Ice (15 page)

Remembering how I myself had wished to forget on another occasion, I understood the euphoric blindness without condoning it. I did not take part in the general rejoicing; I did not feel gay. I had no wish to spend my time dancing or looking at fireworks. Very soon I was utterly sick of bands playing and people in fancy dress. The girl loved all the gaiety, was absolutely transformed by it, her life miraculously renewed. Her weakness and lassitude vanished, she rushed to the shops, bought clothes and cosmetics extravagantly, visited hairdressers, beauty parlours. She seemed a different person. No longer shy, she made friends with people I did not know, drew confidence from their approval, became independent and gay. I scarcely saw anything of her; most of the time I had no idea where she was. She came to me only when she needed money, which I always gave her. For me it was an unsatisfactory situation. I wanted to end it.

I could not remain isolated from the rest of the world. I was involved with the fate of the planet, I had to take an active part in whatever was going on. The endless celebrations here seemed both boring and sinister, reminiscent of the orgies of the plague years. Now, as then, people were deluding themselves; they induced a false sense of security by means of self- indulgence and wishful-thinking. I did not believe for one moment they had really escaped.

I observed the weather carefully; it was fine and warm, but not warm enough. I noted particularly how the temperature fell after sunset, producing a definite chill. It was a bad sign. If I mentioned it, I was told this was the cool season. All the same, the sun should have had more power. Looking about, I found other signs of a changing climate. Plants in the tropi- cal gardens were starting to look unhealthy, and I asked a man working there why this was. He gave me a suspicious glance, mumbled an evasive answer: when I persisted, he pretended to hear the head gardener calling, and ran away. I commented on the chilly evenings to some townspeople I saw going about in peculiar wrappings. They were obviously unused to even this mild degree of cold, and possessed no suitable clothing. They too answered evasively and looked at me in alarm. In view of the new regulations, they probably took me for an agent provocateur.

An acquaintance of mine, employed in an official capacity by his government, stopped to refuel his plane. I made contact with him, questioned him about events elsewhere. He was uncommunicative. I understood the reason and did not press him. He could not be certain of my affiliations. Mistakes were not tolerated. An absolute standard of loyalty was demanded. The speaker of an incautious phrase would be eliminated, given no chance to correct an error of judgement. Somewhat reluctantly, he agreed to take me as a passenger when he left, but only as far as another island in the archipelago. I saw on the map that the island inhabited by the Indris was not far away, and, though I had decided to go back to my old profession, I promised myself a short visit to the lemurs before proceeding to the theatre of military operations.

I went to inform the girl of my plans. Earlier in the day, waiting to cross a street, I had been held up while a procession went past. She was at its head, standing beside the driver of a big open car decorated with parma violets. She did not see me, she had no reason to look. Her hair shone like pale fire in the sun, she was smiling and throwing violets to the crowd. It was hard to recognize her as the girl who had travelled with me. When I entered her room, she was still wearing the same parma violet dress; the delicate colour suited her fragile paleness, she looked extremely attractive. Her sparkling hair, sprinkled with silver and parma violets, had been touched with a matching dye; the slight touch of fantasy was especially charming.

Telling her to open it later, I presented her with a small package containing a bracelet she had admired, and a cheque on my personal account. 'I've brought you some good news, too. I've come to say good-bye.' She looked disconcerted, asked what I meant. 'I'm leaving tonight. By plane. Aren't you pleased?' As she only stared silently, I went on: 'You've always wanted to get rid of me. You must be glad I'm going at last.' A pause, then her voice, cold, resentful. 'What do you expect me to say?' I was puzzled by this reaction. She continued to survey me coldly, asked with sudden bitterness: 'What sort of a man do you think you are?' The tone was meant to be scathing. 'Now perhaps you see why I've never trusted you. I always knew you'd betray me again ... go off and leave me, just as you did before.' I protested: 'That's grossly unfair! You can't blame me for going after you've told me to go, made it completely clear that you've no time for me—I've hardly set eyes on you since we got here.' 'Oh ...!' With a disgusted exclamation, she turned her back, took a few steps away from me.

