The Dark Labyrinth

Ariadne’s Thread

It was in the middle of May that Graecen for the last time closed the little makeshift office which had been built around the Cefalû statue while it was being cleaned, and started to walk, with his deliberate soft pace, across the Graeco-Roman section. Twilight had come — that strange marine twilight which only seems to come to Museums — and the long cases reflected his sober figure in subaqueous tones as he passed them. Today was the end of a ten-year term in a life devoted entirely to them, he was reflecting, as he descended the long staircase step by step, and ten years was a long time. He was trying to invest the episode with some sentimental significance, but in truth he felt a little empty and negative. He tasted the damp air from the gloomy corridors of stone and glass around him. It must be seven. The light was fading fast outside; neutral, grey London had seen no signs of spring as yet. He breasted the tide of scholars emerging from the great library, flowing through the central doors and dissolving into the grey hinterland outside, and handed over his key with a sigh of resignation, a little surprised that it did not hurt more. As he was collecting his hat and coat, Swan, the attendant, hurried up to him.

“Is it true that you’re leaving us, sir?” he said. It was true, of course; but the eager self-indulgent emotion in the old man’s voice struck no echoing spark in Graecen’s heart. He stood on one leg, flushed. In his neat black clothes and preternaturally shined shoes he looked very much a gentleman covered by a gentleman’s confusion. “For a time, Swan,” he said, “I hope to be back soon.” The blush lit up first his face and then the little bald spot on his crown which always made him look like a saint in a halo. Blushing was a habit he tried to cure without success. He saw that Swan’s rheumy eye was marking the blush as it travelled steadily upwards and round towards the nape of his neck. He put his hat on, and pressed a ten-shilling note into the old man’s hand. “I shall see you very soon,” he said as he passed down the hall and through the swing-doors.

He halted for a moment on the marble steps, experiencing a sense of aimless emptiness which must, he thought, be such as prisoners feel, who, after a long sentence, hear the prison gate close behind them. It was a leave-taking peculiarly without any positive sentimental bias, and as a sentimental man he regretted it. “I’ve resigned,” he told himself aloud, and, looking round, found that the pock-marked elementary Easter Island carvings were staring at him with their familiar cruelty from the porch.

Museum Street looked drab. So did Great Russell Street. Drabness multiplied by drabness. The last suds of light were running down behind St. Pancras. London was drawing up the darkness like a blotter. Syrinx was out, however. He saw that it was in several bookshops. A few notes on the scrannel for a Spring that was, as usual, late. “Ah well,” he said, and took off his hat to feel the air upon his brow. He bought a Times Literary Supplement and a packet of cigarettes at the corner. It was no good reading the reviews in the left-wing papers — they always upset him with their ill-bred shrillness. As an afterthought he stole into a bookshop and bought himself a copy of Syrinx: as usual he had given all his complimentaries away. It was absurd to feel guilty and panic-stricken, for he was still comparatively unknown as a poet. Syrinx was his seventh book and he did not expect more than the usual mede of literary lip-service for it. He had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his verse was neither very experimental nor very exciting. But at least it got published: and he adored publishing. He had all the author’s vanity in the appearance of a new book, and Syrinx was really very pretty, very pretty indeed. The cover was bright, and yet refined. The pan-pipes, the reeds, the rather mouldy-looking swan — they all, he felt, admirably expressed the nature of the poems. They, too, were a little mannered, a little old-fashioned, perhaps a little threadbare. (“Lord Graecen’s Muse, turned housewife, once more beats out her iambics like some threadbare carpet”: that was the kind of thing he found so unkind.)

