Armed with Madness

In the house, in which they could not afford to live, it was unpleasantly quiet. Marvellously noisy, but the noises let through silence. The noises were jays, bustling and screeching in the wood, a hay-cutter, clattering and sending up waves of scent, substantial as sea-waves, filling the long rooms as the tide fills a blowhole, but without roar or release. The third noise was the light wind, rising off the diamond-blue sea. The sea lay three parts round the house, invisible because of the wood. The wood rose from its cliff-point in a single tree, and spread out inland, in a fan to enclose the house. Outside the verandah, a small lawn had been hollowed, from which the wood could be seen as it swept up, hurrying with squirrels, into a group of immense ilex, beech and oak. The lawn was stuck with yuccas and tree-fuchsias, dripping season in, season out, with bells the colour of blood.

Once the house was passed, the wood gave it up, enclosed it decently, fenced a paddock, and the slip of dark life melted into the endless turf-miles which ran up a great down into the sky.

The silence let through by the jays, the hay-cutter, and the breeze, was a complicated production of stone rooms, the natural silence of empty grass, and the equivocal, personal silence of the wood.

Meanwhile the weather was good. One of them sat up, and rolled off the reef’s edge into the sea.

A brother and sister to whom the house belonged, and a young man they had known a long time. They called her Scylla from her name Drusilla, altering it because they said she was sometimes a witch and sometimes a bitch. They were handsome and young, always together, and often visited by their friends. It was Felix, the brother, who had swum out. His sister sat up and watched him with the touch of anxiety common to females, however disciplined. “Be careful,” she called, “the tide’s turning.” He wallowed under the sea.

“Leave him alone,” said the other man, “it’s the last day’s peace,” and rolled over on his face and ate pink seaweed.

She approved because it was good for his complexion, wood-brown as they were fair, but she stood up and watched the boy’s head popping in and out of the crisp water. Naked, the enormous space, the rough earth dressed her. The sparkling sea did not. But the sea at the moment was something for the men to swim in, an enormous toy. She thought again: He won’t drown. Besides, why worry? Lay down again, and fed an anemone with a prawn.

“Ross, why do you say ‘the last day’s peace’? You like people when they come.”

He answered:

“One always enjoys something. But this one’s an American.”

“No, we’ve never had one before.”

“I don’t mind ’em. I always like their women. But take it from me, all we shall get out of this one is some fun. He won’t like the wood. The wood will giggle at him.”

That was the situation for him, as he listened, translating, to the story Felix had to tell. Felix said that Ross and he had been to a place called Gault, and he’d sung to it. Presumably a dangerous place. They had then decided to call on distant friends, who might or might not be inhabiting a cottage on a place called Tollerdown. Anyhow, supposing they were not there, a rare species of hawk known as a honey-buzzard might be observed in the vicinity. On arriving they had found their friends (Scylla seemed to be the only woman in the group, a point for reflection) in difficulties owing to their well, shrunk by the drought, yielding nothing but dead hedgehogs. A digression on the use of soda-water to make tea. An excursion down the well to clean out the hedgehogs had led to a discovery. An odd cup of some greenish stone had been found, rather like pea-soup carnelian. The state of the well had necessitated the transfer of Picus and Clarence for an indefinite stay. “You’re done in this country if your well gives out. Wait till ours does.” Carston was not interested. This might interfere with his making love to Scylla, which he had decided was to be his expression of a successful visit. Unless he found out how to use it.

Then Ross produced the cup suddenly, out of his pocket, and handed it round. Carston said:

“That means nothing to me.”

“Been cut by hand,” said Felix. “Is there a kind of opaque flint glass? Celtic twiddles, I think, very worn round the rim.”

A good deal was told Carston, casually, about Celts and Saxons and Romans and early Christianity; things completely over so far as he knew⁠—Not that they talked about what he hadn’t heard.

“Swank,” she said, “and instinct. To cover quite intolerable pain. You see we know between us pretty well all there is to know. That’s why we rag all the time. To keep things clean, and because it’s the only gentlemanly thing to do. We have our jokes, our senses, and our moments of illumination which always take a turn for the worse. See? We live fast and are always having adventures, adventures which are like patterns of another adventure going on somewhere else all the time. A very different sort of affair, a state suggested if you like in a good work of art. The things down here seem hints of it, but there is nothing to make us sure that it is a reality. Let alone that it is worth what it costs us. Quite the contrary. We get into trouble over it, it runs after us, runs away from us, runs away with us, makes fun of us and fools of us. Because of it we have no money, and the wrong lovers, and our instinct for power is starved. For we come of families which have never been without power before. And the name for all this is our subconscious minds. And between Freud and Aquinas, I’ve managed to tell you about it completely wrong. For another of its names is intellectual beauty, and another, the peace of God.”

“D’you believe in God?”