A Garden of Trees (15 page)

For a while the three of them lived there together, and Marius stayed ostensibly as a friend of Peter's. But when Peter went away there was talk about Marius staying on in the flat alone with Annabelle, so for a time Marius had gone away out of deference to this talk; but Annabelle's scorn toward such scruples was so prolonged and vehement that eventually he moved back again out of deference to her. The talk had continued, anyway, even when he had gone: for people argued that he would not have left if he had not had something to hide. As Annabelle said, to run one's life according to the theories of others is a business too contradictory to be considered even out of kindness. So Marius stayed, and the necessary attempts at explanation were made, and the parents had not minded. And anyhow, Peter was not away for long.

Peter had gone to Oxford and had hated it with all the fury of which he was capable, and had walked out before the end of his first term. He said to me once: “Oxford is like a flea-circus: you can suspend a flea from wires and pretend that its struggles are acrobatics, but it can never get off the wires and it can never stop being a flea.” In all this talk of Oxford he used phrases like these, as if the only people he had met there were either parasites or puppets, and the pride that drove them only the parade of greed. But his talk was always exaggerated, and I do not know what was in his heart. In the army he had been happy, because he had expected nothing from it, and yet in spite of the drudgery he had found something, with surprise—the simplicity of simple people doing things that are supposed to be unpleasant. And at Oxford he had expected something, because he had been told to expect it, and he had found only the complications of complicated people doing things that are supposed to be pleasant. He had been taken up by the societies, by the clubs, by the serious young men with portfolios: he had sat in the junior common room and had been smothered by smoke and tea: he had felt the heaviness of the jokes and the lightness of the discussions: he had written his essays as judgments and been told that he was not in a position to judge: he had studied other people's judgments and decided that there was no one in a position to judge. He had gone to some lectures and had not heard them, to others and had not understood them, others again and had wished that he had neither heard nor understood. At first he had tried to work, but in his mind all the time was the conviction that his work was irrelevant, that it was a fraud, that several thousand people were playing logical acrostics and were claiming that they were dealing with philosophical truth. This was what obsessed him—the knowledge that what he wanted was judgment and truth, and the fear that what he was getting was instruction in crossword puzzles. He wouldn't have minded, perhaps, if this had been admitted. But it wasn't. The instruction was solemn, circumlocutory, and ceaseless. The instructors were as grandiloquent as emperors or saints. He even heard, one evening, during a sermon by the Master, his college described as a temple in which men's souls were kept pure by the bright virginity of scholarship. This was a schoolroom where they played lexington and lotto! A barrack-room housey-housey fitting numbers into squares! He walked out of the sermon, because he felt ill, and then he stopped trying to work.

He shared a room with a man of thirty, who was married, and who could not afford to stop working. This man made noises in his throat while he worked; and when he was not making noises in his throat he was knocking his pipe out on his boot or blowing through it like a whistle. So Peter went out. He would have had to have gone out anyway, he said, because the room was so cold, and because the only arm-chair had a loose spring in it that hummed like a harmonium. Also the ugliness was aggressive: the wallpaper brown, the carpet green, the upholstery muddy. So he went out to parties, and he gave parties himself, and he was quite taken up by the party-going people.

He gave gramophone parties that were stopped by the Dean, river-boat parties that were stopped by proctors, dance-hall parties that were stopped by the police. He climbed up over walls, along across roofs, down through windows. He fell through buttery skylights into bursars' arms. At tea time he picked up girls with their evening dresses tucked up beneath their coats, at breakfast time he returned them re-tucked to their colleges after a celibate night in the streets. If he was locked out after midnight he could not get in before dawn, if he tried to sleep in the daytime he was disturbed by traffic and bells. Indeed, he said that it was the bells that finally drove him to leave. There was one that exploded just outside his window every quarter of an hour, and he claimed that it broke his tooth glass and did not even give accurate time.

