Nuns and Soldiers Read Free Page B

‘Indeed.’
    ‘Linguistic idealism. A dance of bloodless categories after all.’
    ‘Yes. Yes.’
    ‘But really, could I be happy now?’
    ‘What do you mean?’ said the Count. He was always, now, frightened that even in these sterile conversations something terrible might be said. He was not sure what he anticipated, but there could be something dreadful, a truth, a mistake.
    ‘Death is not an event in life. He lives eternally who lives in the present. To see the world without desire is to see its beauty. The beautiful makes happy.’
    ‘I never understood that,’ said the Count, ‘but it doesn’t seem to add up. I suppose it’s out of Schopenhauer.’
    ‘Schopenhauer, Mauthner, Karl Kraus - what a charlatan.’
    The Count looked surreptitiously at his watch. The nurse put a strict time limit on his conversations with Guy. If he stayed too long Guy began to ramble, the abstract moving on into the visionary, the mind-computer beginning to jumble its items. A little less blood to the brain and we are all raving lunatics spouting delusions. Guy’s ramblings were to the Count unspeakably painful: the helpless still self-aware irrationality of the most rational of minds. What was it like within? It was the pain-killing drugs, of course, the cause was chemical. Did that make it better? It was not natural. But was death natural?
    ‘Language games, funeral games. But - the point - is -’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.’
    ‘And without that?’
    ‘We can’t experience the present. I mean dying does -’
    ‘It drives away -’
    ‘Yes. Death and dying are enemies. Death is an alien voluptuous power. It’s an idea that can be worked upon. By the survivors. ’
    Oh we shall work, thought the Count, we shall work. We shall have time then.
    ‘Sex goes, you know. A dying man with sexual desire - that would be obscene -’
    The Count said nothing. He turned again to the window and rubbed away the misty patch which his breath had made upon the glass.
    ‘Suffering is such muck. Death is clean. And there won’t be any - lux perpetua - how I’d hate that. Only nox perpetua - thank God. It’s only the - Ereignis -’
    ‘The -’
    ‘That one’s afraid of. Because there is - probably-a sort of event - half an event - anyway - and one does wonder - what it will be like - when it comes -’
    The Count did not want to talk about this. He cleared his throat but not in time to interrupt.
    ‘I suppose one will die as an animal. Perhaps few people die a human death. Of exhaustion, or else in some kind of trance. Let the fever run like a storm-driven ship. And in the end - there’s so little of one left to vanish. All is vanity. Our breaths are numbered. I can see the imaginable number of my own - just coming - into view.’
    The Count continued to stand at the window staring at the huge slow illuminated snow flakes showering steadily out of the dark. He wanted to stop Guy, to make him talk about ordinary things, and yet he felt too: perhaps this speech is precious to him, his eloquence, the last personal possession of the breaking mind. Perhaps he needs me to make possible a soliloquy which soothes his anguish. But it’s too fast, too odd, I can’t play with his ideas like I used to. I am dull and I can’t converse, or is my silence enough? Will he want to see me tomorrow? He has banished the others. There will be a last meeting. The Count came to Ebury Street every evening now, he had given up his modest social life. Soon there would be no more tomorrows anyway. The cancer was advanced, the doctor doubted whether Guy would last till Christmas. The Count did not look that far ahead. A crisis in his own life was approaching from which he carefully, honourably averted his eyes.
    Guy was still rolling his head to and fro. He was a little older than the Count, forty-three, but he seemed an old man now, the leonine look quite gone. His mane of hair had been cut, more had fallen