A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online

split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half?
But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking.
    - Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature’s
wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode
of conjunction.
    They drank and drinking looked each other in the eye or
eyes. Thomas Walsingham said:
    - More spiritual? Angels holding hands?
    - Holding hands, yes. Effecting more intimate joining. We
have bodies, we are not all soul. There is a higher order than
what crass nature dictates. Nature does not want poetry, nor
music, nor the eyes of the seeker looking upward from the dungy
earth. Nature does not want the love that she would call sterility
but we could designate otherwise.
    - Well, we have known each other some ten minutes and
you are already anatomising unnatural love.
    Kit blushed. He said hurriedly:
    - Unnatural love is a bad phrase. What is against nature
is sin, so the religions say. But what makes man what he is
is unnatural if we raise him as we must above eating, dunging,
begetting, dying.
    - Well, these be high or deep matters for a morning cup
and a first meeting. In youth is pleasure. (Kit started: someone,
perhaps he himself, had said that that previous day or night
that seemed now much in the past.) I mean that thought is
the enemy of doing. My grave cousin is always saying that
thought both makes and undoes life’s fabric. If, he says, he
thinks too much on racks and thumbscrews and what he calls
the apparatus of the finding of truth then he grows sick. And
yet, he says, what is the big conflict but a grinding of thought
against thought. Some think that bread can be God and some
that bread is bread and God but a hovering thought over it. And some that the Pope is the devil. It was different a hundred
years back. Thoughts change and become perilous. What, then,
are the things that do not change? In youth is pleasure.

    He pledged that in a draining of his tankard. Kit did not
drain his. He said:
    - I beg pardon for bringing in the high or deep matters.
Altus in Latin is both deep and high. I was seeking some
answer to the question how a man can have a conviction that
he is drinking with an old friend -
    - You feel that? That we are old friends?
    - I feel at ease and yet not at ease. And you will know
why not at ease.
    Thomas Walsingham looked away at that. He looked at the
street outside the open door. An old nag, much galled on its
flanks, was pulling a cart of country produce; the wheel had
jolted against a hitching post and the horse was being blamed.
Then he turned and said:
    - I know not why not. You may be at ease, he said in a
parody of a captain’s tone. Wholly at ease. And then: There
is the boy in this thing of Plato’s. A slave boy without learning.
Yet Socrates shows that the boy knows Euclid and Pythagoras.
So the soul lives before birth.
    - You have done some reading.
    - A little. I leave reading to my man Frizer.
    - Frazer?
    - He calls himself Frizer. Ingram is his other name. He is
often called Mr Ingram. It’s no matter. Very devoted. He has
more money than I and yet he is my man. He has ambitions for
me. He thinks of buying an inn in Basingstoke, the Angel, he
thinks the name apt for some reason, and I shall be the landlord
and he a mere tapster. Oh yes, highly or deeply devoted.
    - He loves you, then. I see.
    - You do not see, and the tone was sharp. If you mean
the love you spoke of, no. Frizer is a dog and a good dog.
He likes being a dog. He is never happier than when fawning
and cringing. There are some men born to be dogs. And yet
he reads and tells me what he reads. He would serve me in all ways. Lackey and groom and schoolmaster. He licks my hand,
but there the licking ends.

    - And you live together at - I have forgot the name of
the place.
    - Scadbury near the caves of Chislehurst. My brother
Edmund