«Where's the mink?»
«I explained, Bradley.»
«Oh you should be ashamed,» I said. «Look at you both. You are wicked people. You should be so ashamed.»
I said, «I'm not going to wait while you pack these cases.» I could not bear to see the girl shaking out Priscilla's things and folding them neatly. «You can send them on to my flat.»
«Yes, yes, we'll do that, won't we, darling,» said Marigold. «There's a trunk upstairs-«You will tell her, won't you,» said Roger. «Tell her as gently as you can. Make it clear though. You can tell her Marigold is pregnant. There's no way back now.»
«You've seen to that.»
«You must take her something now,» said Marigold, kneeling, her bland face glowing with the tender benevolence of real felicity. «Darling, shouldn't we send her that statuette, or-?»
«No. I like that thing.»
«Well then that striped vase, didn't she want that?»
«This is my house too,» said Roger. «I made it. These things have their places.»
«Oh darling, please let Priscilla have that vase, just to please me!»
«Oh all right, darling-What a tender-hearted little muggins it is!»
«I'll pack it up carefully.»
«Don't think I'm the devil incarnate, Bradley old man. Of course I'm not a holy character, I'm just an ordinary chap, I doubt if you'll find an ordinarier. You must understand that I've had a rough time. It's been pure hell running two lives, and Priscilla's been awful to me for so long, she's really hated me, she hasn't said a kind or gentle thing to me for years-Marigold came back with a bulky parcel. I took it from her and opened the front door. The outside world looked dazzling, as if I had been in the dark. I stepped outside and looked back at them. They were swaying together, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand. They could not check two radiant smiles. I wanted to spit upon the doorstep but my mouth was dry.
Later on they were shooting pigeons and the funnel was blue and white, the blue confounded with the sky, the white hung in space like a great cylinder of crinkly paper or like a kite in a picture. Kites have always meant a lot to me. What an image of our condition, the distant high thing, the sensitive pull, the feel of the cord, its invisibility, its length, the fear of loss. I do not usually get drunk. Bristol is the sherry city. Excellent cheap sherry, light and clean, is drawn out of huge dark wooden barrels. I was feeling, for a time, almost mad with defeat.
They were shooting pigeons. What an image of our condition, the loud report, the poor flopping bundle upon the ground, trying helplessly, desperately, vainly to rise again. Through tears I saw the stricken birds tumbling over and over down the sloping roofs of warehouses. I saw and heard their sudden weight, their pitiful surrender to gravity. How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. I was looking at a ship's funnel and it was yellow and black against a sky of tingling lucid green. Life is horrible, horrible, horrible, said the philosopher. When I realized that I had missed the train I rang the number of my London flat and got no reply.
«All things work together for good for those who love God,» said Saint Paul. Possibly: but what is it to love God? I have never seen this happening. There is, my dear friend and mentor, some hard– won calm when we see the world very detailed and very close: as close and as vivid as the newly painted funnels of ships on a sunny evening. But the dark and the ugly is not washed away, this too is seen, and the horror of the world is part of the world. There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. There is no drying of tears or obliteration of the sufferings of the innocent and of those who have undergone crippling injustice in their lives. I tell you, my dear, what you know better and more deeply than I can ever know it. Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near-gods by heaven-inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.
Later on the empty lighted street was like a theatre set. The black wall at the end of it was a ship's hull. The stone of the quay and the steel of the hull touched each other and I sat upon the stone and leaned my head against the hollow steel. I was in a shop lying under the counter with a woman, and all the shelves were cages containing dead animals which I had forgotten to feed. Ships are compartmental and hollow, ships are like women. The steel vibrated and sang, sang of the predatory women, Christian, Marigold, my mother: the destroyers. I saw the masts and sails of great clippers against a dark sky. Later I sat in Temple Meads station and howled inside myself, suffering the torments of the wicked under those pitiless vaults. Why had no one answered the telephone? A train after midnight took me away. Somehow I had managed to break the blue-and-white china urn. I left the fragments in the compartment when I got out at Paddington.
I was at Christian's house where they had taken Priscilla. Later I was with Rachel in a garden. This was no dream. And somebody was flying a kite.
I found a note from Rachel waiting, and Rachel herself came early, very early, soon after I had arrived, to tell me what had happened: how Priscilla had become upset, how Christian had telephoned, how Arnold had come, how Francis had come. When I failed to appear Priscilla had become as fretful as a little child awaiting its tardy mother, tears, fears. Late in the evening Christian had carried Priscilla off in a taxi. Arnold and Christian had laughed a great deal. Rachel thought I would be angry with her. I was not. «Of course you could do nothing if they decided otherwise.»
«It's not a plot, Bradley, don't look like that.»
«He's furious with us.»
«He thinks you're holding Priscilla as a hostage!»
«I am holding Priscilla as a hostage!»
«Whatever happened to you? Priscilla was terribly upset.»
«I missed the train. I'm very sorry.»
«Why did you miss the train?»
«Why didn't you telephone?»
«How guilty he looks! Look, Priscilla, how guilty he looks!»
«Poor Priscilla thought you'd been run over or something.»
«You see, Priscilla, we told you he'd turn up like an old bad penny.»
«Be quiet everybody, Priscilla's trying to say something.»
«Bradley, don't be cross.»
«Silence for Priscilla!»
«Did you get my things?»
«Sit down, Brad, you look awful.»
«I'm sorry I missed the train.»
«It's going to be all right.»
«I did telephone.»
«Did you get my things?»
«Dear Priscilla, don't throw yourself around so.»
«I'm afraid I didn't get your things.»
«Oh I knew it would go wrong, I knew it would, I knew it would, I told you so!»
«What happened, Bradley?»
«Roger was there. We had a chat.»
«A chat!».
«You're on his side now.»
«Men always stick together, dear.»
«I'm not on his side. Did you want me to fight him?»
«You talked to him about me.»
«Of course I did!»
«They agreed that women were hell.»
«Well, women are hell!»
«Is he unhappy?»
«Yes.»
