The Sea, the Sea

too seriously, though I do feel cross with her for not having told me and I feel she has broken her promise. Besides, what are their relations? Lizzie’s proximity is surely enough, even now, to convert any man to heterosexuality. (Her breasts are enough.) Do they drink cocoa together in their dressing gowns? The whole thing is rather horrid. Of course Gilbert is nothing, he is a man of twigs, I could crush him with one hand and take Lizzie with the other. I certainly cannot envisage any platonic love trio. From the date of Lizzie’s letter it appears to have been in the dog kennel for well over a week. On reflection this seems to be no bad thing. If I had received it at once I might have been tempted to write an ill-tempered or facetious reply by return of post. As it is, she has had a silence to reflect upon. It may be best to prolong the silence.

However, to repeat Lizzie’s own perfectly reasonable question, what do I want? Oh why do women take everything so intensely and make such a fuss! Why do they always demand definitions, explanations! There are in fact some quite shrewd guesses in her letter, and the quiet outburst of resentment has not escaped me. Those wounding and not wholly unjust observations have doubtless been stored up for a long time! Perhaps I do want a sort of retired part-time ‘senior wife’ figure, like an ageing ex-concubine in a harem who has become a friend: a companion who is taken for granted, to whom one is close, but not committed except by bonds of friendship? (This need not preclude occasional love-making. In fact the harem situation would suit me down to the ground.) Why can’t Lizzie be intelligent enough to understand? My letter said nothing about time and space, I simply thought of her and wanted to see her. But then she will start asking absolute questions. An ‘experiment’? Yes, why not? She knows how I hate exhibitions of emotion, but she pours it all out all the same. She ‘wants everything’, does she. Well, she can’t have it; and that doubtless is that.

I feel no jealousy of Gilbert, but I feel a sort of envy of him! He is the clever one. He has got simple Lizzie as his sweet affectionate housekeeper; and meanwhile I very much doubt whether he has given up ‘hunting’. I must confess I still have feelings of ownership about Lizzie. She has ‘lasted’ in my mind. Yet, she is quite right, loving shows like one’s slip showing, as I once said to her when her slip was showing! (How these girls do treasure up one’s words.) I have neglected her, I have even been cruel, though that could be called a sign of love and the neglect a sign of trust. I do in fact recall the business of the taxi after Sidney’s luncheon. I saw that Lizzie was scheming to leave with me. But at the last moment I quite deliberately brought Nell Pickering along too. Nell is the new musical comedy star, with whom I had been flirting all through lunch. Nell is twenty-two. (I wouldn’t mind having her in my harem.) Poor Lizzie. What made me suddenly write that teasing semi-serious letter to her I wonder? Some fear of loneliness and death which has come to me out of the sea?

Since the subject of Lizzie Scherer has come up I may as well give some further account of her. I began to love Lizzie after I realized how much she loved me. As does sometimes happen, her love impressed me, then attracted me. I was directing a season of Shakespeare. She fell in love with me during Romeo and Juliet, she revealed her love during Twelfth Night, we got to know each other during A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then (but that was later) I began to love her during The Tempest, and (but that was later still) I left her during Measure for Measure (when Aloysius Bull was playing the Duke). I recall very clearly that occasion when I first realized that Lizzie loved me. She was playing Viola. (This was during Lizzie’s brief ‘shining period’, her annus mirabilis.) It was the production in which Wilfred Dunning, who usually played Sir Toby Belch, suddenly insisted on playing Malvolio. At least, he did not insist, I let him. It was a marvel but it wrecked the production. Lizzie and I were alone in a rather draughty church hall which for some reason was all we could get at that moment to rehearse in. It was a winter’s evening and I remember the place as being lit with gas. Lizzie (now in Act two, Scene four) got as far as ‘she never told her love’. Then she stopped and seemed to choke and uttered no more. I thought at first that this was her own extremely effective idea of how to speak the speech, and I waited for her to go on. She gazed at me. Then huge glistening tears rose into her eyes. When I realized what the matter was I began to laugh and laugh and laugh, and after a bit Lizzie laughed, laughing and crying helplessly. And I loved her for that laughter too. She was a good girl. She is a good girl.

