The Nice and the Good

'I knew it was, John, only I just wanted you to say it, like that. I'm so glad. You're sure it won't be somehow painful for you, sad, you know –?'

'There will be some pain,' he said, 'but pain that I can deal with. And so much happiness too.'

'Yes. One doesn't want to be just painless and content, does one? You and I can be so much to each other. Loving people matters, doesn't it? Really nothing else matters except that.'

'Come in,' said Willy Kost.

Ducane entered the cottage.

Willy was sitting stretched out in a low chair beside the hearth, his heels dug into a spilling of grey wood ash. The gramophone behind him was playing the slow movement of something or other. It seemed to Ducane that Willy's gramophone was always playing slow movements. The noise immediately irritated Ducane, who was unmusical to the point of positively disliking the concourse of sweet sounds. His mood as he approached the cottage had been elevated and intense. The harmony generated by his scene with Kate, the perfect understanding so quickly reached between them, had enabled him to switch his thought with a peculiar singleness of attention to the problem of Willy. The music was now like an alien presence.

Willy, who knew how Ducane felt about music, got up and lifted the playing arm off the record and turned the machine off.

'Sorry, Willy.'

'S'all right,' said Willy. 'Sit down. Have something. Have some tea or something.'

Willy limped into his little kitchen where Ducane heard the hiss and then the purr of the oil stove. The single main room of the cottage was filled with Willy's books, some on shelves, some still in boxes. Kate, who could not conceive of life without a large personal territory of significantly deployed objects, constantly complained that Willy had never unpacked. She had forgiven him his shudder when she once suggested that she should unpack for him.

The big table was covered with texts and notebooks. Here at least was an area of significance. Ducane touched the open pages, pretending to look at them. He felt a slight embarrassment as he often did with Willy.

'How goes it, Willy?'

'How goes what?'

'Well, life, work.'

Willy came back into the room and leaned on the back of a chair, observing his guest with amused detachment. Willy was a small man, delicate in feature, with a long thin curvy mouth which seemed always a little moist and trembling. He had a great deal of longish white hair and a uniformly brown rather oily and glistening face and sardonic narrow brown eyes.

A velvety brown mole on one cheek gave him a curious air of prettiness.

' «Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge."'

Ducane smiled encouragingly.'Good!'

'Is it good? Excuse me while I make the tea.'

He returned with the tea tray. Ducane accepted his cup and began to perambulate the room. Willy with a large glass of milk resumed his chair.

'I envy you this,' said Ducane. He indicated the table.

'No, you don't.'

It was true that he did not. There was always a period of time, more or less brief, when they met after an interval, when Ducane fumbled, flattered. He was patronizing Willy now, and they both knew it. The barrier created between them by this spontaneous, this as it seemed automatic, flattery and patronage could be broken easily by Willy's directness if Willy had the sheer energy to break it. Sometimes he had. Sometimes he had not, and would sit by listlessly while Ducane struggled with their meeting. Ducane in fact could overcome this automatic falseness in himself unaided, but it took a little time and a very conscious measure of seriousness and attention. Willy was always difficult.

'I envy something,' said Ducane. 'Perhaps I just wish I had been a poet.'

'I doubt if you even wish that,' said Willy. He lay back and closed his eyes. It looked as if it was one of his listless days.

'To live with poetry is next best,' said Ducane. 'My daily bread is quite other.' He read out at random a couplet from the open page.

'Quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes: non satis est ullo tern pore longus amor.'

A physical vision of Kate came to him out of the words of Propertius, especially out of that final amor, so much stronger than the lilting Italian amore. He saw the furry softness of her shoulders as he had often seen them in the evening. He had never caressed her bare shoulders. Arnor.

'Stuff, stuff, stuff,' said Willy. 'These were cliches for Propertius.

In couplets like that he was talking in his sleep. Well, most human beings are talking in their sleep, even poets, even great poets.' He added, 'The only amor I know anything about is amor fati.'

'Surely a manifestation of pure wickedness,' said Ducane. 'Do you really believe that?'

'That it's wicked to love destiny? Yes. What happens is usually what oughtn't to happen. Why love it?'

'Of course destiny shouldn't be thought of as purposive,' said Willy, 'it should be thought of as mechanical.'

'But it isn't mechanical!' said Ducane. 'We aren't mechanical!'

'We are the most mechanical thing of all. That is why we can be forgiven.'

'Who says we can be forgiven? Anyway that needn't imply love of fate.'

'It's not easy of course. Perhaps it's impossible. Can a thing be required of us and yet be impossible? I don't see why not.'

'Submit to fate but don't love it. To love it one must be drunk.'