I Hear Voices (11 page)

“Then why didn’t you marry him?” I ask.

“Why?” repeats Maria. “I didn’t marry him for a variety of reasons.”

She appears to be recollecting some of these reasons. She sighs with considerable emotion and notices one of the last flies moving in the room.

“Are you going to tell me the reasons?” I ask her.

But she just shakes her head impatiently. She does, however, later admit certain things, but I become increasingly doubtful
as to whether these are the real reasons, or as to whether the real reasons have any sort of existence anymore.

“There was nothing shameful?” I ask.

“It was like I’ve been telling you,” she retorts. “Just that he went—at least—it was just after a war, and we couldn’t find—”

She pauses, her face a screen onto which confused images from the past are projected.

“A house?”

“Some blasted woman—”

“A rival?”

She then explains how the doctor diagnosed something fearful.

“We all thought it was—naturally—”

But it was something else. But by then something had
arrived,
or some law. She now seems puzzled at someone’s
absence
—a cousin—or
was
it a cousin? But the episode has to be abandonded. Then how did—she is on the point of retrieving something when something else, cooking or cleaning, occurs to her and, with a start, she hurries away to perform it.

Downstairs, having returned to her work, moving quickly, scolding Jane and so on, she sings a little song, only a few coherent words of which drift out of mystery towards me: “sing—sing—heart—ago—”

And then a voice says:

“You must start again.” I ask myself wryly what is meant by that. “You must start again. It seems doubtful if you started properly before. It seems doubtful if you established a real position. Can you recall? Were you poised at any state?” I ask myself what this means. “Poised—there’s a problem. Do you concur? Do you subscribe to this formulation? What are your views?” What are my views? I ask this doubtfully.

Autumn views.

“A mere season.”

A mere season—well—I’m open to advice. I should like advice.

“You must begin by ‘living in a picture’ and then there’s a next step. You must think about your mother. You must
rigorously
exclude—

“You must exclude gulls. Then there’s the next step. You must seek advice.”

Well—I’m open to advice.

“You’d better get in touch with Stoker Brangwill. It’s most important —”

Will this advice spread? Is it like an estuary, full of ships that have come singly down the stream? Will it spread like the smoke or beams from the ships spreading with the wind and the subtle currents of the earth? First of all, is it new advice?

“It’s certainly advanced. We have the best people. This is Commissioner Brangwill. His father was a stoker, but he’s been specially trained as an adviser.”

Commissioner Brangwill seats himself. He takes up my
problem
at once.

“What is the nature of your problem?”

“Grapes.”

“This young man is perplexed about grapes.”

During the course of the ensuing interviews, he admits his own perplexities, not grapes but the propensities of children, the things they like, the things behind the things they like, the things he liked, the why and wherefore—

“But I’m talking too much about myself,” he smiles. “I was a child like you. And I sit here talking about children like us both. You’re doubtless looking forward to some therapy.”

He gives me some therapy which is distinctly helpful and then sends me out to see if the therapy has reconciled me. I meet someone who uses balm instead of therapy but is very
hospitable. He at once invites me to establish myself and so my whole social world is extended. At its outermost ridge, I meet someone.

“Would you like to meet more of us?” she asks. “Do you know ‘Piper’ Brangwill? He was a boatswain, you know.”

We pass a wonderful evening. When I get home it is very light with renewed desire, with fresh calls and insisting.

“You can’t go on in this way.”

“He can’t go on like this.”

“Are there enough voices here to vote?”

“Can we vote?”

That evening, when I meet someone in secret, I confess that the situation is becoming much more difficult.

“It’s almost incredibly difficult,” I point out. “I’m sure your situation is difficult too.”

“I’m your little bird, your little bird of passage. Migratory bird. Shall we fly?”

“The situation at home is much more difficult.”

She turns away to look at other people.