Enjoying the feeling of the little book under his arm he turned into a tea-shop to look it over once more. The review in The Times would be, as always, sepulchral but kind. Old Conklin admired his work, genuinely admired it. He avoided the corner where old Sir Fennystone Crutch was devouring buttered toast. His skull-cap and slippers made him a familiar figure in the reading room. He hated being disturbed at his tea — which was the only real meal he had during the day. Graecen had once done so and had been severely reprimanded. “Go away,” the old man had said, “Can’t you see I’m eating?” An all-consuming passion for Sanscrit and buttered toast — did that give one the right to be rude to people, Graecen wondered? Nevertheless he had learned his lesson; he squeezed past the old man in a hurry and fitted himself into one of the dark wooden alcoves, ordering tea, toast and a boiled egg. He opened the paper.

For over an hour now he had forgotten what had been haunting him for several days; well, haunting was too strong a word. He sought in his mind for something with a little less value. His round innocent face puckered as he searched the columns of the paper, leaving one-half of his mind to indulge its capacity for fear, and to play with metaphors for death. It was like having a cavity in a tooth — one simply could not keep the tongue away. Death, of course, was a cavity considerably larger and more exciting. After all, he reminded himself, it was not certain that he might die during the next few months. It was merely the opinion of certain medical men — an unreliable faculty at the best. The thought had been, of course, sufficient to dislocate his life to a degree — and yet there need have been no reason. After the first day the expectation of death had assumed a kind of uniform greyness; he referred back to it as he had, when a schoolboy, referred back to the expectation of a thrashing scheduled for the next day. There was an element of pleasure in it too; at times it gave him a sense of isolation and detachment from the rest of the human race, and then he was forced to remind himself that they were also going to die. They, however, were not disturbed by the accent upon a particular time. Yet the idea, which he had confided to nobody, was disturbing. At times he felt almost ashamed of the knowledge — as if it were a disease that should be hidden from his fellows. That was really why he had resigned. It would be somehow awful to die in the Museum. “It might happen quite suddenly,” the doctor had said, adding, “Pop, just like that.” Graecen had been impressed by the phrase. He had found himself saying absently to an assistant curator apropos of a badly-arranged terra-cotta. “It might fall down and break — pop, just like that.”

And once more logic began to intervene with its clearer assessments. Just look (he had invited himself for the last three mornings running) at Sir Fennystone Crutch. He could not go on for ever. No sane medical man would give him more than six months to live. Toothless, buried in his Sanscrit, forgetting his lunch-hour every day and leaving a jumble of gnawed crusts all over the reading-room floor. He could have no delicacy about the idea of dying at his desk, could he? What would they do if he did? Graecen decided that they would put him on the trolley — already groaning under tomes of Sanscrit — and lay his carpet-bag, skull-cap and slippers beside him. Then they would wheel him away. Would they go through the North Library, and so avoid the main entrance?

Graecen became exasperated with himself for wasting his time like this … Following up these fatuous chains of possibility. What the devil did it matter which way they wheelec him? He pictured them wheeling the old man’s body across the Graeco-Roman section. Young Stubbs would obviously be the one to wheel him.… He frowned at himself and drew his mind back to the task in hand.

All this time his eye had been travelling across the sedate columns of the newspaper searching for a review of Syrinx. He was eating buttered toast, his face growing more and more innocent and childish as he felt the butter trickle to his chin. He got out a handkerchief and started absently to dab it. Could he say that life had gained in value from the possibility of its extinction? He knotted his brows in a scowl and cracked the top of the egg. In one way, yes. Everything had been thrown into dark relief — as though he had woken one morning and found the whole world inked in at the edges by a fall of snow. It had informed his critical sense — that was rather an awful phrase. And yet his feelings neither rose nor fell at the idea. Why?

Even his poetry — had it shown any inclination to strike a deeper note? No, it was just the same. He remembered that his work had been described by a young critic in a little review as “pre-atomic, non-radioactive, non-conducting bilge”. It had annoyed him considerably. “Lord Graecen sticks to the rut of rentier poetry”, was another phrase from the same article. Was he honestly so bad?

When torpid winter covers

The city and its lovers,

The cold finality of snow

Whitens the signs and clear defines

The way mortality must go.

