Strange Triumph
From 1946 to 1948
I RETURNED TO INDIA for a short spell of work before retiring to the home country. My long stay in the East had already told on my health, and I looked forward eagerly to some modest and unexacting job in England to keep me going for a few years until the time should come to retire completely from active life. I promised myself that I would first take some post in England, something not too arduous, that would allow me enough leisure to work up a full-length biography of Victor. He had agreed to this project, on condition that the book should not be published till after his death. If I should die first, which seemed to me quite likely, the manuscript was to be held by my executors until Victor had followed me. I looked forward to seeing much more of Victor when I finally settled in England, and I hoped to gain a much more intimate understanding of the true Victor’s ideas. If he failed to publish his ever-rewritten book before his death, I was to have the task of editing it and publishing at least a large part of it posthumously.
My plans were frustrated. Some nine months after my return to India I received a disquieting letter from Maggie. Victor’s condition seemed to have deteriorated. He was faithfully continuing his work; and indeed, when he had sufficient strength to carry out his teaching, he was a more successful teacher than he had ever been; but he seemed to be profoundly and morbidly depressed about himself and the world. He was seriously overworking, both in preparing his official lectures and in reading book after book on religious or philosophical subjects. He generally stayed up half the night reading, or just thinking. Maggie could not make up her mind whether he was heroically and forlornly struggling to mimic his ‘brother’ by finding some great illumination, or whether, on the contrary, he was rebelling against the resented influence of the true Victor.
He had started a course of ruthless asceticism. Alcohol and tobacco he had given up entirely. Food he had strictly rationed to something much less than the official ration. He said that if the Germans had to starve, so must he. Undernourishment had undermined his bodily health, though (so he said) it was quickening his mind. All the same, Maggie learned from his students that he was often too tired to cope with a class properly. All occasional pleasures, such as films and plays, motoring week-ends and country walks, he had abandoned. Had he wanted to walk, he could not have done it, for he had no spare energy. Toward Margaret, on whom till recently he had rather extravagantly doted, he now maintained a strange aloofness, alternating with gleams of hungry love. Toward Maggie herself, though he treated her with even more than his habitual tenderness, he seemed at heart aloof. She had tried to persuade him to tell her what was troubling him, but he refused to be drawn. He insisted on sleeping in a separate room, because (so he said) his nocturnal meditations would disturb her. He never laughed, never smiled, save professionally at his classes. He had apparently lost all interest in the life of the society in which he lived, and in the whole surrounding universe. Even his work he performed rather as a discipline than from a sense of its importance. His attention seemed wholly withdrawn upon his own inner life. But this too, so far as she could judge, gave him no real satisfaction. Maggie was, of course, greatly distressed and frightened. She feared that sooner or later he would have a complete mental breakdown. In her letter to me, she said, “My poor Victor is desperately groping for the light, but I cannot help feeling that the powers of darkness, whatever they maybe, are closing in on him. I think he is putting up a great fight against them, but I am sure he has chosen quite the wrong tactics. Nothing that I can say succeeds in persuading him to live more naturally and openly. Oh, how I long for the return of my own true Victor! But it is now an age since he came, and I begin to fear I shall never see him again.”
A few months after receiving this letter, I was shocked by a cable from Magpie announcing Victor’s death. An airmail letter followed, saying that one morning he had failed to appear at breakfast, so she went up to his room, and found him apparently asleep; but he was dead. A post mortem proved that he had taken one of the modern poisons which send one quietly to sleep, never to wake again. He had left no last message for her. And she found that all the true Victor’s manuscripts had been destroyed. She greatly blamed herself, for having agreed, some ten years earlier, to restore them all to the study, where the secondary Victor (by then a reformed character) could examine them whenever he was in the mood for it.
The disaster of Victor’s death, Maggie said, was the more distressing because the true Victor had recently appeared rather more frequently, and his last visit had been prolonged for more than a week. She had begun to hope for his permanent re-establishment. He had told her of the other’s intention to kill himself, and she had been anxiously watching him. On one occasion an attempt had actually been made; but in the nick of time the true Victor had re-appeared. She therefore hoped that this happy issue would be repeated whenever the impulse for suicide recurred. In this, alas, she was mistaken.
A long letter from the true Victor, she said, was on its way to me. But it had been sent by the sea mail, and might not reach me for some time.
Maggie allows me to quote the closing passage of her letter to me. “From the bottom of my heart I am thankful for my life with Victor. We both suffered very much. And in the end came a dismal tragedy. But in spite of everything, I feel that the true Victor has won through. In our last week together we were happy, more happy than ever before. He seemed to have an ecstatic peace which was infectious. He was telling me about it, but he disappeared before he had made me fully understand. But I have felt that peace. And now I feel — well, grief, of course, since I shall never see my darling again; but not grief only. Much deeper in my heart, I feel joy. Somehow, in the last week he taught me more than in the whole of the rest of his life. And perhaps he himself learned more. He has tried to express something of this in his letter to you, but words can give only a pale ghost of the peace and joy which his presence radiated through and through me during those most happy days. And even now that he is gone, I feel convinced that in some sense beyond my intelligence he is always with me; he, the true Victor, my pride and my joy.”
In due course I received Victor’s letter. I will end this inadequate biography of my friend by quoting his last letter in full. It is a remarkable and a moving document. Parts of it are either beyond my comprehension or else sheer verbiage. The reader must judge for himself. My own feeling about it is that while the letter shows the potential greatness of my dead friend, both in intelligence and in large-heartedness and spiritual vision (if I may so put the matter), it also shows considerable traces of mental derangement, due, no doubt, to the strain of his situation. The opening reference to myself, far kinder than I deserve, shows Victor’s unfailing magnanimity.
“DEAR HARRY.
