# Firecrackers/Chapter 7

Two days later, a little after five o'clock in the afternoon, Campaspe again drove up to the stage-door of the Riverside. Theatre. This time she made no futile attempt to besiege the gate, waiting, rather, inher car. The neighbourhood was entirely deserted at first, but presently, performers and stage-hands began to make their way out of the playhouse. It was not long, indeed, before the person whom she attended appeared, in the company of the Brothers Steel. She drew his attention with her eyes and he approached, indubitably with reluctance and even with suspicion. There was, however, Campaspe recognized, something inevitable about his appropinquation. However distasteful to him was this re-encounter, he could not, it was clear, help himself to escape it. Some power quite apart from her own desire had created this condition: of that fact, too, she was instinctively aware.
I felt an inclination for conversation, she explained lightly. Will you drive with me?
Stammering an obviously unwilling assent, he made his excuses to Robin and Hugo and entered the car.
​The day was crisp and cold, with a brisk wind blowing, but the interior of the automobile was warm and comfortable. For a time the two sat silent. Campaspe did not immediately even look at her new friend. Another might have opened the conversation by remarking, You are wondering why I asked you to come, but Campaspe did nothing of the sort. Instead, she demanded abruptly, as if she had sought him out only to learn the answer, What do you think of Consuelo?
Consuelo? He seemed bewildered, and yet relieved.
The child you met in the flower-shop.
O, the child! I've thought a good deal about her. She interested me. The Persians have a proverb: A tree which comes quickly to maturity never grows very high. He spoke with difficulty. An unwonted embarrassment clouded his tone and gave his phrases a stilted air. He enunciated with great precision, although his intonation was more foreign than usual, with almost a trace of an accent. The car was driving down Riverside Drive. Campaspe ostensibly interested herself with a view of the river.
After a pause Gunnar went on uneasily, as if driven by some invisible pressure to pursue this subject. Is it her father and mother? I mean, have they pushed her?
On the contrary. Her mother is horrified, her ​father, quiescent, amused. She seems to belong to a different race.
She is so intense. Gunnar appeared to be a little more at his ease. She lives so hard in mind and spirit. Will she burn out?
I, too, have asked myself that question, Campaspe replied soberly, but only a prophet could answer it.
A prophet! Gunnar grasped the word, as though startled by a new idea. How can one go about becoming a prophet?
Campaspe turned her eyes casually towards his face as she responded, It is the easiest and the most difficult state of being in the world to achieve. All it requires is an unceasing reliance on one's own instincts. If you become strong enough to create this magic current, in time it becomes quite possible to understand other people even when they don't understand themselves. But, she sighed, looking back across the river, how few there are who possess the essential forces of purpose and character to bring about this condition.
I know very well now what you mean, Gunnar said, and I think you must be a wise woman.
Some days I wonder if I am; Campaspe apparently was musing aloud. There are hours when I feel that a philosophy of life is unsupportable, that the only people who really live are those who blunder and stumble blindly through.
No, not that! the young man cried vehemently. ​Never that! His face was aflame with a passionate denial.
What then? she demanded quickly, as if his contradictory spirit had amazed her.
He became calmer at once. I only mean to say, he explained coldly, that the plan, or lack of plan, you have just suggested is not my ideal.
She did not ask him to define his ideal. Instead, she lighted a cigarette, and inquired, Have you seen Paul?
Yes. He came to our gymnasium again last night. Paul has made a great decision: he is going to work.
But are you so sure, was Campaspe's next question, that work will be good for Paul?
Of course, I am. Work is good for everybody. It is even necessary. In a way, he continued, proudly, I made him do it.
Campaspe disregarded this boast. What about the philosopher in his ivory tower, the monk in the desert, the astronomer gazing at the stars? she catechized him.
Dust and ashes, he pronounced solemnly. They don't get anywhere. How can they? Man must work to forget the horror of infinity. These monks and philosophers prompt us to remember it.
Who does get anywhere? she persisted, now scrutinizing his face closely. At this moment she had a curious impression of an unterrestrial radiance ​glowing on his features, not unlike the flickering effulgence created by a halo.
So few, he responded sadly. Perhaps no one. I wonder if many actually try?
What, after all, does getting somewhere mean?
A new and lighter shade of feeling coloured his tone. Every one, I suppose, has his own peculiar ambitions, he averred; some desire happiness, others hanker after gold, some seek God, others, knowledge. There are those, even, who only want to forget. It seems to have occurred to no one, not even Jesus Christ or Napoleon, to aspire towards everything.
