The Philosopher's Pupil (20 page)

John Robert had lived for so many years in the foggy space of his own thoughts, never pausing, never resting, the prey of incessant anxiety, carrying innumerable abstract interconnections inside his bursting head. He could
feel
the billion electric circuits of his frenzied brain, and how his mind strained and slipped like a poor overloaded horse. And was he
now
to work as he had never worked before? Sometimes he seemed to traverse vast heavens, sometimes to be enclosed in an iron ring, tied to one place, rooted in one spot. Sometimes it seemed to him that in all those strenuous metamorphoses he had hold of only
one
idea. He descended into primeval chaos and rose grasping some encrusted treasure which instantly crumbled. He pursued quarries into thickets, into corners, into nets, and at the end found nothing there. Such were his own images of his terrible addictive trade. If only he could get down deep enough, grasp the difficulties deep deep down and learn to think in an
entirely new way.
He perceived amazing similarities, startling light-bringing connections, problems which seemed utterly disparate merged into one, suddenly and with dream-like ease, then when the great synthesis seemed at last at hand, fell apart into strings of shallow aphorisms. He gazed and gazed with amazement at what was most ordinary, most close, until the light of wonder faded, leaving him unenlightened, without clue and without key. Philosophy may be called a sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest. But what is closest is what is farthest. He longed to live with ordinariness and see it simply with clear calm eyes. A
simple
lucidity seemed always close at hand, never achieved. He longed for thoughts which were quiet and at rest.

He had lived for so long among the problems with which the greatest minds of the past had fumbled like children. He had contemplated, almost indeed become, the images of the great metaphysicians, spawning his own imagery with a foaming spontaneity worthy of any madhouse. He had fled from these warm shades to the clean company of non-sensible things, numbers, mathematical forms; and had returned refreshed and hungry. He had created a moral system based on the
Timaeus,
and wondered in the silent night why great Plotinus spoke at last of touching, and not seeing, the One. Long did he live with the Ontological Proof, and try to frame a language wherein to speak about the Form of the Good. He indulged, then denied, then indulged again his heady image-making power, and sometimes, holding his head, cursed the luck which had so authoritatively made of him a philosopher and not an artist. Sometimes his life seemed to him to have been, not a progression of pictures, but noise, continuous noise, not music yet containing ever-elusive hints of musical form. And now, when there might perhaps burst forth some great symphonic finale, the crown of his laborious trial, at the crucial point demanding the purest most refined thinking of all, he was old, losing the clarity of his mind, losing his words and mislaying his thoughts. Could he
stop
thinking? What could he
do
but think?

Contrary to what many believed, John Robert's metaphysical strivings had nothing to do with religion.
That
distinction had always been for him a clear one. His interest in the Ontological Proof was purely philosophical. What lay behind all
that
was certainly not God. John Robert was sometimes described as a metaphysical moralist, but if the tag was just, it did not imply that his morality was to turn out (perhaps in the alleged ‘secret doctrine') to be religion after all. He was concerned with ‘the real' and thus by his own confident implication with ‘the good'. He regarded religion, as he understood it, as a phenomenon of a different kind, something on which philosophy could not pronounce. Dogmatic belief he had none, nor was he troubled by its absence; and his own personal morality had a simplicity (some might say a naivety) which his philosophy certainly lacked. He had of course been indelibly marked by his Methodist childhood. As his would-be biographers, already hanging around like hyenas waiting for him to die, liked to remark in their ‘perceptive' articles, Methodism had made of him a puritan with an obsessive guilt-ridden sense of truth which some saw as a motive for philosophy. If he had any convenient traditional label (he gave himself none) he was perhaps a stoic; and this too might be connected with the rigorous and bracing moral atmosphere in which he had lived as a child. His Eros was
Amor Fati.
He had been practising dying all his life, but had never, and certainly not now, been emotionally interested in death. He would have considered any quasi-religious collection of his soul as deluded sentimentality. He was aware of death as the imminent cessation of his labours. As a thinker, he was content to regard it as inconceivable.