“It is unlikely that we shall meet again, and I feel I must say something to you before it is too late.
“First of all, Harry, I want to say ‘thank you’ for your friendship, your patience and kindness through all the years since we were at Oxford. I have never said anything like this to you before. I have always counted on you. I have always accepted from you without any spoken gratitude. And often I have been inconsiderate and impatient. For this I cannot make amends; but let me at least say that our friendship has been one of the happiest and most valued things in my life, and that you, more than anyone else, have taught me what the relation between man and man should be.
“I woke a few days ago in strange circumstances. I was in bed in the Dolt’s room. In the palm of my hand there was a little white pill. Thinking that it was an aspirin, I put it in my mouth. But the Dolt’s memories were now flooding back on me, and I quickly realized that he had decided to kill us both. I hastily spat out the pill and rinsed my mouth. My watch told me it was half-past one. I went to Maggie’s room.
“If he does it again, shall I again wake in time to thwart him? I cannot feel confident of it. The knowledge that this may be my last few days of life seems to have intensified my vitality. Everything that happens to me, everything that I do, has a new meaning, and glows (so to speak) with an inner light.
“We have seized the opportunity of a complete holiday in this glorious English spring. (Fancy my fool ‘brother’ wanting to kill himself and me in this weather, with all the buds bursting!) We have been out in the country every day. I don’t know which is more delightful, lying on one’s back in a field, with Maggie, and listening to larks and an early cuckoo, or swinging across the moor, with Maggie, watching the cloud shadows on the hills, and an occasional hare start up and streak away round the hill’s shoulder. ‘Swinging across the moor’ is a very false image. ‘Painfully plodding’ would be better; for the Dolt had been starving our common body. But now, there’s some sort of fire in me that drives the body far beyond its natural strength.
“What a joy seeing is! Even when it is done through aging eyes that give neither the precision nor the brilliance of childhood’s seeing. The poor old physical instrument is no longer ‘optically perfect,’ but the relish, the zest, is as fresh and breathtaking as it was in my still-remembered babyhood. O lovely world; tragic, sordid, brutal, and yet lovely! The sturdy hog-backs of the moors! The frail geometry of a spider’s web! This morning I was making the porridge for breakfast. Have you ever noticed how at a certain stage the quick waves of gruel gradually turn to heavy, sluggish, velvet foldings? Rather like the smooth hide rippling on a puma’s shoulders. Then the stuff boils. Subterranean explosions in the little molten world form ephemeral craters. You watch the show, fascinated, till a projectile of lava rises into the stratosphere and scalds your hand. Strange how even pain itself has a sort of tigerish loveliness! I mean, when one is really awake, and can experience it with a full sense of its spiritual meaning. But alas, alas! Man can only reach this all-redeeming illumination in his rare and precarious moments of full consciousness. And most of us are doomed never to reach so far. This is the ultimate tragedy at the heart of the universe. Ultimate? No! Seeming ultimate, only while one is in the trance of lonely selfhood. But in fact we are indeed all members one of another, and of the Whole. Even the least of us is at heart the Whole. And in the Whole’s glory his suffering is redeemed. But, oh, Harry, how I stammer and drivel, trying to express the inexpressible that I have indeed, though darkly, seen.”
“In these few happy days that have been given me, I spend much of my time just looking at things. For instance at Maggie. Aging suits her. She was lovely when I first saw her, so many years ago; but now, though she has lost all the sweet physical freshness, in another way she’s lovelier. The spirit, one might say, shines so clearly through that experienced, that tempered and beautifully weathered smile. If only she could enjoy the present fully, without thought of the future, or without fear of the future! I must show her how to do that before I go. I shall succeed. I shall teach her to see everything from the point of view of eternity. In these few days we are creating something eternally lovely. We are completing our thank-offering to eternity. Our music rises to its last triumphant note. I hope, indeed I am sure, that when I am gone you and Maggie will be very close friends. I am not commending her to your care, for she is strong, and I have no fears for her. But your friendship will mean much to her.
“And the children! That’s a joy you have missed, Harry, watching children grow, and being glad to be needed by them, and glad to watch them be themselves, and not what one had wanted them to be. I find it hard to forgive my accursed other self for harming them. Colin will bear the marks for ever. There’s a wry twist in his character, a streak of cynicism that need not have been. But he’s tough and sane, and complete master of himself. And even the Dolt’s clumsy treatment could not seriously mar the gentleness that Maggie taught him. Sheila, bless her, is less damaged. I know no one, not even Maggie, more serene. As for that diabolically attractive minx, Margaret, I expect she’ll be all right when she has got over the spoiling that the doting Dolt slopped over her till quite recently. Of course she hardly knows me. And she’s piqued because I don’t fuss over her.
“How exquisite every moment of experience is! Even such a little thing as the forming of these words with my pen! See! This bit of handwriting shall be a real work of art, in its little way; precise but fluent. Each letter’s economical form echoes so much of history, monkish, Roman, Greek, Phoenician, and Egyptian. How long, I wonder, will men continue to use symbols formed in this great tradition? Will man in the end outgrow the need for writing? Or will man and writing cease together? Well, I may not use these signs much longer. This may be the last time I shall practise this homely, lovely art. Meanwhile, since writing is the matter in hand, I will delight in conforming to its canons. Strange, how even in the careful forming of a single word (that word ‘strange’ for instance) we can express so much yet fall so short of our intention!
“I am writing in my little study. At bottom it is my study, not the Dolt’s. I chose the furniture, and placed it conveniently. But my other self has been in possession so long that he has largely imposed his character on the room. There’s a picture of his, sophisticatedly modern, but not quite sincere. There’s a pile of back numbers of the Autocar — not mine at all.
“On my desk, here, there’s a folded newspaper. Bad paper, smudgy printing, incredib............