Campaspe regarded the youth with a new interest, and again she was struck by the illusion that an amber glow illumined his features. Was it, she wondered, an effect caused by the mounting of his blood under the rays of the lamp? At any rate, she believed she had never before seen such great beauty in a face, physical, spiritual, and mental beauty, and yet she observed something else there, too, dimming the glory, a suggestion of hideous pain and incessant struggle. She had made no comment after his last statement and, after a pause, he began again, Paul has at least taken a step. Before that he was only one thing, now he is on his way to many.
But I am not so sure, Campaspe argued, that many things will be good for Paul. He had his ​entity; he was what he was, laughing and careless, perhaps . . .
He has not showed that side of himself to me, Gunnar protested, with a trace of dismay in his tone. Not yet, Campaspe reflected, had the young man removed his eyes from Ambrose's back. If he would only look at her!
Well, he was . . . laughing and careless, until . . . she hesitated. To be perfectly frank, I noticed a certain change in Paul even before he met you.
You see . . . Gunnar was triumphant . . . he was searching.
I am not convinced that Paul has the right to search. However unconsciously, he had realized himself very neatly, very completely, I thought. I still think so. It may not have been a very big self, or a very important self, but it was Paulet's own.
But don't you believe in growth, in change, in accumulation, in collection? Gunnar cried out in astonishment.
I believe, Campaspe asseverated as devoutly as though she were reciting another Credo, that we are born what we are, some one way, some another, that we cannot change, no matter how hard we strive to. All we can do, with whatever amount of effort, is to drag an unsuspected quality out of its hiding place in the unconscious. If it is there, in us, it can neither be virtue nor vice. It can only ​be ourselves. Whatever it is, if we admit that it belongs to us, we need it to complete ourselves.
No! No! Gunnar cried in torment. I won't believe that! The shadow of torture fell athwart his countenance. Do you think we can get no help from outside?
Yes, that is what I think, that is what I know, that we can hope for no help from outside . . . unless, she qualified this statement, perhaps there may be those who utilize the people they encounter as mirrors. There are times, she went on, when I watch another act, or hear another speak, when I feel at once that this is some hitherto unsuspected part of myself that I have forgotten, or possibly never known about before at all.
Gunnar was making an effort to pull himself together. As she watched him erase the shadow from his face, quickly her mind reverted to Magdalen Roberts and her pamphlet on. The Importance of the Façade. At last, he spoke: Well, possibly the desire to work is a part of Paul that he has forgotten or else never known about.
Campaspe smiled. I doubt that, she said.
If I could believe what you say, Gunnar went on in a kind of reverie, I think it might satisfy me to be like every one else.
But my belief depends on the premise that each of us is a different individual.
Each of us is God, Gunnar asserted with deter​mination. Each can be what he desires to make himself.
Once again Campaspe forfeited an opportunity for asking the obvious question. She appeared to be meditating. And those philosophers in their ivory towers, those desert monks, those astronomers, she insisted, are they not striving to make themselves what they want to be?
It is not enough, Gunnar averred simply. Nothing is enough.
And what is the end of the quest?
There is no end to the quest. There never can be.
Campaspe went back. I fear, she remarked, that Paul has embarked on a ship which has no destination in view. How much happier he might be had he remained safely at home.
Happier, quite possibly. Worthier, no.
I doubt if Paul were created to be a worthy person.
It is his step.
It is your example.
It is, he maintained, a little complacently, Campaspe thought, a good one.
Should I, too, follow it?
That depends entirely on your inclination.
I am interested in your ideas.
You do not know what they are. There was a touch of tragic brusqueness in this retort.
​Why did you come for me today? Gunnar demanded abruptly.
Why did you come with me? Campaspe countered.
Perhaps I wanted to find out why you had asked me. Perhaps . . . He hesitated. His confusion was apparent.
Her tone shifted. She adopted her most charming manner.
I came for you, she said, because I felt certain that I should be interested in a man who had enthralled both Paulet and Consuelo, in a man whose occupation seems to hover between manual and clerical labour and professional gymnastics. I have not been disappointed, she concluded.
Gunnar groaned. I have walked so far, so light, heartedly, so proudly, so easily, he mumbled. Then, with a sudden transition, Please ask your man to stop the car. His eyelashes were wet.
Let me take you home.
Please ask him to stop.
She did not try again to persuade him. She gave Ambrose the order. As the automobile drew up at the kerb and Gunnar prepared to alight, she took his hand. When, she asked, will you come to see me?
