Alma relaxed and looked up, holding the matter poised, deliberately locating the casting vote before breaking into enthusiasm. He paid tribute, coming round the table companionably to her side, but still looking from face to face, claiming audience.
“We’ll break out. Each bring its little mattress and things. After they’ve retired. Yes, I think, after they’ve retired.” Why the conspirator’s smile? The look of daring? What of the servants? They were bound, anyhow, to know in the morning.
It was glorious to rush about in the lit house, shouting unnecessary remarks. People shouting back. Nobody attending. Shouting and laughing for the sake of the jolly noise. Saying more than could be said in talk. Admitting.
And then just to lie extinguished in the darkness wondering what point there was in sleeping out if you went to sleep at once. All that jolly tumult. And he had been so intent on the adventure that he had let Miss Prout change her mind without protest, only crying out from the midst of busily arranging his bed on the lawn. … “Have you seen Miriam’s pigtails?”
And suddenly everything was prim; the joy of being out in the night surging in the air, waiting for some form of expression. They didn’t know how to be joyful; only how to be clever. … She hummed a little song and stopped. It wreathed about her, telling off the beauties of the night, a song sung by someone else, heard, understood, a perfect agreement.
“What is she doing?”
“She’s sitting up, waving her banana in the air; conducting an orchestra, I think.”
“Tell her to eat the banana and lie down.” Alma, Rose Gauntlett, Mrs. Perry and me, starting off just after I came, to paddle in the moonlight. … “Don’t, don’t do anything that would make a cabman laugh.” Why not? Why should he always imagine someone waiting to be shocked? Damn the silly cabman if he did laugh. Who need care? As soon as her head was on the pillow, nothing visible but the huge night and the stars, she spoke quietly to herself, flouting them. He should see, hear, that it was wicked to simmer stuffily down as if they were in the house. He didn’t want to. She was making his sounds for him.
“Tell Miriam this is not a conversazione.”
His voice was actually sleepy. Kindly, long-suffering, but simply wanting to go to sleep. There was to be no time of being out in the night with him. He was too far off. She imagined herself at his side, a little space of grass between. Silent communication, understanding and peace. All the things that were lost, obliterated by his swift speech, communicated to him at leisure, clear in the night. Here under the verandah, with its roof cutting off a part of the sky, they were still attached to the house. Alma had been quietly posed for sleep from the first moment. They were all more separated than in their separate rooms indoors.
The lingering faint light reflected the day, the large open space of misunderstandings, held off the cloak of darkness in which things grew clear. She lay watching for the night to turn to night.
But the light seemed to grow clearer as the stillness went on. The surrounding objects lost their nighttime mystery. Teased her mind with their names as she looked from point to point. Drove up her eyes to search for night in the sky. But there was no night there. Only a wide high thinness bringing an expansion of sight that could not be recalled; drawing her out, beyond return, into a wakefulness that was more than daytime wakefulness; a breathless feeling of being poised untethered in the thin blue-lit air, without weight of body; going forward, more and more thinly expanded, into the pale wide space. …
There is no night. … Compared to this expanse of thin, shadowless, boundless light the sunlit sky is a sort of darkness. … Even in a motionless high midday the sky is small, part of it invisible, obliterated by light. After sunset it is hidden by changing colours. …
This is the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time, visible, pouring itself out. Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time. Its movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace. This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time, pouring itself out; ceaselessly winding off short strips of life, each life a strip of sleepless light, so much, no more, lessening all the time.
What rubbish to talk about the stars. Vast suns, at immense distances, and beyond them, more. What then? If you imagine yourself at any point in space or wafting freely about from star to star you are not changed. Like enlarging the circle of your acquaintance. And finding it, in the end, the same circle, yourself. A difference in degree is also a difference in kind. Yes. But the same difference. Relations remain the same however much things are changed. Interest in the stars is like interest in your neighbours before you get to know them. A way of running away from yourself.
What is there to do? How know what is anyone’s best welfare?
To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible. Any kind of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish.
Christ? But all the time he was alone with a certainty. Today thou shalt be with me. … He was booked for Paradise from the beginning … like the man in No. 5 John Street going to live in a slum, imagining he was experiencing a slum, with the latchkey of his west-end house in his pocket. … Now if he had sacrificed Paradise. But he couldn’t. Then where was selflessness?
Yet if Christ had never been, the sky would look different. A Grecian or a Jewish sky. Awful. If the personal delight that the sky showed to be nothing were put away? Nothing held on to but the endless pouring down of time?