And now his purposes had brought him back to Burkestown, to the house and the room where he was born, where the old shabby graceless furniture was much as it had been when he had leapt into the world as his ancestors were conversing in Russian. He did not look at those old patient shabby things, nor did they touch his heart. He had never cared for the external world. He was sitting on the bed and thinking, but not about conceptual matters. He needed, like a drug, someone to talk to, preferably another philosopher. He wanted to talk philosophy even if he could not (at present) write it. All his life he had talked with pupils and colleagues. He felt ill now with the deprivation.

He looked at his watch. It was still early, not yet ten. It was Wednesday morning. At eleven o'clock he was expecting Alexandra Stillowen.

Suddenly the bell rang. He had not heard the bell with its old funny familiar voice (it was an electric bell which made a conspiratorial hissing sound) since his return to 16 Hare Lane, and he shuddered. It was too early for his expected visitor. He rose and peered down through the lace curtains. The person at the door was George McCaffrey. John Robert moved abruptly back.

He never swore, his Methodist upbringing had made such vulgarity impossible. He frowned slightly and shook his head to and fro. It did not occur to him not to answer the bell. That would have been a lie or subterfuge. He thought, I shall have to see George sooner or later. I had better see him now. He went down and opened the door.

George McCaffrey had, like his mother, meditated carefully upon exactly how soon and how he was to present himself to John Robert Rozanov. He had fled promptly from his teacher's apparition at the Institute: a meeting
then
would have been a miserable botched affair. Though, on the other hand, George felt later, it would have been, now, a relief to his mind if he could simply have got over the ‘first sighting', for instance by passing by and giving and receiving a friendly nod. He observed, with calculating detachment, his mounting frenzy. He
could not
absent himself too long. He had to be in Rozanov's presence, with all the danger which that represented.

One thing encouraged him. He knew that, wherever he was in the world, Rozanov had to have someone with whom he could talk philosophy: a colleague, or failing that a pupil. George was the only person in Ennistone who fitted this role. (It was often said that Rozanov did not make or need friends: he only needed people to argue with.) At moments now George saw (or heartily attempted to see) the philosopher as lonely, abandoned, awaiting rescue. In the very early days George had aspired to be a favourite pupil, imagined himself the beloved disciple. He had even thought himself destined to be the prime interpreter of John Robert's thought to the world. There was a kind of helplessness about the philosopher, some absolutely monumental lack of common sense, which seemed to demand the assistance of a more worldly
chela.
Now that George appeared to be without competitors, might he not be, without comment, simply ‘resumed' into John Robert's life? It was possible. Yet George also knew how terribly wrong, through no fault of his own as he so often agonizingly thought, his relations with Rozanov had gone. It was not just that John Robert had ‘ruined George's life' by discouraging him from philosophy and thus somehow in effect from an academic career. John Robert had also mortally wounded George's soul, setting at the same time therein the eternal need to be justified, to be healed, to be saved by the executioner himself. He and only he who had dealt the wound could heal it.
What
it was, and how and even when it had happened, was now unclear to George. He knew that his attempts to return to philosophy after he had, with such stupid obedience, left it, his pretentious letters (unanswered), his hauntings of John Robert's classes, had annoyed the philosopher. He recalled (he tried deliberately to forget, stirred and muddied his memories in vain) one or two awful occasions when John Robert had been positively angry with him. No, it was not anger, it was cold as if the philosopher, while crumpling George up and casting him aside, had been thinking about something else. There had been psychological analysis, moral summary, spiritual devastation, inward wreck. He was not accused or savaged, simply annihilated. Nonetheless at a later time he had had to,
had to,
follow Rozanov to America and once more haunt him, waiting around under palm trees on hot dusty roads in California. It was almost as if anything, a gesture of the hand which recognized his existence, could cure him, so great was his need, so humble his expectation. Rozanov had been casual, but somehow
awful.
He had made it clear that he did not want to see anything more of George. George had become more persistent, then crazy, furious. Was he not ruining his life to spite a charlatan? He had been suddenly possessed by wild destructive hatred; only it was not really hatred, he
could not
hate John Robert, it was madness. Rozanov had responded with a ferocity suited to the occasion. George tried to see him again, tried to apologize. He returned to England and from there wrote a number of extremely long letters, some indignant, some abject, which received no answer. Of course he told nobody about this nightmarish pilgrimage. However, the idea somehow got around in Ennistone that George McCaffrey had pursued Professor Rozanov to America and been rebuffed. George felt he could murder the people who sent these rumours about, no doubt repeating them with satisfaction.

