Armed with Madness

with a dead bird, Picus the Woodpecker, in his hand and in his arms. Sometimes it was an image for Picus. Sometimes him. There came a point when he would say: “This is a play, made out of my wishes and my disappointment. Truth is quite different. I am unhappy because the boy has things wrong with his character, because he has things wrong with his inside. Or, because we all think, somehow, that Picus is a bad lot.” After this correction there would come the final idea that saw behind these images and their rationalisation another truth. He stirred, shifted and fell asleep again, not knowing at all that Carston, awake, was wondering why he seemed so wretched, and why he had dictated them and taken offence at lunch. That Carston liked him, and admired his good looks, who could only see how worn they were beside the American’s ageless set trimness.

He dreamt again: another Picus came walking up the rock-spit, carrying a glass dish which was the cup of the Sanc-Grail, saying: “It’s the lapis exilii, the stone of exile. What I’m walking on is the lapis exilis, the slender stone. All the same, my dear.” Then the neat reminder that no grail texts were clear what the thing was really called. Then his private fancy to call it the lapis exultationis, the stone of joy. That the thing had never existed. The joy-stone. Freud again. Had he ordered more wax for Picus to play with? A letter with a stamp like a black star, shifting along a river which carried the London post. Too slowly. It must get there quick, or Picus would be angry and say he hadn’t sent it. He woke to remember that that had been an old quarrel, and the stuff had come. Also that he ought to talk to Carston, wide awake in a basket chair, five stone pillars away. That he was feeling horribly shy, raw, ill-adjusted, sick to assure himself that the others thought he was good for something. Had the American seen through him? After all, he’d seen war. Half an hour’s more sleep. Perhaps the dreams would be more comfortable, or wouldn’t come.

Carston was wondering if he was expected to come over and talk. He liked to hear Clarence talk about war. He had seen some rough stuff himself in Russia. A good soldier the man must have been. Wondered why he hadn’t stuck to it, and was now rather overdoing the art business. The others did not overdo it. Quite a good painter, too. Then he saw Scylla in the treetops. A limb of ilex, detached from the main height and formed perfectly. Lifted up, glittering in the insolent sky. She was upstairs, broken in pieces, in preposterously pretty, sexual wax. Picus might be there, making another. He’d go up and see. Creep in, if he wasn’t allowed to enjoy it.

Almost as good as having the girl, to have that thing of her in wax. This was as far as he got. It was quite true that the statue would have done as well. Desire in Carston was almost mental, a redecoration of his memories. Only at the moment he was between the two, the statuette and the girl, the shoulders he saw in leaf and wax and flesh, and was troubled by the repeats.

While Clarence, asleep again, dreamed he was meeting Picus as he had met him in the war, wearing his shrapnel helmet, a queer glass dish someone had found in a well. Rather a worry.

“Big magic,” said Picus. He was a boy then, his smile already gracious and timid, contrasting with a loose, haughty walk. He had said, laughing: “If you take it off, off comes my hair.” That was important. The queer fairy cup his bird wore. Some day Picus would take off his cap to him. He woke up. Something had broken in him, the sense of wrong adjustment was easier. It would come back, but now it was perfectly easy to talk to Carston, by this time also anxious to bridge the gulf between lunch and tea.

VI

Tea was a reasonable meal, with a real human being at it, the doctor having come over from Starn to attend to Picus’s health. Carston held his attention, improvising brilliantly on aspects of his native land, wondering if he could interpret Scylla’s cordiality into the beginnings of desire. Quick work, he knew, but life in the infernal stillness was going at a pace that had New York beat. It became the doctor’s turn to talk. Carston noticed how they played in turns, the second guest after the first. “Pass the buns,” said Felix. That was the cue. Carston listened to stories of medical practice in a remote district; after a time to an accompaniment he did not at first locate. Later that it was Picus ringing with a spoon on his medicine glass.

The doctor said:

“I don’t wonder you two left Tollerdown. It’s a cheerless place at best. I only knew it in winter, going out there to deliver the shepherd’s wife. So I think of it as the darkest place that exists.”

Scylla answered: “I know. Even now when it is burnt white. I think of it the only time I was there in winter, in a storm. Wind roaring over the flint-crop and snow whirling. Lying an instant and vanishing.”

Ross said: “Be prepared for lambing⁠—You hear them mewing in the dark, and see a light in a wooden box on wheels, and out comes a shepherd, with his hands covered with blood.”

The doctor said:

“Show me the cup you got out of the well.” And when he had looked at it: “The luck of the country’s with you. I’m glad to find a few Roman pots. It isn’t glass at all, too heavy. I think it’s jade. It may have been set once. I tell you, it might have been the cup of a