it was the evolution of this love, compelling all interdependent life to take place, that, seen in retrospect, was the will of God. And the peace that ensued from its fulfilment smiled on the face of the violated girl just as clearly as on the mouth of the intercessional prayer.
* * * *
One has to speak at some length about oneself. Why? Because everything begins, as it ends, at the egoistic heart. “Man,” I heard the shade of Disraeli interpolate, “is only truly great in his passions.” The passions of the egoistic heart have erected themselves marvellous memorials in places that the admirer can never visit, like the cairn that commemorates Captain Scott at the South Pole. Others, greater than this simple and vainglorious hero, have established their monuments in even remoter regions. Such as Antony who died on the Everest of the sensual, or Abelard who lived a long life in a cave of chastity that he could not abandon. Each of us, I suspect, has his own epitaph to earn, but the life upon which it will stand, this is our own responsibility. The sins that we feed with crumbs and cakes will follow us home; the virtues upon whose tails we failed to place salt will never attend us; the crime done in a hot bed will in turn engender a criminal.
* * * *
My father, a man of small means who lived in a southern county, had three possessions and he was incontinently fond of each. He loved his mother, his father, and himself. His affection for his two sons, eyeing the advance across a generation, hesitated, shied, and then turned inward upon himself. My brother and I would look back at him, wherever we were, and at all times, in the knowledge that his sympathies were not for us.
He had been a soldier. For several years after the war he continued to use his military prefix of Major. Normally loquacious, he spoke too much of war. And then, one day, he discovered two adolescent strangers in his house, one painting a picture of horses killing each other, and the second, the elder, myself, writing a thesis to disprove the existence of God. Not unkindly he remonstrated with us. Money was short, he explained; and expenses, after the war, exorbitant. If the times had been otherwise he would, he assured us, have been happy to have sent us together to a secondary school in the capital of the county. But, as things were … he left the sentence hanging about in the air and walked slowly from the room. I deduced that he was inviting his sons to get jobs. And the next night, quietly, as though it were an indelicate obligation of the body, he died in his sleep, leaving that unfinished sentence over our heads like an injunction from the hereafter.
* * * *
My brother, who, because he happened to be a couple of years younger than I, delegated me the decisions that we knew we shared, came, then, to a decision of his own. He decided that he was a painter. And that, as far as my brother is concerned, is that. I see no reason why I should say anything more about him; during the time that intervenes between then, when he decided he was a painter, and now, when I write this, he has simply gone on painting pictures of things that kill each other.
And at this point there is no one left in my story but me and crossed stars.
* * * *
Where was that house in which I first encountered love? What irresponsible collocation of improbabilities conspired to bring together at the same time and in the same place the victim in his yoke of roses, the goddess with her urgent appetites, and the altar of human sacrifice on which the heart breaks? That meeting of the improbabilities had occurred long, long before I knew it. I met her, in my youth, when she wore a gym slip and long black stockings, carried a pile of exercise books under her left arm, and, being three years older, had not really noticed the precocious boy who, years too soon, carried a sexual fox in his vitals. She was tall and dark, and her eyes had, even then,
* * * *
One has to speak at some length about oneself. Why? Because everything begins, as it ends, at the egoistic heart. “Man,” I heard the shade of Disraeli interpolate, “is only truly great in his passions.” The passions of the egoistic heart have erected themselves marvellous memorials in places that the admirer can never visit, like the cairn that commemorates Captain Scott at the South Pole. Others, greater than this simple and vainglorious hero, have established their monuments in even remoter regions. Such as Antony who died on the Everest of the sensual, or Abelard who lived a long life in a cave of chastity that he could not abandon. Each of us, I suspect, has his own epitaph to earn, but the life upon which it will stand, this is our own responsibility. The sins that we feed with crumbs and cakes will follow us home; the virtues upon whose tails we failed to place salt will never attend us; the crime done in a hot bed will in turn engender a criminal.
* * * *
My father, a man of small means who lived in a southern county, had three possessions and he was incontinently fond of each. He loved his mother, his father, and himself. His affection for his two sons, eyeing the advance across a generation, hesitated, shied, and then turned inward upon himself. My brother and I would look back at him, wherever we were, and at all times, in the knowledge that his sympathies were not for us.
He had been a soldier. For several years after the war he continued to use his military prefix of Major. Normally loquacious, he spoke too much of war. And then, one day, he discovered two adolescent strangers in his house, one painting a picture of horses killing each other, and the second, the elder, myself, writing a thesis to disprove the existence of God. Not unkindly he remonstrated with us. Money was short, he explained; and expenses, after the war, exorbitant. If the times had been otherwise he would, he assured us, have been happy to have sent us together to a secondary school in the capital of the county. But, as things were … he left the sentence hanging about in the air and walked slowly from the room. I deduced that he was inviting his sons to get jobs. And the next night, quietly, as though it were an indelicate obligation of the body, he died in his sleep, leaving that unfinished sentence over our heads like an injunction from the hereafter.
* * * *
My brother, who, because he happened to be a couple of years younger than I, delegated me the decisions that we knew we shared, came, then, to a decision of his own. He decided that he was a painter. And that, as far as my brother is concerned, is that. I see no reason why I should say anything more about him; during the time that intervenes between then, when he decided he was a painter, and now, when I write this, he has simply gone on painting pictures of things that kill each other.
And at this point there is no one left in my story but me and crossed stars.
* * * *
Where was that house in which I first encountered love? What irresponsible collocation of improbabilities conspired to bring together at the same time and in the same place the victim in his yoke of roses, the goddess with her urgent appetites, and the altar of human sacrifice on which the heart breaks? That meeting of the improbabilities had occurred long, long before I knew it. I met her, in my youth, when she wore a gym slip and long black stockings, carried a pile of exercise books under her left arm, and, being three years older, had not really noticed the precocious boy who, years too soon, carried a sexual fox in his vitals. She was tall and dark, and her eyes had, even then,
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