A terrible freedom, p.18
A Terrible Freedom, page 18
I walked to and fro, treading softly as a cat lest I wake Lindy from her sleep; though I did not know on which side of the ship she was sleeping. William had the single cabin on the starboard side, and Lindy’s luggage had been put in that on the port side; but their quarrel might have been patched up—lovers’ quarrels are often a mere quest for patching—and she could now be with him, or he with her. I did not feel jealous, but merely envious. And not wholly or properly envious, because in my envy there was a qualm or shiver: her beauty delighted but sometimes daunted me. It was too near perfection, and I could not grow accustomed to the bloom of delight that covered exposition of her theme. Her self-confidence was excessive, and though she wore no look of scholarship—nor ever spoke with the pomp of learning—her voice had sometimes the inhuman sound of stiff pages smartly turned upon a scholar’s desk. But if I had been younger—well, thirty years younger—I would have been dry-skinned and dry of mouth with thirsting for her. What a mercy to be sixty-six, and able to see the shape of danger in the shadow that beauty throws!
Andrew was the first to join me. He looked cast down, uncomfortable, and for a while was loath to talk.’ She’s our guest on board, and we shouldn’t have spoken so roughly to her,’ he said at last. ‘But God, she made me angry!’ And then, half a minute later, ‘Do you think she’s right?’ he asked.
‘We’re not invulnerable,’ I said.
‘We live on a small island, and parts of it are overcrowded. But she said we were paralysed by overpopulation. You’d gone to bed by then, but what she said was that initiative lay dead under the feet of the multitude, and the power to govern was paralysed by the sheer weight of fifty million people. She’s got the gift of words, that lassie.’
‘I think she exaggerates. It’s an American characteristic.’
Roderick came on deck, snuffed the air, and said, ‘The glass is high and steady. With an easterly wind there’s usually fine weather in the west. Fog on the east coast, sunshine out here. I’ve seen it often.’
He filled and lighted his pipe, and said, ‘It’s a wicked tongue she’s got. I came near to losing my temper with her last night.’
He went forward to the bow of the boat, and stood there, smoking; and Andrew said, ‘But we’ve learnt our lesson. We’ll not argue with her again.’
‘If you don’t like what she says, don’t listen,’ I suggested. ‘Forget about your ears, and use your eyes. I think she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.’
Andrew was immensely surprised, and said, ‘Do you tell me that? Well, well! I must take another look at her.’
We all breakfasted together, very amicably, for Roderick and Andrew covered any memory of the previous night’s altercation with assiduous attention to Lindy, who was loud in her praise of their scrambled eggs and coffee. William said they were going for a long walk, and asked if I would go with them, at least as far as the great white beach called the Traigh Mor.
Roderick gave us picnic lunches, and haversacks to carry them in, and when we reached the Traigh Mor I told William and Lindy, ‘I want to go no farther. I can spend the day here very happily indeed, and find my own way back to the boat. So off you go, and don’t give another thought to me.’
They had the intention of making a circular walk round the island—a matter of fourteen or fifteen miles, I suppose—and as they were about to leave me I called them back and said, with a pretence of severity, ‘And when we sit down to supper, I hope you’ll both be too tired for argument.’
The tide was out, and the Traigh Mor was a vast expense of shining white sand, a mile across and nearly a mile from high-water mark to the pale edge of the distant sea. I was filled with a pure, childish pleasure as I walked about on the firm, almost crystalline surface—made of the crumbled shells of ten thousand times more cockles than all the stars in heaven—and beyond the fringe of the incoming tide I could see an archipelago of minute islands poised on a peacock sea. Between Barra and South Uist the sea is shallow, its bottom white, and some miracle of the sun paints the moving water with hyacinth and purple, with apple-green and the green of deep rivers; and small, rude islands live innocently within circlets of foam.
