I will tell you this, that the technique is something different to that of the churches. The churches have never answered the question of technique. But art has tried to, and dancing has tried to, and we must go back to the savages for that. But savages have something of the technique without the desire to use it: or rather, they use it for fear. And we have the desire without the technique. It is this that one should study, perhaps—this subtlety of movement and attitude, this darkness of laughter, and use it for love. It is there, somewhere, hidden; and that is what will be new.”

There was a silence, and then Annabelle said: “Yes, but God is more than a word, and the first commandment is at least half of the technique, and although you may say what you like about churches there is another meaning of that word which might explain even more about the technique if it ever exists as more than a meaning.”

“Which it doesn't,” Marius said.

“I don't know. But it exists as a symbol, and that is my symbol. Whether it exists as more I don't know because I have never tried it.”

“Tried what?” Marius said.

“Tried to lose myself in the meeting-ground which is not just a word but which is the first commandment.”

“Oh hell,” Peter said. He sat up suddenly. “And I'll tell you this, that it is easier to get lessons in dancing that it is to love God. Three guineas in Oxford Street and you can jump like a bloody savage. But three prayers to God and all you get is a crick in the back. And a kick too, most likely. I know because I've tried it.”

“You haven't,” Annabelle said.

“I have. And I tell you that I can jump but I can't love God, and I don't always hit my head on the ceiling, either.”

“It was you who asked the question,” Annabelle said. “How to help others and how not to be alone.”

“And it is you who have not answered it. You say you must lose yourself, Marius says through dancing and you say through God, and I say that if I have to choose between being a savage who cuts up his children and an ascetic who cuts up himself, then I would rather stick to my donkey and try to train it into a horse. I stick to that symbol, and to hell with the rest.”

“As a matter of fact,” Annabelle said, “you do not stick to your donkey, and you do care about other people, and you could not bear it if you were on your own.”

“To hell with the rest,” Peter said.

“You said at the beginning that you are not living if you stick to your donkey. You know that that is true and that you yourself would always live for other people and in fact do more for other people than you will ever admit or imagine.”

“To hell with everything,” Peter shouted. “And to hell with me. If you dare to flatter me I shall cry.”

“I suppose we shall behave now as we should have behaved anyway,” Marius said, “whatever are the words that we have used.”

“Then give me the brandy,” Peter said, “and to hell with words.”

“It is you this evening who have danced and who have loved,” Annabelle said.

“I told you I should cry,” Peter said. “And now will you play the piano, please, very sadly, so that my tears may be mistaken, as they will always be mistaken, I hope, for the tears of either brandies or pianos. And let us behave, for a little, as you say, as we should anyway behave, but won't, because of our symbols and our nonsense and the things that we can never understand and can never even hope to. You can play a psalm and Marius can croon like a negro and I will make a noise like a lonesome and tragic ass. Then, indeed, we will have created a reflection of eternity. And I still think that I know more about life than the whole bloody lot of you put together.”

Annabelle played the piano.

7

In the days that followed I was with them, often, meeting for coffee in the mornings as a substitute for breakfast, and buns in the afternoon as a substitute for lunch. I do not think we ever ate properly except in the evenings, when Annabelle would cook us large quantities of buttered eggs in the flat, or we would go to some foreign restaurant which Peter had heard was excellent, and there eat the chopped cabbage, the skewered gristle, the queer pancakes, in which such foreign restaurants excel. Meals are the standard by which the duration of the day is timed, so that with the neglect of eating the days themselves became haphazard, passing quickly, almost unnoticeably, and becoming muddled with the nights. Emerging from a door, or drawing the curtains of a window, it was often a shock to find that the dawn, or the dusk, had crept up on us without warning, and that the scene we had expected had been transformed into either the candle-light of evening or the pale arena-like glare of early morning. Marius usually was away during the day, engaged upon some business about which I never quite discovered, but he would join us at night wherever we were, and he had a fortunate faculty for interpreting the garbled and often contradictory messages that we left behind us at the flat. Whether we were with him, or away from him, it was always the same. I think that in all our lives this spring was a queer interlude in which time became a vacuum, and we were all waiting for something to happen, whatever it would be.

Of our lives before this time we never talked, although we seemed to talk of everything else, and it was not until long after that I learnt some of the details of Peter's and Annabelle's childhood. I never learnt much about Marius's. He was older than us, and always mysterious. I think he was about thirty when we knew him. I learnt something about him, later, from his wife. But from the other people who knew him before he met Peter and Annabelle I never discovered a thing. They told me a lot about themselves, about how they reacted to Marius, but they never answered questions about Marius himself. He had that effect on people. He made them think about themselves, but never gave anything away.

He had lived most of his life in the West Indies, in a big house by the sea. He had come over to England in the war, as Alice had said, with his wife, and his wife was ill, and she had gone to hospital. Then he had lived alone, busying himself with a number of things that interested him, and being taken up by people who dropped him as soon as he disappointed them, and who usually returned at intervals to dig him up again only to retire in increasing bafflement when he would not submit to their plans. He intrigued people and at the same time infuriated them, for although they sensed that he was an extraordinary person they could not tell where his power lay. I have heard people talk of him as if he could have been anything, or again as if he were a wastrel without any power at all. But he was the kind of person who all his life is treated as a celebrity, although I do not think he was anything of a celebrity until the end.

When he had met Annabelle and Peter he went to live with them. I do not suppose that they talked much about this, either; he just stayed one night in the spare room of the flat that belonged to their parents and went on staying there on and off for the next six months. Their parents were away—their father was at that time the governor of some colony in Africa—and they had left their home in London for the use of their children. Annabelle was eighteen and Peter twenty, and Peter had come home previously to do his service in the army. This he had done, and Annabelle had come with him to look after the flat, and to be introduced to London by a series of relations.

When Annabelle had first moved into the flat these relations had done their best to move in with her, or at least to persuade her to move in with them. They had said that it would be more proper. But she had held out against them, and in this she was supported by her parents, who showed their regard for their children by letting them do as they wished. So Annabelle kept the flat and cleaned it and did the cooking with the help of a woman who came in each day, and it was there that Peter had come during his week-ends and his leaves from the army, and it was there that Marius came during the holiday that Peter had before he was due to go to Oxford.