The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online

he had said to a rather surprised Baird. He was a small, strongly-built little man with a lot of curly yellow hair coarsely pushed inside a beret. He wore sandals and an open-necked shirt. “Listen to them,” he said fiercely. He was eating rapidly as he talked. Baird looked at the party and could not for the life of him see what was so offensive about it; there were several distinguished people present. Mincon the musician was standing at the mantelpiece. He thought perhaps that Campion might be suffering from some obscure class-inferiority, and asked him pleasantly if he would care to meet the French composer, whom he knew quite well. “God, no,” said Campion in horror, “I could not be nice about his work.” This had rather shocked Baird. Mincon had been accepted everywhere as a genius. “Don’t you like it?” he asked. Campion gave him a long sober look. “Music for the credit titles of a Hollywood film,” he said quietly. “And as for these other people.” His contempt was boundless. Baird asked him why, if he disliked this kind of thing so much, he accepted invitations to parties. Campion once more gave him the cold steady look and answered: “Because of the food—can’t you see? I’m starving.” A little later he had left, and Baird had transferred his attentions to someone more pleasant—someone to whom he might confide his burning desire to write the novel of the age.
    He met Alice Lidell in the tea-room of the Tate Gallery and fell in love with her at sight. She was tall and beautiful and her fine blonde hair picked up the reflected light from the long mirrors, twinkling as she combed it. Her diffidence and breeding were charming. They were immediately friends. He admired her long shapely fingers and fine northern colouring. She was, he discovered with a thrill, an art student at the Slade School and keen to be a painter herself. Their friendship survived even her description of Whistler as a “bemused sentimentalist” (a phrase he had heard a friend of hers use) and her defence of Picasso as “the only painter alive”. However, he weathered these intellectual storms and took her to lunch with his aunt—a recognized preliminary to any announcement of his engagement. His aunt approved. Alice found her collection of jade enchanting. She was equally successful with his father, who spent hours showing a rather bored Alice how to hold a gun. By this time, of course, she had decided that she would really like to marry him—he was so personable, so intelligent. His origins and antecedents were unexceptionable. Her own parents were in India and offered no objections. They were married after a short engagement, and retired to a Tudor cottage ten miles from his home, where she proposed to paint, and he to write a book on aesthetics.
    This latter idea was suggested by Alice herself, who held rather unorthodox views about the current literature. “The novel is a dead end,” she told him. “The only thing left is to map out the aesthetics of the new Age.” She believed strongly in some undefined New Era of art which was being ushered in by Dadaism. Baird listened patiently. It seemed to him to be extremely important and necessary that a great critic should arise in England to take the prevailing ideas in hand and synthesize them. He was also secretly rather glad to put off the projected novel, which he felt quite incapable of handling. “The novel is a dead end,” he told his friends, “the only hope is to direct the currents of aesthetics from a vantage-point.” What exactly the vantage-point was he himself was not very clear. At any rate he felt vaguely important and pleased to be doing something, and read industriously in the British Museum every day while Alice painted.
    After their marriage they moved to the cottage, where a small car, books and friends confirmed them in their happiness, and in