It was all of a range, but he liked it. Of course the demonic element he admired so much in Emily Brontë, that was missing. But was it, as the young men said, cake without currants? It seemed on the contrary rather full of plums. At any rate Yeats had printed one in an anthology; and old Lord Alfred had once invited him to Hove where, he said, he would teach him the elements of the sonnet. It was rather condescending of him, really, but Graecen had thanked him profusely.

“Ah,” he said, for his eye, travelling slowly down the penultimate page had struck the title “England’s Cricketer-Poet”. There it was to be sure, written with all the overflowing admiration of old Conklin. He noted the usual references to his title, his scholarship, and his cricket. Conklin did not like his poets effeminate. With a certain indignation, however, he read: “It has become increasingly clear that a new Gordon Bottomley is amongst us. Lord Graecen is definitely in the great tradition of Lord Alfred Douglas, Roland Tuft, Canon Alec Smudge, and Loyola Tipstaff, any of whose lines are worth a bookful of today’s harsh clangour, which, to the uninformed, passes for poetry.” Graecen made an irritated gesture in the air and spilt some butter on his tie. “Here!” he said plaintively, addressing Conklin, “you can’t say that.” It was obviously crass. One hated adverse criticism — but could one bear to be damned by this sort of praise? He read on, however, with growing bitterness.

The bell on the outside door clinked and he saw Hogarth enter, stooping low in his baggy grey trousers, his arms full of books. “Hogarth,” he said delightedly, “Hogarth.” The newcomer lowered his grizzled taurine head and started towards him, with all the caution of a big man who fears that he will overturn something. “Well,” he said, “I was thinking about you — wondering why you hadn’t rung me up.” Graecen was childishly delighted to see his old friend. “Sit down, my dear fellow,” he said. “It’s very nice — dear me — very nice indeed.”

Hogarth sat down slowly, battling, it seemed, with something like the centrifugal force, and unloaded his books on to the table, placing his stained pork-pie hat on top of them. He regarded Graecen with sardonic affection. His small keen eyes took in Graecen’s appearance: the buttered toast in one hand, the handkerchief in the other, the book open on his knee. “Richard,” he said sternly, “you are reading your own work again.” Graecen blushed like a girl. Hogarth always adopted a tone of savage irony for the sheer pleasure of teasing him.

To do him justice, Graecen’s character demanded something more barbed than the conventional responses; and Hogarth, whose dominant character was almost the exact antithesis of his, found himself to be almost complementary in feeling and outlook. They got on admirably; fulfilling indeed Hogarth’s theory of psychic union between two essentially polar types. He had named them “dominant” and “recessive”.

He sat now, regarding his thumbs for a moment, and got his breath. It was obvious that he was a little out of breath. Graecen cherished him with his glances, for he had not seen Hogarth for several weeks. The familiarity of the picture pleased him. Hogarth’s large shoulders were clad in an old tweed coat patched with leather at the elbows. His grey trousers had shrunk in the wash, and their nether ends exposed his thick ankles whose socks hung down about his shoes. His face was like one of those carved Austrian pipe-heads — large bony features which were only kept alive by the small pointed eagerness of his eyes. They were rather fine and changed their colour, the eyes; they were engaged on a perpetual enquiry. When Hogarth laughed they disappeared into small commas like the eyes of pigs. When he opened them very wide, as he did when there was a question to ask, they seemed to become younger, to shine with a beauty and candour of their own.

“Well,” he said, ordering tea, and starting to charge his great blockish pipe with tobacco, “I’ve been running to get away from Boyd.”

