The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [16]
“So, you see, you are after all come to the beginning of another day.” And as he spoke, he took from his pocket the envelope addressed to Imogen and tore it into small pieces. Like wounded birds they tumbled and fluttered, until reaching the water they became caught up in its movement and were swept out of sight round the bend of the river towards the city, which Adam had just left.
The reflection answered: “Yes, I think that that was well done. After all, ‘imperatrix’ is not a particularly happy epithet to apply to Imogen, is it?—and, by the way, are you certain that she can understand Latin? Suppose that she had had to ask Henry to translate it to her!
“But, tell me, does this rather picturesque gesture mean that you have decided to go on living? You seemed so immovably resolved on instant death yesterday, that I find it hard to believe you can have changed your mind.”
Adam: I find it hard to believe that it was I who yesterday was so immovably resolved. I cannot explain but it seems to me as though the being who survives, I must admit, with very great clearness in my memory, was born of a dream, drank and died in a dream.
The Reflection: And loved in a dream, too?
Adam: There you confound me, for it seems to me that that love of his alone does partake of reality. But perhaps I am merely yielding to the intensity of the memory. Indeed I think that I am. For the rest that being had no more substance than you yourself, whom the passage of a bird can dissolve.
Reflection: That is a sorry conclusion, for I am afraid that you are trying to dismiss as a shadow a being in every way as real as yourself. But in your present mood it would be useless to persuade you. Tell me instead, what was the secret which you learned, asleep there in the grass?
Adam: I found no secret—only a little bodily strength.
Reflection: Is the balance of life and death so easily swayed?
Adam: It is the balance of appetite and reason. The reason remains constant—the appetite varies.
Reflection: And is there no appetite for death?
Adam: None which cannot be appeased by sleep or change or the mere passing of time.
Reflection: And in the other scale no reason?
Adam: None. None.
Reflection: No honour to be observed to friends? No interpenetration, so that you cannot depart without bearing away with you something that is part of another?
Adam: None.
Reflection: Your art?
Adam: Again the appetite to live—to preserve in the shapes of things the personality whose dissolution you foresee inevitably.
Reflection: That is the balance then—and in the end circumstance decides.
Adam: Yes, in the end circumstance.
Continuation
They have all come over to Thatch for the day; nine of them, three in Henry Quest’s Morris and the others in a huge and shabby car belonging to Richard Basingstoke. Mrs. Hay had only expected Henry Quest and Swithin, but she waves a plump hand benignly and the servants busy themselves in finding more food. It is so nice living near Oxford, and Basil’s friends always look so charming about the place even if they are rather odd in their manners sometimes. They all talk so quickly that she can never hear what they are saying and they never finish their sentences either—but it doesn’t matter, because they always talk about people she doesn’t know. Dear boys, of course they don’t mean to be rude really—they are so well bred, and it is nice to see them making themselves really at home. Who are they talking about now?
“No, Imogen, really, he’s getting rather impossible.”
“I can’t tell you what he was like the other night.”
“The night you came down here.”
“Gabriel was giving a party.”
“And he didn’t know Gabriel and he hadn’t been asked.”
“And Gabriel didn’t want him—did you, Gabriel?”
“Because you never know what he is going to do next.”
“And he brought in the most dreadful person.”
“Quite, quite drunk.”
“Called Ernest Vaughan, you wouldn’t have met him. Just the most awful person in the world. Gabriel was perfectly sweet to him.”
Dear boys, so young, so intolerant.
Still, if they must smoke between courses,