“I suppose it’s more difficult,” I continue, but with rather less conviction. “Well—anyway—what about old—thing—er—”

It is a bitter morning when I next present myself in Dr. Brangwill’s small den. He is seated as usual and registers some new data while I listen to the particular tensions made by the aviary nearby.

“Today,” he begins rather loftily, soaring about with his hands clasped loftily behind his back, “I shall tell you why I am not afraid, what screens I use. I use the screen of the immediate and other screens. I use strong screens and I sit behind them and suck rind. Sometimes I whimper a little but this sound is effectively screened and no one hears. I whimper because I see someone in need. I never see one person in need
but millions. Then I stretch out my hand, still sticky from the sweet rind but I only touch the screens. That’s how my
screening
works.”

After he has explained this, he returns to his desk and sits down. He seems to reflect on what he has said and to be not altogether satisfied with it.

“That’s all I’m prepared to say,” he resumes. “Unless you ask me about my real interest which is early life. My early life, all early life. On second thought, too much time has been consumed already. You’re the very devil for making me talk.”

He then mentions therapy but becomes absorbed in reading a long list of appointments and names. I wait for a while and then get up and quietly leave his office. I tell his assistant that I will return for my next appointment.

“Somehow,” she says, “I don’t think you will.”

And, when I ask her to explain these words, she continues:

“You’ll never see Brangwill again. His number’s up. I don’t like him much, but if there was any way I could warn him—make him see—”

But then several people, who are waiting, begin to show signs of impatience. The assistant looks at them coldly, but then, adopting a conspiratorial and familiar manner with me, suggests:

“You’d better go now. They’re all impatient for their last interview. It’s rather awful.”

She shakes her head disapprovingly and then calls out the next name from her book. It is someone whom I only know vaguely and I do not stay long enough to exchange more than a greeting. The man does, however, provide me with something to reflect upon as I go.

“Something’s going on,” he confides. “I read about it.”

This turns out to be quite true, unlike the lying prediction of the assistant, for, when we are all gathered later that day in
Miss Casket’s surprising apartment, a good deal of
consternation
is displayed. Her friends are in a class by themselves. All of them are alert and fully informed as to what is going on. Some of them stride about as if they wanted to burst out and taste the thinness. Miss Casket comes up to me at once and leads me to a cushion.

“Before you hear it from anyone else,” she begins, “I thought I’d better tell you.”

She tells me that her father has disappeared.

“And also,” she goes on, “that a group is being formed. This is the nucleus. You’ve found yourself in the nucleus.”

I do not feel entirely happy about the group in which I find myself. Only one member of it attracts my attention from the outset, a young man who confides:

“I can’t help wanting that Casket woman. I despise myself for wanting her, nearly as much as I despise her, damn her, but I do want her. Imagine, wanting her at times like these.”

He says some more about the times. Large areas of the room are given over to information. Large bundles of this informative matter are transported up to the roof whither we all proceed. A study ring is formed and various points of view are soon being expressed. My companion remarks:

“I can’t take part in this activity. The name Grore, Groor or Goorry, one name really in several forms, corresponding to
budding
tips, may be familiar to you. I bear it. Terrible weight, but it does ballast one. Therefore, I can’t rock with these
others,
loading themselves with nubs of information. And then I’m pickled with desire—every time I look at that Casket. Look at her now.”

I look in the direction he indicates and do indeed see Miss Casket. She is dressed in such a way that her body is very strongly emphasized. As she, crouched amidst the group on a soft mat or blanket, leans efficiently this way or that, to oversee
notes or discharge a view, her body seems to retain its own idiom and to go on speaking of desire while its mistress talks of affairs.

“I’d like to touch her now,” snarls Gore. “Not after some beastly compromise or understanding. But listen to Cup-Rinse and Piner.”

Cup-Rinse has been discoursing on effects and how these can be brought into the picture.

“Charts—” he is saying. “We must regard these as charts or programs, not actualities, and go our own way.”