Graecen registered a rather fussy interest. Boyd was a friend of his. He was wondering how much he should tell Hogarth. “Boyd wants me to do the preface for his book on psychoanalysis and art. He takes both seriously.” Hogarth sounded gloomy and irritable. “The book is farcical. There is an analysis of Poe’s Raven which would make your hair stand on end. You know the Freudian tie-up between the symbol of the bird and the penis?” Graecen did not, but he blinked and nodded rapidly, moistening his lips with his tongue. “Well, the Raven with its mournful ‘Nevermore’ is a terrible confession of Poe’s impotence.” Graecen said “Dear me” twice, with sympathy. He knew nothing about psycho-analysis, but he could never bring himself to be disrespectful about anything. Hogarth lit up with seven gargantuan puffs. “He has traced a strong interest in masturbation running through Dickens; the choice of names like Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller are only thinly disguised symbols … Dicky, what’s the matter?”

Graecen felt suddenly unhappy again; he had remembered the sentence. “I’ve resigned from the Antiquities,” he said in a small voice. He had a desire to confide a number of things in Hogarth — among them even old Conklin’s article; but they had all got jammed together at the entrance of his mind and he did not know which he could get out first. His face looked round and ingenuous. His lower lip trembled ever so slightly.

“You’re run down,” said Hogarth.

Graecen nodded and handed the paper across the table to his friend, pointing with his finger to the offensive passage in the review; yet before Hogarth had time to read it he added, rather out of breath, “I’m supposed to have only a few months to live.” It sounded absurd. They looked at each other for a second and both laughed, Hogarth gruffly and Graecen in a high boyish register.

“Of all people, me,” he said, suddenly feeling almost jubilant.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Oh yes, it’s true,” said Graecen eagerly. He was all of a sudden anxious that the trophy should not be taken from him by mere scepticism.

“Of all people — me. Dicky Graecen.” He had the rather irritating habit of objectivising himself in the third person, as children do. “So what does old Dicky Graecen do?” was a phrase that appeared unfailingly in all his stories of his own doings. He saw himself, as he said it, childishly far-off and remote, as a sort of wayward young man. Young Dicky Graecen. In this case it was young Dicky Graecen who was going to do the dying — he himself, his alter self, was going to live forever; well, if not forever, for at least another fifteen years. By association this brought him back to Syrinx.

“My new book is out,” he said with a certain pleasant coyness, flushing again. Hogarth looked at him steadily, his eyes still laughing. Whatever happened to Dicky was funny — even the idea of him dogged by a premature death-sentence was funny. One’s compassion was stirred for him through one’s humour. He was holding up the book of poems for inspection.

Graecen never sent Hogarth his books because the latter professed no interest in poetry or the fine arts. Hogarth however always sent him his own books, however ponderous and smudgy they were. On the flyleaf he always wrote “Dicky — push this round among the nobs. Good for trade.”

Graecen felt faintly irritated by this suggestion, that he was, at best, a social tout for Hogarth’s clinical work; but the long friendship and affection, dating back to their university days, always won the upper hand, and he swallowed his chagrin.

“There is no reason”, said Hogarth turning over the book in his paws, “why you shouldn’t die. All of us will have to. And I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to be warned. I like to get myself in order before a change.”

This was not quite the style of thing Graecen liked. He did not want pity or commiseration, but he did feel.… “Well,” he said, “I’ve locked up the flat, sent Garbett on a holiday, and made my will. I’m as free as the wind. And look.” He flourished the travel-company’s ticket before Hogarth, who was slowly turning the book of poems over and over, as if it were some puzzling potsherd whose function he could not decide.

“Cefalû,” said Graecen, enunciating clearly but softly the word which seemed to have come out of a W. J. Turner poem.

“Cefalû,” repeated Hogarth without any emphasis one way or the other. His interest had now moved on from the book to the ticket. The name of the ship was the Europa, “Baird is going to Crete too,” he said. “A patient of mine. You’ll be travelling together, and will see.…”

“Silenus,” said Graecen with the air of a conjurer bringing off a trick. “I shall tell him everything.”

“You won’t need to,” said Hogarth sardonically. “He’ll probably tell you, that old Phanariot intriguer. What is all this about the labyrinth? I saw it in the paper.”

