The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online

been handed on down to our children.’ And stopping me as we walked by the expedient of standing in front of me and catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: ‘What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.’ I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long. ‘But it matters’ she cried with a touching emphasis. ‘It matters deeply my darling, deeply.’
    We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it. I can think of no better identification. ‘Your doubt, for example, which contains so much anxiety and such a thirst for an absolute truth, is so different from the scepticism of the Greek, from the mental play of the Mediterranean mind with its deliberate resort to sophistry as part of the game of thought; for you thought is a weapon, a theology.’
    â€˜But how else can action be judged?’
    â€˜It cannot be judged comprehensively until thought itself can be judged, for our thoughts themselves are acts. It is an attempt to make partial judgements upon either that leads to misgivings.’
    I liked so much the way she would suddenly sit down on a wall, or a broken pillar in that shattered backyard to Pompey’s Pillar, and be plunged in an inextinguishable sorrow at some idea whose impact had only just made itself felt in her mind. ‘You really believe so?’ she would say with such sorrow that one was touched and amused at the same time. ‘And why do you smile? You always smile at the most serious things. Ah! surely you should be sad?’ If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made — ironic tenderness and silence.
    In a night so brilliant with stars where the glow-worms in the shrill dry grass gave back their ghostly mauve lambence to the sky there was nothing else to do but sit by her side, stroking that dark head of beautiful hair and saying nothing. Underneath, like a dark river, the noble quotation which Balthazar had taken as a text and which he read in a voice that trembled partly with emotion and partly with the fatigue of so much abstract thought: ‘The day of the corpora is the night for the spiritus . When the bodies cease their labour the spirits in man begin their work. The waking of the body is the sleep of the spirit and the spirit’s sleep a waking for the body.’ And later, like a thunderclap: ‘Evil is good perverted.’*

    That Nessim had her watched I for a long time doubted; after all, she seemed as free as a bat to flit about the town at night, and never did I hear her called upon to give an account of her movements. It could not have been easy to spy upon someone so protean, in touch with the life of the town at so many points. Nevertheless it is possible that she was watched lest she should come to harm. One night an incident brought this home to me, for I had been asked to dine at the old house. When they were alone we dined in a little pavilion at the end of the garden where the summer coolness could mingle with the whisper of water from the four lions’ heads bordering the fountain. Justine was late on this particular occasion and Nessim sat alone, with the curtains drawn back towards the west reflectively polishing a yellow jade from his collection in those long gentle fingers.
    It was already forty minutes past the hour and he had already given the signal for dinner to begin when the little black telephone extension gave a small needle-like sound. He crossed to the table and picked it up with a sigh, and I heard him say, ‘yes’