“Charts—” supports Piner, “we must erect a stage. What did they suggest? We must pick our way and avoid—”

“Never—”

“Never. Here, here. I—”

“It’s only on very infrequent occasions,” explains Gore, “that they gather on this roof. They like to meet on this roof if they meet at all, and I participate because I know them all and, as I remarked, am so ballasted I can hardly wobble. It’s not very often we get up here anymore. Usually we criss-cross in the streets below or other streets, further away. The Casket is a new recruit, but I’ve lost interest in her.”

He smiles in an ironic manner.

“I’ve noticed a lot of others,” he explains, “there are two down there, softly entombed.”

He points down towards the face of a large slab but I realize that his powers of vision are superior to mine. Then I do see the two he means and I realize that the words “softly
entombed
” were meant to be voluptuously evocative and not
descriptive
, for, in the tiny cell, into which we peer, like optically augmented eyes into the world of sentient specks, striped
sophistications
have been fashioned into lusts. These are the two he meant and they seem very cheerful.

“Then there were others—one turned that corner—they
took my mind off Casket. But the hell of it is, now I’m involved with Casket. Between moves that they’re dispiritedly plotting, if you’ll notice, she darts glances at me. Some sort of
understanding
, originating on an occasion when a whiff of a certain major project was in the room, but only as a seasoning, as it were, not as the entree—anyway, on that occasion, this
understanding
originated and I’ll have to deal with that. None of it, none of this sort of thing is quite—do you read poetry?”

“Well, I haven’t read much,” I admit, trying to recollect the striking lines the conductor once recited for me.

“No, why should you,” Gore, on a note of savage complicity, sympathizes. “I hate the stuff, but do I? That’s the snag.
Perhaps
my attitude is ambivalent. There’s the snag. Perhaps I’m a poet, or a sort of counter-poet. Perhaps I love the stuff. If I walk near certain plasticities, huge, tremendous things, rearing towards moon-face, silent things, whispering a controlled
instability
, whispering an obscure aspiration, sometimes I have quite a battle with poetry. All those Gores, I reflect, reflecting on the illustrious dead of my own branch, have come to this Gore, this Gore fleeing down a girder from the drum-beats of poetry
roaring
in the void. And then I say ‘what poetry? What poetry do you flee, Gore?’ for you see I have this whimsical, you might think decadent, manner of detaching my
persona
from
something
and harping at it. ‘What poetry do you flee, Gore?’ Her face? A lovelier face. What words? Hank, bone—and in the end I can only look and hope and wait once more for desire to assure me of motive.” On the final words, until which his declamation has been with a fervor far more intense than that normally employed for casual conversation at a meeting of this sort, Gore’s expression quickly contracts again into one of mere
social
irony. Then he concludes, on this note of irony: “The unskilled hand, the unofficial eye—meet Gore.”

I express my appreciation and earnest desire to meet him
again. We find that we have a social link in a certain Brangwill who is an official relative of his and my adviser. I look rather unenthusiastically at the remnants of the meeting which has sadly degenerated. Two or three of the sturdier young men have bared their breasts and are thrusting them towards the meek autumn sun. Two or three are still talking about
outstanding
points and Miss Carpet is now flirting with one or two men, but clearly still keenly interested in Gore’s reactions. They promise each other future encounters, but nothing
definite
is scheduled.

“Anything may happen,” remarks one, and it is clear that these words express the general attitude.

I take my leave of Gore, courtesies first being exchanged, and make my way back to my egg. On this journey, the variety and density of the city are borne in upon me. Along its channels, across its plates, up its dungeons and widths, the craft of man is in dynamic pursuit. Far away the old clouds are calling
themselves
new clouds and advertising their vapor. Far away the African giraffe peers with idiot gentility towards the English squirrel. Nearer, little bursts are taking place and people are breathing and fabricating everywhere. It is with relief that I reach the damped plain of terraces. And it is with relief that I greet Susan.

“You’ve returned to our little pot,” she responds, rather crossly.