Graecen fished a letter out of his pocket holding up an excited hand to prevent Hogarth saying any more until he should deliver himself of his news, “A letter from Silenus,” he said. “Look.”

Hogarth saw the familiar vermilion and the little drawing on the letterhead, of a village perched upon the side of a high stone cone. “Read it,” he said. He knew that Graecen loved to read aloud, having a conceit of his voice. “All right, I will.”

Graecen sat back and put on his story-book voice — the voice reserved for reading of his own work on the radio.

“The sun”, he read, “comes up every day like the naked flash of a cannon. I am sitting in the garden writing on a fallen block of marble. The roses are doing well and so, as you have heard, is the archaeology. Further to my last, the labyrinth has produced a stone inscription — pre-Minoan? At any rate anothen script I cannot tackle, part hieroglyph. The Museum say they will send for you if I wish? My dear fellow, of course I wish. A summer in Cefalû would do you good. I need company. Bring anyone you wish. But please follow these instructions implicitly: Do not in any way, in print or by statements to the Press, commit yourself to a belief in, or knowledge of, the New Era (we hope) I’ve stumbled on. Got that?” Graecen broke off in confusion and found Hogarth’s steady eye upon him. He wrinkled his brows. “Now I wonder why,” he said plaintively.

Hogarth admitted a wrinkle to his left cheek and shook out the burnt top of his dottle. “Why not guess?” he said. Graecen looked at him innocently.

“Dicky,” said Hogarth, “you know what our dear Silenus is. It’s just possible that the New Era is—”

“Faked?” said Graecen in alarm.

“Well, it’s a proposition,” said Hogarth easily. “It surely wouldn’t be hard to do.”

“But the lovely statue,” said Graecen.

“I should have a good look at it,” his friend advised.

Graecen looked confused and put the letter back in his pocket. He thought hard.

“How do you tell the age of a statue anyway?” said Hogarth, “apart from guesswork or typology?”

Graecen was too busy thinking to answer. He could easily get Firbank and his beastly chemicals to come along and test the stone; “but I don’t want to start any suspicion about Axelos,” he said.

“Chemicals?” said Hogarth. “Take some along with you when you go.”

“I will,” said Graecen fervently. “I will.”

He ate a rejected crust off his plate and seemed lost in thought. The statue was exquisite.

“Now then,” said Hogarth paying the bill and building a pyramid of books before taking them up. “I want you to meet a young man who is travelling on the Europa with you. He’s waiting in a pub in Shaftesbury Avenue.”

As usual Graecen had a thousand and one things to do. He took out his little leather notebook. Hogarth must really come to lunch or to dinner; but as usual he was booked right up. Tomorrow he was taking Mrs. Sanguinetti to the new Disney film. There was a dinner at the Savile in the evening. He read breathlessly through his engagements. Hogarth noticed that death hardly intruded upon Graecen’s daily life; it was assumed that he would not die before Saturday, when the Europa was due to sail. He lowered his crest like a bull and dragged his protesting friend to the corner of Tottenham Court Road. When Graecen showed signs of breaking away Hogarth anchored him successfully by giving him some of his books to hold. In this way they made their slow way down to the little pub in which Baird sat, reading a newspaper over his beer.

Later, as always happened, Graecen found that he was too late to keep the scheduled engagements for the evening, and found himself taking Hogarth out to dinner at the little Spanish restaurant in Old Compton Street, whose pimento-flavoured rice they had enjoyed together for so many years. Baird in his tactful way slipped off and left them together.

“How is it”, said Graecen when he left, “that that normal-looking young fellow should turn up in your consulting-room, Hogarth?” How indeed? Hogarth considered the question fairly for a moment. The reason for Baird’s journey to Crete was fantastic enough in its way. Cefalû was to be the answer to more than one problem. “By jove,” he said, “I almost wish I was going too, to help him dig up Böcklin.”

Over dinner he told Graecen the story.