I ate my sandwiches—very good they were: smoked salmon, cut thick, and others of a cream cheese in lettuce, packed in what the Scotch call ‘baps’—in a coign of rock on the west side of the great beach, and drank a bottle of beer. I dozed off for an hour or so, and then walked out on a green peninsula called Eoligarry, where, by scrambling down to a small beach, as white as the Traigh Mor, I enjoyed, in perfect solitude, a private view of the whole Atlantic.
As much of the Atlantic, that is, as anyone can see through human eyes; for what I saw stretched flawless to a bright horizon that looked very like infinity. Behind me the ground rose steeply, and closed the landward view. It was easy to foster the illusion that I had left the world behind me—the grossly inhabited world—and I felt no sense of deprivation. The bright sea, reaching to infinity, enchanted me with its comely invitation.
I think, perhaps, I slept again for a little while. The beach was entirely sheltered, the air was warm, and I was very surprised when I looked at my watch and saw it was already five o’clock. The sea had darkened, but was still calm, and I left it with reluctance.
I walked back, quite slowly, to North Bay, and several times stopped to talk with crofters and their womenfolk who stood by the road, chatting to their neighbours as if roads were primarily made for conversation; and again and again I was so struck by the ease and dignity of their words, the grace of good manners twinned with good sense, that I returned to the ship in a very comfortable frame of mind. I took my time about washing and changing, I had a drink in my cabin, and when I went up to the deck-house—where we usually met before supper—I found William and Lindy, tired but not exhausted by their walk, drinking whisky and soda. They appeared to be on very good terms again, and though in my old-fashioned way I retain respect for what I consider the better conventions, I made no objection to their going down to the saloon, when supper was ready, in their walking clothes with the sweat of their walk still upon them. I would not have been comfortable without washing and putting on a clean shirt; but they, apparently, felt no need of either.
And perhaps I did well to put up with their addiction to the new cult of slovenliness, for our conversation that night was good-humoured throughout, though again—I think by accident, by pure inadvertence—we found ourselves discussing a subject of the gravest import. I could make a joke of it by saying of grave import, but that I shall avoid, though the temptation is obvious. We were caught in the ebb of some other topic, and drifted—I’m sure that is the proper word—into a debate on immortality.
Dear Andrew made an admirable beginning. He, with the calm assurance of his Calvinist conviction, said, ‘The number of those destined for salvation—those guaranteed of immortality, that is—was exactly stated in the Book of the Revelation of St. John as 144,000.’
‘I’ve always been interested in that calculation,’ said William, ‘for no one has ever been able to tell me if 144,000 is the final figure, or the number of divine passports—so to speak—that had been prepared for St. John’s contemporaries.’
‘I think we can safely assume,’ said Andrew—speaking like a good schoolmaster, both kindly and judicious—‘that St. John was speaking for his generation only; and if salvation and immortality were promised to 144,000 of the world’s population in his time, we’ve got to admit that God was both lenient in judgement and generous in reward.’
‘But of those who have lived and died since?’ asked William.
‘It might be presumptuous to suppose that a like proportion, of every succeeding generation, has been as lucky as their predecessors,’ said Andrew. ‘But those who are destined for salvation are still marked and numbered from their birth. There’s no doubt about that.’
‘So there’s nothing even approximating to equity in God’s world?’ said William.
‘A salmon, which is the noblest of all fishes,’ said Andrew, ‘lays about six hundred eggs, or maybe more, for every pound of its weight. So a salmon of twenty pounds will lay about twelve thousand eggs; and how many of them, do you think, will live to be fertilised, and grow into smolts, and survive to reach the salt waters of the sea which is their destiny? Very, very few. Now the salmon is as greatly superior to the haddock or the herring—to say nothing of the little soft fishes that live in muddy streams—as Robbie Burns to a drunken supporter of the Celtic football team; and if only one in a thousand salmon eggs ever lives to reach the sea, how many, do you think, of the eggs of humankind will grow with the grace to float into heaven?’
