Philip was puzzled. “Do you mean the one in ‘The Ancient Mariner’?”
“No, no,” said Mr. Quarles impatiently. “That Frenchman.”
“Oh, of course.” Philip had caught the reference. “ ‘Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées.’ Baudelaire, you mean.”
“Baudelaire, of course.”
“Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empèchent de marcher,”
Philip quoted, glad to be able to divert the conversation if only for a moment from personalities to literature.
His father was delighted. “Exactlah!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s the same with philosophers. Their wings prevent them from walking. For tharty yahs I tried to be a walker—in politics, in business. I didn’t ryahlize that my place was in the air, not on the ground. In the air!” he repeated, raising his arm. “I had wings.” He agitated his hand in a rapid tremolo. “Wings, and didn’t know it.” His voice had grown louder, his eyes brighter, his face pinker and more shiny. His whole person expressed such an excitement, such restlessness and exultation, that Philip was seriously disquieted.
“Hadn’t you better rest a little?” he anxiously suggested.
Mr. Quarles disregarded the interruption. “Wings, wings,” he cried. “I had wings, and if I’d ryahlized it as a young man, what heights I might have flown to! But I tried to walk. In the mud. For tharty yahs. Only after tharty yahs did I discover that I was meant to be flying. And now I must give up almost before I’ve begun.” He sighed and, leaning back against his pillows, he shot the words almost perpendicularly up into the air. “My work unfinished. My dreams unryahlized. Fate’s been hard.”
“But you’ll have all the time you need to finish your work.”
“No, no,” Mr. Quarles insisted, shaking his head. He wanted to be one of fate’s martyrs, to be able to point to himself and say: There, but for the malignity of providence, goes Aristotle. Destiny’s unkindness justified everything—his failure in sugar, in politics, in farming, the coldness with which his first book had been received, the indefinite delay in the appearance of the second; it even justified in some not easily explicable fashion his having put Gladys in a family way. To be a seducer of servants, secretaries, peasant girls was part of his unhappy destiny. And now that, to crown the edifice of his misfortune, he was about to die (prematurely but stoically, like the noblest Roman of them all), how trivial, how wretchedly insignificant was this matter of lost virginities and impending babies! And how unseemly, at the philosophic death bed, was all the outcry! But he could only ignore it on condition that this was genuinely his death bed and that destiny was universally admitted to have been cruel. A martyred philosopher on the point of death was justified in refusing to be bothered with Gladys and her baby. That was why (though the reason was felt and not formulated) Mr. Quarles repudiated, so vigorously and even with annoyance, his son’s consoling assurances of long life; that was why he arraigned malignant providence and magnified with even more than his ordinary self-complaisance the talents which providence had prevented him from using.
“No, no, dyah boy,” he repeated. “I shall never finish. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to have a talk with you.”
Philip looked at him with a certain apprehension. What was coming next? he wondered. There was a little silence.
“One doesn’t want to shuffle off entirely unrecorded,” said Mr. Quarles in a voice made husky by a recrudescence of self-pity. “Shyahr extinction—it’s difficult to face.” Before his mind’s eye the void expanded, lampless and abysmal. Death. It might be the end of his troubles, but it was none the less appalling. “You understand the feeling?” he asked.
“Perfectly,” said Philip, “perfectly. But in your case, Father …” Mr. Quarles, who had been blowing his nose again, raised a protesting hand. “No, no.” He had made up his mind that he was going to die; it was useless for anyone to attempt to dissuade him. “But if you understand my feeling, that’s all that matters. I can depart in peace with the knowledge that you won’t allow all memory of me to disappyah completely. Dyah boy, you shall be my literary executor. There are some fragments of my writing …”
“The book on democracy?” asked Philip, who saw himself being called upon to complete the largest work on the subject yet projected. His father’s answer took a load off his mind.
“No, not that,” Mr. Quarles hastily replied. “Only the bare matyarhrials of the book exist. And to a great extent not on paper. Only in my mind. In fact,” he went on, “I was just going to tell you that I wanted all my notes for the big book destroyed. Without being looked at. They’re myah jottings. Meaningless except to me.” Mr. Quarles was not anxious that the emptiness of his files and the prevailing blankness of the cards in his card index should be posthumously discovered and commented on. “They must all be destroyed, do you understand?”
Philip made no protest.
“What I wanted to entrust to you, dyah boy,” Mr. Quarles went on, “was a collection of more intimate fragments. Reflections on life, records of pahsonal expyahriences. Things like that.”
Philip nodded. “I see.”
“I’ve been jotting them down for a long time past,” said Mr. Quarles. “Memories and Reflections of Fifty Yahs—that might be a good title. There’s a lot in my notebooks. And these last days I’ve been recording on this.” He tapped the dictaphone. “When one’s ill, you know, one thinks a lot.” He sighed. “Syahriously.”
“Of course,” Philip agreed.
“If you’d care to listen …” he indicated the dictaphone.
Philip nodded. Mr. Quarles prepared the machine. “It’ll give you an idyah of the kind of thing. Thoughts and memories. Hyah.”