And throughout all this period there was the gossip, and the intrigues, and the jealousy;—the strain of social pleasure revolving like bicycle wheels in the street. Bicycles whizzing up Broad Street, whizzing down St. Giles, with the gossip whizzing secretly on tyres of whispered words. Peter played, pedaled, and went faster than the rest. For a time he was rumoured to be engaged to three girls at once, and men spent sleepless nights explaining his success in terms of snobbery. He bought a car, and they said he was a millionaire; he sold it, and they said he was bankrupt. They followed him to Woodstock, they followed him down the Thames; they followed him voraciously, in a swarm, and then suddenly he stopped. The bells, for the last time, had broken his tooth glass.

So he left Oxford, and he came away hating things, for he felt that Oxford was a microcosm of the world. His memories of the army were no use to him, for he knew that what one finds in the army does not exist outside its ranks. He hated in general, in theory, the work, the play, societies and systems—but he never really hated individuals. I think that individuals were too precious to him; and there was too much love in him also beneath the fury, and it was this that made him so violent. There was more love in him than in most of the people I have known and it was always trying to come out, so that his indignation had to fight to squash it. His indignation won because the world in which he found himself invites more indignation than love on the surface, and he could not get beneath the surface because he felt so uncompromisingly about the evidence of his ears and eyes. He judged himself on his actions, and so he judged the world on its actions, and he judged fiercely, ruthlessly, with a desperate overworking of his conscience that could not tolerate mistakes. This, of course, was the biggest mistake of all; as he had been told at Oxford, one is not in a position to judge the world. Also, if he had paid more attention to his own shortcomings, as Annabelle had told him, instead of those of the world, he might have made fewer mistakes himself and thus eased the strain on his conscience. But with all his feelings turned outwards from himself, outwards towards evidence about which he felt so strongly that he had to judge it, he had to rage against it or else the strain upon his conscience would have broken him. He could not accept things. He was a sensitive person, and in his way an unselfish one. That is what gave him his talent for funniness, his talent for laughter and making other people love. But I think that the only people he ever loved himself were Annabelle and Marius.

Being turned outwards, and suffering, he had to have a God, and his god was Marius. I believe that Marius was a god to several people, but to none so strongly as he was to Peter. Peter took Marius as a god because he was free not only from all the things that Peter hated, but also from the hatred that was in Peter; and perhaps it was this hatred that obsessed Peter most of all. I know that Marius never hated. I don't know if he ever loved, either, in a human, passionate way; not even Annabelle. The word seems to bear a different relation to him. There is a meaning of the word in which it is abstract, inhuman; as if it described the state in which love might be possible, rather than the fact of love itself. This meaning, I think, was more applicable to Marius. Of course, Marius was not entirely like this, but he seemed to be at moments; and looking back on him this seems to be the best way to explain him.

It is difficult to explain him further. I heard him called a saint, once, at the end of his life, but he was not a saint. Saints are solitary, emotional people, whose force is emotional and who as a result are often embarrassing. Saints are crucified by the world because people get fed up with them, because they are too much of a good thing, not because the world feels a challenge from them. Marius's force was not emotional: he was too restrained, enclosed, static. It was not intellectual either, because I think he despised the intellect: he never gave much time to arguments that were logical. Another word is needed to describe the force that Marius possessed, and I do not think that the word exists. It was something to do with the subconscious, something frightening without the emotion of fear and true without the validity of reason. One always felt that Marius was right, like an oracle, even when one disagreed with his words. It was this that was frightening. His force, his whole understanding, seemed to come from a different level of consciousness to that of other people. Being in this presence was sometimes like the feeling that one gets when one is alone in a forest—a hard, impersonal, unbelievable feeling, like losing consciousness. I thought of him once as a tree, and I remember this feeling. Primitive peoples are said to worship trees because they imagine that there is something supernatural about them. There is nothing emotional or intellectual about this sensation. It is different from that—on another level.

And the world did feel a challenge from Marius. They felt him as a witch, not as a saint, and they resented him. The peculiarity of witches, as opposed to that of saints, is that they are usually burned without having done anything. Saints have to do a lot before attention is called to them: witches need do nothing. Saints are condemned for their unnatural actions: witches for their unnatural personality. Marius did not have to do anything. He maddened people by doing nothing, by his aloofness. And those who did not see him as a god often saw him as a witch, and they wanted to burn him. They said he was inhuman, and so he was. Humanity depends upon the conflict between good and evil, and I do not think that there was often a conflict in Marius at all.

