This Was Ivor Trent полностью

The brutality of my relations with Vera temporarily eased the tension created by my association with Rosalie. Or so I deluded myself. Actually, of course, it increased that tension till a collapse was inevitable.

Apart from the ever-present possibility that Vivian would discover our secret, constant companionship with Rosalie was in the nature of an ordeal, for her world was not this one. It was a world of psychic extremity. To meet her was to enter it. To enter it, was to experience its intensity.

Often, when I left her, I was in a state of inner irritability which was intolerable. It was on these occasions that I rang up Vera and told her to come to the flat.

Or, if I did not telephone Vera, I would talk to someone—anyone—and learn all about his or her life till I could steep myself in his or her activities.

There was a girl they called Rummy, who served in the long bar of the Cosmopolitan. I often talked to her, till I had learned everything about her. Then I identified myself imaginatively with her activities till I almost became her. I knew every detail of her life in the bar and at home. I knew her hopes, her fears, her pleasures. I could become her at will—and so be delivered from the heavy chain of my own personality. She was a drug which I used again and again.

But there was another reason why I clung to the madness represented by Rosalie and Vera. That reason was Denis Wrayburn.

I spoke to him for the first time in the station restaurant at Basle. I had arrived at about dawn and had an hour or two to fill in before getting the train to Italy. I went and looked at the Rhine, then returned to the station for rolls and coffee.

I ordered these and was studying the mural decorations, when I heard a polar voice behind me refusing to pay the price asked for the excellent jam provided.

I turned and saw a remarkable-looking individual. I spoke to him and we spent an hour together. Among other things, I learned that he was acting as courier to a rich American family.

I doubt if I saw Wrayburn more than once during the next two years, then—soon after Rosalie and I had become lovers—he turned up at my flat and we met regularly.

I have known hosts of people, but no one remotely resembling Wrayburn. He was disembodied intelligence. He looked like a ghost who had genius—and that is precisely what he was. Only a dying civilisation could have produced him—and he regarded it with the eyes of an undertaker. He was the one man I have met who had to be what he was. No disguise was possible for him. He could present no façade to the world. He was an absolute being.

He frightened me. That is difficult to explain, but it must be explained. He frightened me because I saw an aspect of myself in him. Wrayburn was what I might become. He was what I should become, if my gift for writing deserted me. I should enter his wilderness. I should become a ghost with a brain.

Wrayburn was born an emotional outcast: I was becoming one. Elsa represented my real emotional self. I had abandoned her, and I was dying as a result of that desertion. Only by returning to her could I regain the possibility of life. But where was she? And how could I return to her?

No, I should become what Wrayburn had always been. I should enter his spectral solitude. I should haunt the world—a thinking shadow.

I knew this would be my destiny, if my gift for writing deserted me. And I knew that, soon, it would desert me. Two Lives and a Destiny had been born of vital experience, for Failure is vital experience. The books which followed it had been born of Loneliness—the Loneliness that wears a mask. That, too, for a time, is vital experience. But, soon, I should be incapable of experience. The very roots of my inner life would rot? And then? I knew the worthlessness of books that are born of Observation. They are note-books, masquerading as creative literature.

So, to me, Wrayburn was a prophetic figure.

The fear of becoming like him goaded me to continue my madness with Rosalie and Vera. The fact that such relations would have been impossible for Wrayburn made me plunge deeper into them. By so doing I proved to myself that I was not like him. I was desperately anxious to prove that.

Wrayburn usually came to my flat. I visited him several times in a room he had in Bloomsbury, but—later—he moved to a lugubrious house in Fulham, and I only went there once. It had the atmosphere of a crypt.

He met Rosalie fairly frequently at my flat, but Vera only once.

“What do you think of Rosalie?” I asked him once, just after she had left us.

“If you could take that woman and Mr. Denis Wrayburn—and amalgamate them into one human being—and bring their different qualities into perfect polarity, you would produce a rough model of a New Race.”

After a pause he went on:

“But Rosalie—not amalgamated with Mr. Denis Wrayburn—is quite an interesting person. To be her lover would be a notable experience.”