We had finished eating by then, so I opened a bottle of whisky and passed it round the table. Lindy sat beside me—after walking fifteen or sixteen smiles on a very warm day she should have had a bath—but still I loved her, and I admired the judicious tone—she spoke with a more pointed authority than Andrew had shown—in which she said, ‘It’s incontestable that all primitive peoples believed in immortality. It’s only in communities of the sort we tend to call sophisticated that belief in immortality evaporates.’
‘For a very good reason,’ said William. ‘Sophisticated communities are numerous communities, which means that everyone has a lot of neighbours. Nowadays innumerable neighbours. And when we look at our neighbours—your neighbours and mine—one thing is certain: they weren’t cut out for immortality. And so, by denying immortality to our neighbours, we begin to doubt, and then disbelieve, its possibility for ourselves.’
‘I don’t know if that’s the explanation,’ said Lindy, ‘but the anthropologists say a belief in immortality was almost universal, and the sociologists tell you that nowadays it’s non-existent.’
‘That’s a big jump,’ I said. ‘How many centuries does it cover?’
‘From a week before the Renaissance to the day when they paid the first dividend on the Industrial Revolution. From belief in man as an entity to the conception of man as a piece of profitable machinery.’
For the first time since I had met her she seemed to have lost—or mislaid, perhaps—her characteristic exuberance. She sat with her elbows on the table, leaning forward, and even in my doting eyes her exquisite features wore a heavy, rather sullen look. The smell of her body—excited by her long walk—was quite perceptible. She herself may have been aware of her armpits, for sadly she said, ‘This island of Barra—it’s a heavenly island, and I love every inch of it—but it’s so near death it doesn’t even smell of living people. Those that are left have been preserved in peat-smoke. They’re like mummies of a pre-Renaissance faith—when man was man, and God was God, and there was some relationship between them—but now, God damn it, there’s no such relationship, and the mummies are left on their shelf. On the Atlantic shelf.
‘Give me a drink,’ she said, and held out her glass.
‘Once upon a time,’ said Roderick, ‘I remember I went to Manchester, and three weeks later my ship was immobilised in the Persian Gulf. There was political trouble of some sort, I forget what. So I took leave and went to Isfahan. And in Isfahan, which is not at all like Manchester, I had an introduction to a man who was a merchant in the city, and seemed to be very well off. But he said to me, on the first evening we met, “I think I am the poorest man in all Persia, because I have lost the sensibility of youth. When I was young I would cry from my heart—but my tears were the tears of joy—when I saw the first rose of the year, and I would stamp and roar with pride when the first snow whitened the top of Demavend. But now, when I see such things, I say, That is a rose, and that is the snow on Demavend. They mean nothing more to me than that, and therefore I am no better than a pauper.”’
None of us, I think, saw much relevance in Roderick’s story—certainly I didn’t—though a glimmer of his purpose emerged when he added sombrely, ‘That isn’t the sort of remark you’d hear from a businessman in Manchester.’
But the sadness of his tale was agreeable to our mood, and may have encouraged William to speak with unusual feeling. ‘I envy your merchant of Isfahan,’ said William, ‘because he knew the truth of the matter. A man ought to be aware—nervously and brilliantly aware—of the world he lives in. His nerves should be like fiddle-strings to what his eyes reveal and his ears declare. And if they’re not—if his nerves don’t respond—he’s nothing but a factor in a statistician’s analysis, or a serviceable vegetable.’
‘He may,’ said Andrew, ‘still carry the ineffaceable mark of his destiny.’
‘A man like a marrow? Can a walking pumpkin be promised salvation and a latchkey to immortality?’
‘If he is numbered with the Elect,’ said Andrew.
William, I am glad to say, stifled the reply he was about to make, and Lindy, with the best of intentions, said, ‘I knew a woman in Philadelphia who thought she’d been a watermelon in a previous incarnation. You could see the difference, but it wasn’t enough to start an argument.’
‘Many years ago,’ I said, ‘I knew someone whose faith in reincarnation was beyond dispute.’
‘Man or woman?’ asked Lindy.
‘A woman.’
‘It’s usually a woman, and most of them claim to have been Mary, Queen of Scots, or Cleopatra.’ ‘Or a small furry animal.’
