cheese-pale.
I went into the little red room where the candles, as on an altar, flanked my wine glass and the almost empty bottle. I poured out the rest of the wine and sat and reflected. I tried to recall more things. I was sure that none of the others had noticed anything odd. Peregrine said he had pushed me and walked on. He was very drunk and may genuinely not have known exactly what happened. By the time there was a general alarm I was already lying on top of the rock with James trying to revive me. I had not questioned James properly because he had become ill immediately afterwards, he had had some sort of collapse and retired to bed. Why was he so exhausted? Because of what he had endured in rescuing me, the physical and mental energy which he had expended in that unimaginable descent. I recalled his words about ‘those things that people do, they can be jolly tiring’. No wonder James was knocked out and seemed to have lost his grip. But then… ‘I relaxed my hold on him, I lost my grip.’ Whom had James been speaking of as I fell asleep that night, his sherpa or perhaps… Titus? How was it that Titus had come to me just then? Why had James so pointedly asked for Titus’s name? A name is a road. And why had Titus said that he had seen James ‘in a dream’? James had always been the finder of lost things. Had he stretched out some tentacle of his mind and found Titus and brought him here and kept him as it were under his care upon a binding thread, a thread of attention which was broken when James became so strangely ill after I had been lifted from the sea? James’s reaction to Titus’s death had been ‘it ought not to have happened’, almost as if he felt that it was his own fault. But then if it was his fault it was my fault. There is a relentless causality of sin and in a way Titus died because, all those years ago, I had taken Rosina away from Peregrine. And of course my vanity had killed Titus just as James’s vanity had killed the sherpa. In each case our weakness had destroyed the thing we loved. And now I remembered something else which James had said. White magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. Had one of these demons, with whose help James had saved me, taken advantage of James’s collapse to seize Titus and crash his young head against the rock?
These thoughts were so mad and their implications so hideously frightening that I decided I must stop thinking and try to sleep. I felt that in spite of everything, I should sleep well. I wanted most intensely to talk to James about all these things, or, supposing he had already left, to write to him. But how could I find his address, would he have an address? I really knew nobody who knew him except Toby Ellesmere, and Toby often seemed entirely mystified or ignorant about James’s doings and his way of life. Could I go to some army headquarters or to the Ministry of Defence and ask? Of course they would ‘know nothing’.
I had finished the wine and the fire had sunk into a pile of ash dully smudged with red. I sighed deeply as I thought of all the years I had wasted when James and I might have been friends, instead of just awkward embarrassed relatives or something almost more like enemies. I reached out to the table and began pushing the pile of unopened letters about to see if I recognized any of the writings. Of course there was nothing from James, I would have spotted that at once. There might be one from Sidney telling his side of the ‘young actress’ story. I noticed, because its appearance caught my eye, a letter with a London postmark addressed to
Dear Mr Arrowby,
I have to be the bearer of sad news, I am sorry. I cannot find you in the telephone. But you are at liberty to make telephone to me at the number given on the paper. My sad news is this, your cousin Mr James Arrowby has just died. I am his doctor. He left me a note that you are his cousin and his heir and that I should myself inform you of his decease. So I do this. I want also to tell something to you alone. Mr Arrowby died in much quietness. He telephoned me to come to him and was already dead when I arrived, and he had left the door open. He was sitting in his chair smiling. I must tell you this. By an accident that is no accident I came to him as his doctor. I am Indian, I come from Dehra Dun. When I first met Mr Arrowby I at once recognized him as one who knows many things. Perhaps you will understand. I had some prophetic thought about him, and when I came to him I saw what had been. In northern India I have known such deaths, and I tell it to you so that you need not be sorry too much. Mr Arrowby died in happiness achieving all. I have written for cause of death on the certificate ‘heart failure’, but it was not so. There are some who can freely choose their moment of death and without violence to the body can by simple will power die. It was so with him. I looked upon him with reverence and bowed before him. He has gone quietly and by the force of his own thought was consciousness extinguished. Thus it is good to go. Believe me, Sir, he was an enlightened one.