Averting his gaze, he stammered, I am working so hard now . . . Good God! . . . Lunging out of the car, he disappeared almost immediately in the dusk of distance. Campaspe peered through the window, but the only spectacle that rewarded her ​gaze was the Hotel Shelton, climbing in fragile grace towards the sky.
Frederika had built up the dying fire. Resting one foot on the fender, her legs crossed, Campaspe cupped her chin in her palm, while she considered the curious veils which hang between two personalities. She sensed a definite impression that something distasteful had occurred. A fantastic young man had approached her too closely, not quite closely enough. Riotous and chaotic, her emotions mingled with her thoughts. She was uncomfortably aware of an unpleasant transmutation. She had never before, she was beginning to believe, felt just like this. Sapiently conscious, always, of men's capacity for making fools of themselves, it had never previously been her ambition to curb this propensity. It was more satisfying, generally speaking, to examine the victim while he squirmed on the pin of her observation. Gunnar, indubitably, had aroused in her a new kind of interest. She defined this, not too literally, as an adumbration of the warm glow of motherhood. The boy was, it was apparent, too sensitive to brave the rigours of existence. The pathos of ideals! The unlocked gates of the soul! How much safer, how much more secure one felt if one understood and controlled the cells of this unlocated territory. Life based on disenchantment was comparatively sane; life based on ideals, actually dangerous. She reflected: Could ​she bring this young man to his senses, effect a salutary disillusion, create a realistic flower-pot in which his obviously fine qualities might blossom? Even as she considered the possibility of this ostensibly altruistic move, she was watching herself at the same time with some cynical amusement, wondering just how far she might become implicated in this drama of sympathy without breaking down her own defences, defences which, up to the present, had served her in every emergency. They had consisted in the raising of several essential bars between herself and those who came into social contact with her. She had, through this method, achieved comparative security. It had saved her the pain of doubt. She had, through its offices, enjoyed her life and she had permitted others to enjoy theirs in their fashion. She had constructed her career from the stones of disillusion: they made a strong fortress. Was she, urged by an inexplicable feeling of tenderness, lowering a drawbridge over the deep moat which separated her from the plain of suffering. Was she . . . ?
Campaspe turned to the table by her side and lifted a small volume. The world of T. F. Powys's peasants, low, mean, despicable, mechanical, material, tawdry, inflamed with hatred and greed and lust, over which hovered a nebulous power that might conceivably save, and yet always withheld a saving hand, had hitherto been sufficiently expressive to her of the world in general. She opened ​the leaves of The Soliloquies of a Hermit. Several passages were marked: Love one another an impossible ideal . . . people that claw and tear at each other. They steal the moods of God. They do not permit the moods of God to pour freely through them and go. . . . Man is a collection of atoms through which pass the moods of God—a terrible clay picture, tragic, frail, drunken, but always deep rooted in the earth, always with claws holding on to his life while the moods pass over him and change his face and his life every moment. . . . To have the soul and teeth of a lion and the body of a tramp, is the way to tread on this world as it ought to be trodden on. . . . There is something very ugly about the immortal part of a man—his greed, his getting on, his self-sacrifice, his giving to the poor. I suppose there can be nothing beautiful in anything that has gone on a long while without changing; it is only the ugly part of us that can live through so many centuries of flesh and blood. . . . Only at times under His yoke I have been allowed to take a little nectar from the flowers; I have hidden my hand in a waterfall of brown hair; I have caught a hurried kiss from a breathing sunbeam. This is all we can have—all. It is impossible to get more out of the world than it can give. It is best to ruminate like a cow. . . . That is the way of the world, and it happens like that because man's mind can only go to a certain point, and then it breaks. Every mind breaks when it does more than ​a man can do, and it breaks in unexpected ways. The duty of a philosopher (and the modern philosopher knows his duty) is to keep the sheep; that is to say, to drive the wolves of thought away from the people, and hang the wolves up—in hard and long words, in the philosophers' complex minds that are fitted out with little hooks to hang each wolf up by. . . I believe that the more dead anything is the more it lasts; and the more ignoble a thing is the longer it lasts. The most base thing in me longs the most to live for ever. . . . Campaspe closed the book and stared a long time into the fire. Another quotation had invaded her mind:
Voluptuousness: to the rabble the slow fire at which it is burnt: to all wormy wood, to all stinking rags, the prepared heat and stew furnace.
Voluptuousness: to free hearts, a thing innocent and free, the garden-happiness of the earth, all the future's thanks-overflow to the present.
Voluptuousness: only to the withered a sweet poison: to the lion-willed, however, the great cordial, and the reverently saved wine of wines.
Voluptuousness . . .