The full skirt swirling, a silky shimmer like moonlight on violets; the bright, heavy hair swinging, scintillating with violet highlights. I followed, touched her hair with the tips of my fingers, felt it ripple with life. Her arms had a soft satin sheen, the skin smooth and scented, a chain of violets round the thin wrist. I put my arms round her and kissed her neck. Instantly her whole body tensed in violent resistance, she twisted herself away. 'Don't touch me! I don't know how you have the nerve. . . .' Her voice seemed to fail on the edge of tears, then rose again thinly: 'Well, what are you waiting for? Why don't you go? And don't come back this time. I never want to see you again, or be reminded of you!' She pulled off her watch and a ring I had given her, flung them wildly in my direction; began trying to unfasten her necklace, hands at the back of her head, the raised arms giving her slight body a hint of voluptuousness it did not really possess. With an effort I refrained from embracing her again, pleaded with her instead. 'Don't be so angry. Don't let's part like this. You must know how I've felt about you all this time. You know how I've always followed you, forced you to come with me. But you've said so consistently that you hated me, wanted nothing to do with me, that I've finally had to believe you.' I was only being half honest, and knew it. Tentatively I took her hand; it was stiff, unresponsive, but she did not take it away, let me go on holding it while she gazed at me fixedly. With doubt, criticism, accusation her eyes rested . . . serious, innocent, shadowed eyes; the hand behind her head still engaged with the necklace; the glittering hair, the scent of violets, close to my hand; then the grave voice. . . . 'And if I hadn't said those things, would you have stayed with me?'

This time it seemed important to speak the whole truth: but I could not be certain what that was, and in the end, the only true words seemed to be: 'I don't know.'

Immediately she became furious, tore her hand out of mine; the other hand tugged at the chain round her neck, broke it, beads shot all over the room. 'How can you be so utterly heartless—and so brazen about it! Anyone else would be ashamed . . . but you . . . you don't even pretend to have any feelings . . . it's too horrible, hateful . . . you simply aren't human at all!' I was sorry, I had not wanted to hurt her: I could understand her indignation, in a way. There seemed nothing that I could say. My silence enraged her still more. 'Oh, go on! Go away! Go!' She turned on me suddenly, pushed me with a force for which I was unprepared, so that I stumbled back, ran my elbow into the door. It was painful, and I asked in annoyance: 'Why are you so anxious to get me out of the room? Are you expecting somebody else? The owner of that open car you were in?' 'Oh, how I loathe and despise you! If only you knew how much!' She pushed me again. 'Get out, can't you? Go, go, go!' She took a deep breath, lunged at me, started pounding my chest with her fists. But the effort was too much, she abandoned it at once and leant against the wall, her head drooping. I saw that her shadowed face looked bruised by emotion, before the bright hair swung forward, concealing it. There was a brief pause, long enough for me to feel a chilly sensation creep over me; the adumbration of emptiness,
loss ...
of what life would be like without her.

Action was needed to drive away this unpleasant feeling. I put my hand on the door knob, and said, 'All right; I'll go now,' half hoping to be detained at the last moment. She did not move or speak, made no sign. Only, as I opened the door, a funny little sound escaped from her throat; a sob, a choke, a cough, I could not tell which. I went out into the passage, walked quickly past all the closed doors, back to my own room.

There was still a little time left. I rang for a bottle of Scotch and sat drinking. I felt uncertain, divided in myself. My bag was already packed and had been taken downstairs. In a few minutes I would have to follow .. . unless I changed my plans, stayed here after
all. ...
I remembered that I had not said goodbye, wondered whether to go back, could not make up my mind. I was still undecided when it was time to go.

I had to pass her door again on the way down. I hesitated outside it for a second, then hurried on to the lift. Of course I was leaving. Only a madman would waste this almost miraculous chance of getting away. I could not possibly hope for another.