I will be at your service at the telephone number. With obedient wishes, I am yours truly,
P. R. Tsang.
I read the letter through twice and a terrible cold quietness fell upon me and I sat like a statue motionless for a long time. It did not occur to me to wonder if the strange letter was a hoax or a mistake. I had no doubt that James had gone. He had gone quietly; with just a little gentle pressure of his mind upon his body he had made the restless flickering consciousness cease forever. I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move. And I felt an odd new sensation which it took me a little time to recognize as loneliness. Without James I was at last alone. How very much I had somehow relied upon his presence in the world, almost as if he had been my twin brother and not my cousin.
I saw from my watch that it was nearly midnight. I would indeed go to London tomorrow. And I wondered with helpless sad confusion what had happened, what had they done with him? Was James still sitting there in his chair, dead and smiling his inane smile?
I got up to go to bed and then remembered that I had made my couch out on the rocks. I decided to go to it. Outside the night was warm and had darkened just enough to show a scattering of stars and the faint smudgy arch of the Milky Way. There was a diffused lightness in the sky however, and I recalled that it must be, give or take a day or two, midsummer. I was able to find my way not too dangerously over the rocks which I now knew so well, though at one point my foot slipped into a pool. The water in the pool was warm. I found my hard bed and lay on it in shirt and trousers, just taking off my shoes. I propped my head so that I could look at the horizon which was marked by a dark line and a silver line. The water lapped below me like ripples against a slowly moving boat.
Why had James gone, why had he decided to go now? Was there any immediate reason, such as I could understand, or was it all part of some big wheeling pattern of my cousin’s existence of which I could perceive nothing? All sorts of crazy hypotheses kept coming into my head. Was it something to do with Lizzie? Impossible. Or with Titus? Was he perhaps filled with remorse about Titus, imagining himself responsible for that death? Here I even began to conjecture that James really had known Titus earlier, was perhaps himself the mysterious person who had taught Titus those little airs and graces and given him the copy of Dante’s poems. But this was inconceivable, such a deception not to be seriously imagined. And as I lay there looking at the sky above the sea I saw a golden satellite begin its slow careful journey over the arch of the heavens, and it looked like a calm travelling soul. James had said he was going on a journey. Death was the journey. It was his last ‘trick’.
No, I could not attach this ‘casting off’ to any ordinary or present cause. James’s decision belonged to a different pattern of being, to some quite other history of spiritual adventure and misadventure. Whatever ‘flaw’ had led, as James saw it, to his sherpa’s death belonged, it might be, to some more general condition. Religion is power, it must be, and yet that is its bane. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. Perhaps James wanted simply to lay down the burden of a mysticism that had gone wrong, a spirituality which had somehow degenerated into magic. Had he been overwhelmed with disgust because he had had to use his ‘power’ to save my life, was that the last straw, and was it really all my fault after all? Had I proved to be, in the end, a thankless burden and a dangerous attachment? Here, and sadly, I understood the possible meaning of James’s last visit, James had come to make his peace with me, but it was for his sake, not for mine, in order to break a bond, not to perfect it. He knew it was our last talk, and that was why he was so relaxed, so open, so unprecedentedly frank and gentle. He came, not with any ordinary desire for reconciliation, but in order to rid himself of a last irritating preoccupation. Anxiety or guilt about his wretched cousin might cloud the conditions of the perfect departure upon which he had perhaps long been bent.
How did it go off, that severance, I wondered. Had he responded to the vision of ‘all reality’ which comes at the moment of death and by which one must instantly profit? Had he gone eagerly to that rendezvous and was he now, in what strange heaven of release, ‘set free’, whatever that might mean? Or else, aching and weak like the shade of Achilles, shut in some purgatory to expiate sins which I could not even imagine? Was he now wandering in a dark monster-ridden