‘Women,’ said Lindy,’ think a lot about abortion. And if a woman extrudes a foetus in its tenth week, it’s not unnatural for her to suppose that something equally primitive lies far back in her blood-line.’
‘In the Orient,’ said Roderick, ‘it isn’t only women who believe in reincarnation.’
‘Tales of polymorphism,’ said Lindy, ‘were always grandma’s way of putting the kids to sleep and telling them to be kind to animals.’
‘But Buddhism—’ I said.
‘Don’t talk to me about Buddhism. Buddha was the first Californian.’
‘Lindy doesn’t believe in reincarnation—’ said William.
‘Call it polymorphism. It’s the jelly where fairy-tales grew.’
‘But she believes in immortality.’
‘Sure I do! I’m like one of Cousin Andrew’s smolts,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find my way to the sea.’
Incredulously I asked, ‘Are you a Calvinist too?’
‘Calvin was a pretty good sociologist. He saw that if Heaven was going to go on being heavenly, it couldn’t afford to get overcrowded. In some ways he was a big dumb cluck, but even the dumbest of dumb clucks sometimes stumble on the truth, like a dumb blonde winning a jackpot.’
‘In certain respects,’ said William, ‘Lindy shares your extravagant views, my dear father. She sees over-population as the basic reason why policy fails and administration founders. And because Britain is a small, overloaded country—’
‘The British are the next in line for sinking.’
‘But I,’ said William, ‘can’t sympathise with what seems to be her high regard for isolation. She abhors multitude, and exalts the individual. But I detest the idea of isolation, and distrust the individual. I am a painter, and if I were a painter in solitude, who would buy my pictures? Or even look at them? More important than that—no, don’t interrupt me—more important is the enormously important matter of humour. Now humour depends on an audience. Humour is impossible in solitude. If a man, alone in his landscape, were to slip on the banana-skin that he himself had dropped, what could be do but blame God and denounce Him for involving His creatures in irrational tragedy? But if he slips on a banana-skin in front of an audience, everyone laughs and he realises, however painfully, that he’s made a joke. And jokes are a much more civilising influence than a solitary and erroneous conception of God’s scorn.’
‘I don’t want solitude,’ I said,’ but equally I don’t want to feel lost and anonymous in an anonymous multitude.’
‘What I’ve been saying,’ said Lindy, ‘is that the pressure of an immoderate population diminishes the individual, and as the individual is diminished in importance, so is his sense of relationship with God.’
‘Then you do believe in God?’ said Andrew.
‘I wouldn’t be hooked on death if I didn’t.’
We all betrayed, by our attitudes, a stiffness or rigidity as if, for a moment, we had been modelled in wax. It was, of course, the stiffness of embarrassment. Only Lindy herself was unaffected, and she, revealing most of her teeth in a wide-open smile, regarded us with dancing eyes. Again I passed the whisky.
Though I cannot speak with full knowledge of the others, I had been disconcerted, even abashed, by the confidence with which, a moment or two before, she had declared belief in her own immortality. At her age, I felt, she had no business to have thought of such a thing. She was so spectacularly full of life that she should be satisfied with what she had; and I’m pretty sure she was. It was quite impossible to imagine her abstracting herself from the present in order to contemplate a posthumous existence, and in my ears her words had rung with a note of complete falsity. But perhaps that is going too far. Perhaps I should say they had sounded the hollow note of words that were quite meaningless.
But now I was more deeply embarrassed. I am always pleased to hear young people announce their faith in God, because it means, if nothing else, that their minds are not wholly submerged in the vulgar apparatus of an encumbered world; but in Lindy’s voice the declaration immediately evoked, from my startled mind, a very uncomfortable question. In what sort of a God did she believe? A God who had made her in His own image? Though I was greatly attracted to Lindy—though I could look at her with marvellous pleasure and think of her with absurd desires—I was badly shaken by the vision of a God who, even very distantly, might resemble her.