And Annabelle? I cannot describe Annabelle. She has seemed to me to be most things in her time.

In the days that we were together, then, after our meeting with Alice, we moved around London with the impetuosity of people who have not known each other for very long, people who have been thrown together on a holiday that might end at any moment or go on for years, people who keep moving because to sit still is a waste of time. Peter, waiting for news from his father, had nothing to do: I, being idle and disorganized, had nothing to do: Marius and Annabelle, although they disappeared regularly—she to the shops and kitchen, he to no one knew where—did not let what they had to do intrude upon the irresponsibility that seemed our special province. I have never again been happy in this province, but I was then, and I think it was this very fact that we were waiting, as if on a holiday, and the fact that we really knew each other so little, that made this happiness possible. I had built up myths around them, and perhaps they had built up their own myths too, and one can live by myths quite easily so long as circumstances do not combine to mock or shatter them. For me the circumstances were propitious for myths, because my knowledge of the reality was so limited. There were many unanswered questions that lay around us, for instance—questions about Marius's wife, about Marius's relations with Annabelle, about hers with him, about Peter's attitude to whatever these relations were. There was also the question about myself—about why they should be content that I should spend so much time with them. This question was never even asked. Nor, indeed, were the others, but they hung in the air around us like the mysteries, the riddles, that are the guardians of myths. The question of Marius's wife, especially, was often present in my mind; but instead of causing the uncertainty that might have been expected, in some way it helped, by the fact of its secrecy, to mitigate the irresponsibility and make possible the fun. Since we did not know what it was that we ought to worry about, we waited for a time when we might; and in the meantime did not worry at all. It was as if, under the shadow of secrets, we were able to live more freely beneath the sun that might otherwise have weaned us. The power of myths usually resides in their mysteries.

It was this power that determined my feelings at that time towards Annabelle. I loved her, and I knew that I loved her, but it seemed impossible that I should ever make this known. I felt that she belonged to Marius; that there was so much established between her and Marius in their attitude, their behaviour, and their past, that any intrusion on my part would be sacrilege. It never occurred to me to try to establish a separate relationship between the two of us on our own. Whenever we happened to find each other on our own by chance, the situation at once became awkward, alarming, as if we were treading on forbidden ground; threatening the myth, coming close to breaking some taboo. We would make polite conversation, not looking at each other, and wait for the others to return. I became strangely aware of myself at these moments—aware of responsibility and the stretching length of time. But the others always did return, and then we would greet them, and the fantasy, shaded from its dangers, could continue on its levels out of time and out of thought. I did not know the nature of these taboos, these mysteries, but I remember them. Whatever love there was between Annabelle and me at that time belonged to them. I think it was the existence of Marius's wife that was perhaps the cause of them. She was the fifth person amongst us, always, absent and unknown, who by her presence and yet her absence made the relationship between the four of us so imaginary and yet so strong.

So we lived on the surface, and the surface was movement, and the movement was fun. Alice was right, I thought; it is fun that matters. Fun as a business, fun as a life, fun as an attitude that is graceful and creative. There were days when nothing mattered but this, and these I remember. Peter walking up the street with his golden hair bounding, his jacket open, his tie over his shoulder, his shirt rucked up around his waist: Annabelle with a hat like those that Spanish men wear when they come in to towns for the festivals, a black stiff hat with a wide flat brim and a crown on top like a cake tin: Marius on the corner, always slightly dramatic, always posed, his hands in his pockets, watching. Peter running through the traffic, running for a bus, everything flying, his arms, his legs, his elbows, waving: Annabelle swaying with long quick steps with her chin tilted up above the soft black strap that ran from her hat past her cheek-bones: Marius standing, watching us catch the bus, following from a distance discreetly in a taxi. Peter wore old clothes, clothes from his school days, but he wore them with a peculiarly careless elegance. Annabelle made her own clothes, made them from stiff jutting material that went in capes and folds, reminding one of bustles and epaulettes and bodices. One never noticed what Marius wore.