Sometimes it was the very vagueness of the situation which tortured George most. If he had committed some definite crime for which he had been punished by exile, this period might intelligibly be expected to come to an end. If he had offended he might be forgiven. Yet what
was
his crime, was there one, in Rozanov's eyes? In Rozanov's eyes, where his reality subsisted. He had been, very often, a damn nuisance, and once, very rude. But had Rozanov really noticed? He could not even put it to himself that he had failed John Robert, let him down, disappointed some cherished expectation. There had been no such expectation. One day I'll commit a real crime, George thought, since I'm being tortured for nonexistent ones. Why should I be made
invisible
in this way? And yet, how could he not hope, in spite of everything, that John Robert would undertake his salvation after all? Was it not
significant
that the philosopher had returned to Ennistone? Why had he returned? There were meanings in the world. He had seen his own double in the Botanic Gardens. Perhaps it was just someone very like him, but that had meaning too. Twice now he had seen this double, capable of anything, walking about and at large. Once, talking to someone in his office, he had seen through the window a man fall from a high scaffolding. He had immediately apprehended that man as himself. He said nothing about this at the time or later. There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.

That morning he had woken early with the clear conviction that today was the day. He could wait no longer. Had he expected a summons, a letter, had he even hoped for one? In his mind he had composed letters himself, suppliant letters, proud letters, asking for a meeting, but he had not written them. Receiving no reply would be too terrible an experience, and he must cherish himself. He must simply go and knock on John Robert's door. The resolution filled him with a strange fierce exciting emotion, as he got up from the crumpled sofa and wandered with energetic restlessness from the dining-room to the sitting-room to the kitchen and back. He felt anxious to do something, as if there were something to be done in the house, some task which he had left unfulfilled; and he found himself again in the kitchen, opening a drawer and taking out a hammer. He looked at the hammer, swinging it, weighing it in his hands; then he ran quickly up the stairs and into Stella's bedroom.

Stella had, some time ago, moved into her own room the little collection of Japanese netsuke, gifts from her father, which had once stood upon the sitting-room mantelpiece. She had ranged them upon the white window-sill facing the end of her bed. George burst in with this hammer, eagerly anticipating the work of destruction. But the window-sill was bare. He looked about the room, opened the drawers: gone. The little gaggle of ivory men and animals had disappeared. Stella must have come, foreseeing his rage, and taken them away. She treasured them as tokens of her father's love. George felt a pang of jealous misery and frustration. He went to the dressing-table and swept off it on to the floor the few oddments, some little silver boxes, make-up, a hand mirror, which had lain there untouched since the evening when he and Stella had set off to see Alex, a hundred years ago. He kicked the delicate legs of the dressing-table, cracking one. Then it suddenly seemed to him strange and rather amusing that Stella should actually have come to the house, secretly, fearfully turning her key in the door, and put the little netsuke into her pocket. Or perhaps she had sent someone else to fetch them. George did not proceed to wonder where his wife was now. Wherever she was, she would be being well looked after.
She
was all right. He went downstairs and put on his overcoat. It was a cold dull windy day. He had not breakfasted, of course; breakfast was out of the question.