TWELVE

The news I heard during the flight confirmed my worst fears. The world situation seemed to be entering its last fatal phase. The elimination of many countries, including my own, left no check on the militarism of the remaining big powers, who confronted each other, the smaller nations dividing allegiance between them. Both principals held stocks of nuclear weapons many times in excess of the overkill stage, so that the balance of terror appeared to be nicely adjusted. But some of the lesser countries also possessed thermo-nuclear devices, though which of them was not known: and this uncertainty, and the resulting tension, provoked escalating crises, each of which brought nearer the final catastrophe. An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt. I was profoundly depressed, left with a sense of waiting for something frightful to happen, a sort of mass execution.

I looked at the natural world, and it seemed to share my feelings, to be trying in vain to escape its approaching doom. The waves of the sea sped in disorderly flight towards the horizon; the sea birds, the dolphins and flying fish, hurtled frenziedly through the air; the islands trembled and grew transparent, endeavouring to detach themselves, to rise as vapour and vanish in space. But no escape was possible. The defenceless earth could only lie waiting for its destruction, either by avalanches of ice, or by chain-explosions which would go on and on, eventually transforming it into a nebula, its very substance disintegrated.

I went through the jungle alone, searching for the Indris, believing their magic influence might lift the dead-weight of depression which had fallen on me. I did not care whether I saw or dreamed them. It was hot, steamy; the mad intensity of the sun pouring down all its force on the equator for the last time. My head was aching, I was exhausted: unable to stand the burning sun any longer, I lay down in black shade, shut my eyes.

At once I felt that the lemurs were near me. Or
was
it their nearness that abolished despair and dread? It seemed more as if I received a message of hope from another world; a world without violence or cruelty, in which despair was unknown. I had often dreamed of this place, where life was a thousand times more exciting and splendid than life on earth. Now one of its inhabitants seemed to stand beside me. He smiled at me, touched my hand, spoke my name. His face was calm and impartial, timelessly intelligent, full of goodwill, impossible to associate with any form of pretence.

He told me about the hallucination of space-time, and the joining of past and future so that either could be the present, and all ages accessible. He said he would take me to his world, if I wanted to go. He and others like him had seen the end of our planet, the end of the human race. The race was dying, the collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction, though perhaps human life might survive. The life here was over. But life was continuing and expanding in a different place. We could be incorporated in this wider life, if we chose.

I tried to understand. He was a man, but seemed more; he was not what I was. He had access to superior knowledge, to some ultimate truth. He was offering me the freedom of his privileged world, a world my inmost self longed to know. I felt the excitement of the unimaginable experience. From the doomed dying world man had ruined, I seemed to catch sigh of this other one, new, infinitely alive, and of boundless potential. For a second I believed myself capable of existing on higher level in that wonderful world; but saw how far it was beyond my powers when I thought of the girl, the warder the spreading ice, the fighting and killing. I was part of all that, irrevocably involved with events and persons upon this planet. It was heartbreaking to reject what a part of me wanted most. But I knew that my place was here, in our work under sentence of death, and that I would have to stay and see it through to the end.

The dream, the hallucination, or whatever it was, had a powerful effect on me afterwards. I could not forget it, could not forget the supreme intelligence and integrity of that dream-face. I was left with a sense of emptiness, loss, as if something precious really had been in my grasp, and I had thrown it away.

It did not seem to matter what I did now. I was committed to violence and must keep to my pattern. I managed to react the mainland where guerrilla fighting was going on, and, indifferent to everything, joined a company of mercenaries in the pay of the west. We fought in the marshes, in the delta of a tidal river with many mouths, thigh-deep in mud most of the time. More men had been lost in the mud than through enemy action when finally we were withdrawn. It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.

I still felt I was waiting for something fearful to happen, but in a curious sort of suspended state. There was an emotional blockage. I recognized it in others besides myself. In suppressing food riots, our machine guns indiscriminately cut own rioters and harmless pedestrians. I had no feeling about it and noticed the same indifference in everyone else. People stood looking on as at a performance, did not even attend to the wounded. I had to share a sleeping tent with five other men for a time. They had fantastic courage, but no idea of danger, of life, death, anything; were satisfied as long as they got a hot meal every day with meat and potatoes. I could not make any contact with them; hung up my overcoat as a screen and lay sleepless behind it.