The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [445]
… one day, like an iron shutter falling, guilt.’
The word dropped like a falling star and expired in the silence. I took this unhappiest of all relics and pressed it into her cold hands.
‘I will take the letters’ I said.
‘Thank you’ she replied with an air now of dazed exhaustion.
‘I knew we had a friend in you. I shall count on your help.’
As I softly closed the front door behind me I heard a chord struck upon the piano — a single chord which hung in the silent air, its vibrations diminishing like an echo. As I crossed among the trees I caught a glimpse of Mountolive sneaking towards the side door of the house. I suddenly divined that he had been walking up and down outside the house in an agony of apprehen-sion, with the air of a schoolboy waiting outside his housemaster’s study to receive a beating. I felt a pang of sympathy for him, for his weakness, for the dreadful entanglement in which he had, found himself.
I found to my surprise that it was still early. Clea had gone to Cairo for the day and was not expected back. I took the little suitcase to her flat and sitting on the floor unpacked it. In that quiet room, by the light of her candles, I began to read the private letters with a curious interior premonition, a stirring
of something like fear — so dreadful a thing is it to explore the inmost secrets of another human being’s life. Nor did this feeling diminish as I proceeded, rather it deepened into a sort of terror almost a horror of what might be coming next. The letters!
Ferocious, sulky, brilliant, profuse — the torrent of words in that close hand flowed on and on endlessly, studded with diamond-hard images, a wild self-analytical frenzy of despair, remorse and passion. I began to tremble as one must in the presence of a great master, to tremble and mutter. With an interior shock I realized that there was nothing in the whole length and breadth of our literature with which to compare them! Whatever other master-pieces Pursewarden may have written these letters outshone them all in their furious, unpremeditated brilliance and prolixity. Literature, I say! But these were life itself, not a studied repre-sentation of it in a form — life itself, the flowing undivided stream of life with all its pitiable will-intoxicated memories, its pains, terrors and submissions. Here illusion and reality were fused in one single blinding vision of a perfect incorruptible passion which hung over the writer’s mind like a dark star — the star of death!
The tremendous sorrow and beauty which this man expressed so easily — the terrifying abundance of his gifts — filled me with helpless despair and joy at once. The cruelty and the richness!
It was as if the words poured from every pore in his body —
execrations, groans, mixed tears of joy and despair — all welded to the fierce rapid musical notation of a language perfected by its purpose. Here at last the lovers confronted one another, stripped to the bone, stripped bare.
In this strange and frightening experience I caught a glimpse, for a moment, of the true Pursewarden — the man who had always eluded me. I thought with shame of the shabby passages in the Justine manuscript which I had devoted to him — to my image of him! I had, out of envy or unconscious jealousy, invented a Pursewarden to criticize. In everything I had written there I had accused him only of my own weaknesses — even down to com-pletely erroneous estimates of qualities like social inferiorities which were mine, had never been his. It was only now, tracing out the lines written by