I somehow always picture Lizzie in breeches. She first won a little fame as principal boy in small provincial pantomimes. She was very slim in those days and rather boyish in appearance and used to stride around in boots and cut her hair very short. Her great ambition, never realized, was to play Peter Pan. She was (briefly) quite serviceable as Shakespeare’s transvestite girls. (Sidney later directed her as Rosalind.) I made her into an adorable Viola, but her greatest success in that historic season was as Puck. (In Romeo and Juliet she was a mute lady. I forget who played Juliet, except that she was no good.) I was touched by her love and by her superb obedience, but I was tied up with Rosina at the time and I saw Lizzie as a wispish enchanting rather infantile sprite. Every time I met her I laughed and then she laughed too. We used to laugh at each other across restaurants and suddenly and mysteriously during rehearsals. I did not need to be told how much she loved me, though she never, even on the first occasion, said anything about it. I thought that was stylish of her. Throughout the Dream her radiant gaze rested on me, her will touched my will and trembled. She understood and obeyed, and although (as she told me later) she knew about Rosina, she existed in a sort of heaven of suffering which I must confess gave me some gratification. Perhaps this gratification was a prophetic gleam from the love I was later to feel for her. And by then I was getting thoroughly tired of Rosina. In that production of the Dream Al Bull (a most uneven actor) played Oberon rather boorishly, and I regretted not taking the part myself. Lizzie’s cup would then have been full and running over! It was at the end of that season that I went to America, and there followed the horrible interlude in Hollywood and the first debacle with Fritzie Eitel. I think I went to Hollywood partly to escape from Rosina: in any case I escaped. Rosina thought I left her because of Lizzie, but this was not so.

When I came back to England again there was suddenly an interval of peace and an atmosphere of restored innocence and joy. It was summer. I was on good terms with Clement who had one of her silly young men at the time. I felt, after the horrors of California, free and happy. I wanted to get back to Shakespeare after the muck I had been wading through in America. A fly-by-night American director called Isaiah Mommsen let me play Prospero. It was the last substantial part I ever played. Lizzie was Ariel. She was the most spiritual, most curiously accurate Ariel I ever saw. Her love for me made her so, and in the midst of all that magic made me love her. Oddly, I felt then, and the feeling remains with me, that I loved her as if she were my son. She often called herself my page. She had a pretty little singing voice and I can still hear the thin true tone of her Full Fathom Five. How now, after all these years, my tricksy spirit. I remember that she once played Cherubino in an amateur production of Figaro, and I think this tiny success was one of the things she valued most. Damn, it has just occurred to me that Gilbert Opian probably regards her as a boy!

My love for Lizzie was somehow an innocent love. (God, what messes I got into with Rita and Rosina and Jeanne and Doris and the rest.) The innocence was Lizzie’s pure gift. Her love was so scrupulous, so intelligent. She never used her power to lay upon me the lightest of moral bonds. The reader will say, but the bonds were there! Well, yes, and yet some grace born of Lizzie’s selflessness seemed almost to abolish them and we lived in the golden world. Of course she never reproached me. It was as if she positively did not want me to feel any sense of duty towards her, but wanted me simply to use her for my happiness. Written so, this sounds crude. But as we lived it, it was the profoundest humblest tact on her part, and on mine a love that was composed of gentle gratitude. We were gentle with each other.

And yet of course it was also at the same time a scene of carnage. (Why do I so much enjoy writing this down?) I told her from the start that I had no conception of marrying her. Was it blind stupid hope nevertheless which made her so infinitely kind to me? An ungrateful thought: I am sure she had no hope. I told her that the affair was temporary, that my love for her was temporary, and doubtless her love for me was temporary. I spoke of mortality and the fragile and shadowy nature of human arrangements and the jumbled unreality of human minds, while her large light brown eyes spoke to me of the eternal. She said, I want to be perfect for you so that you can leave me without pain, and this perfect expression of love simply irritated me. She said, I will wait forever, although I know… I am not… waiting for… anything. What a love duet, and how much I enjoyed it although in her suffering I suffered a little too. Certainly she concealed her pain as much as she could; but towards the end it was impossible. She cried before me with wide open eyes, not staunching the tears. Her tears fell on my sleeve, on my hand like storm rain. And when at last I told her to go she went like a shadow, with silent swift obedience. After that I went on my second visit to Japan. The taste of sake still makes me remember Lizzie’s tears.

She never prospered in the theatre after I went away. (All the ladies went downhill after I left them, except