The Silence is Broken

A Gift of the Dusk — By R. O. Prowse

It does not matter how many times Life has been compared to a journey; there comes a day when each of us makes that comparison for himself and wonders at the mysterious fitness of it. In the confusion and immediate pressure of modern existence we are borne along, we are carried and upheld until we are half persuaded that we could not escape if we would. Then, suddenly—as though it had all been a dream—the crowd vanishes, the noise dies away, and the little human creature finds himself alone, with time to think of his destination. Well, perhaps the moment need not be grim. Perhaps you will page 280 not so dreadfully mind that invisible hand touching you so lightly, that soundless voice whispering so gently: ‘But of course you realize that sooner or later the train is going to rush into a black hole, the ship is going to sink out of sight of land.’ And you really won't read next morning that ‘We regret to announce the death of …’; you really won't know, as the last man swings on the box and the horses break into a decent trot, whether it is an adorable wet day—with the sky a waterspout, a soft roaring in the trees, and the first jonquils shaking with flower—or an adorable fine day—when just to walk in the sun and shade is enough. And all your belongings, your cold clothes, all the things you arrange so carefully and love to look at and handle—they will be free once more. Your books … the library of the late…. Other fingers will rub out the marking under that line and the ‘How true!’ in the margin. A strange voice, which I swear to you, cross my heart, you won't hear, will say: ‘I do wish people didn't write in their books.’

After all—who does think so childishly? Who really minds his own death? True, it would be very interesting, very amusing to see what happens to this or that. But —kindly remove your hand, kindly stop whispering—we flatter ourselves we shall be true to our appearance unto the last. And if you don't mind—we are rather busy—another time, perhaps—Good-bye. Or if the little human creature happens to be an artist he does listen. Is not ‘That Life hath an Ending’ one of the eternal themes for the artist? Yet there is a great, vast difference between a recognition that the destination cannot be escaped and the knowledge that it is upon you. The artist may put on the black cap and condemn himself to death, but he does not say when the sentence is to be carried out. He may terrify himself—and we do not mean it lightly—by crying: ‘I shall never see this almond tree again.’ But even in his cry of despair there is hidden his belief in the beauty of other almond trees.

But if judgment has been passed upon him, if it was a page 281 Harley Street specialist who wore the cap and tossed off the sentence—ah, then, for the very first time, it is revealed that the Future is contained in the Present. We live that we may live. However rich the present may be, it is a preparation. The writer no sooner finishes his book than he begins to discover what he wants to say. The painter puts the last touch to his picture, thinking that next time he will start off at that last touch. We believe, in spite of the youngest novelists, that lovers see their children in each other's eyes…. What is the Present when the Future is removed, when life is haunted, not by Death in the fullness of time, but by Death's fast-encroaching shadow?

In his new novel, ‘A Gift of the Dusk,’ Mr. Prowse tells us the answer. He does not spare us; he tells ‘everything—everything.’ And yet we are so book-hardened to-day, there is a danger that this book may, to the casual glance, seem other than it is. It cannot be read by the clock. Have we time for such novels? Ah, have we time for any others? ‘A Gift of the Dusk’ was created to satisfy the author's desire to tell the truth about his own secret world. It is written in the form of a confession, but the hero, Stephen, might not equally well have confessed to a priest. It is—how shall we explain it?—as though his two selves were transposed. The self which is silent (and yet is never silent) emerges and speaks to that other self in you. It is strange to think of these ceaseless conversations that never languish or fail. We look at our friend, and it were thrilling enough to know what he was thinking of. How much more thrilling to know what he —the secret he—is saying! And here, in ‘A Gift of the Dusk,’ we listen to Stephen, the exile from health put into prison in a Swiss Sanatorium:

One tries still to fancy that one is here by some chance of travel, to flavour the experience with some lingering taste of adventure. One tries to fancy one is a little different from the others. They belong to the page 282 place; they are part of it; they are an essential part of the intense impression it conveys; they could not really belong anywhere else! But oneself … I look at my letters on the table.

But very gradually that sense of separateness leaves him; the background of the past fades away. Whatever our surroundings are—however strange and terrible they may be—it is human nature to try to adjust ourselves to them; even to establish our claims to them, for however short a time. Even so, Stephen is drawn into the lamentable life of ‘Château d'Or.’ The peculiar tragedy of the consumptive is that, although he is so seriously ill, he is—in most cases—not ill enough to give up the precious habits of health.

Perhaps if one were worse, if there were still fewer things one could do, if the tide of one's powers had fallen to a still lower ebb, one might suffer less from the ache of this inner desolation.

Thus the small stricken company, living its impersonal life together among the immense mountains, is for ever mocked by the nearness of those things which are forever out of reach. Even if they recovered: ‘Shall we ever again have quite the free run of the world?—we who have carried in our hearts, if not in our hands, the misery of the warning rattle.’ It is not easy to be heroic in such circumstances; it is infinitely harder to remain true to one's secret self—to one's vision, or dream. But Stephen succeeds; he discovers how to bear the ‘silence’; it is to surrender to it:

After which I had a conception more intimate still: I had a sense of my oneness with it. I had an intensified sense of living, as if I had entered into mystic relation with that inner permanence and continuity of things, which for me—at this moment, at least—would be the meaning of life everlasting…. There came to me like a draught from the deep wells of being a return of energy and strength and will.

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But ‘A Gift of the Dusk’ is not only a record of suffering —a revelation, rather of how one is alone in one's agony; there grows out of this sorrowful soil a friendship with a fellow-sufferer, Mary Rolls. It is the gift that each receives. What a moment to clasp hands with love! But the beauty of their relationship is that, although every dreadful circumstance is against them, it is untouched. Had they met elsewhere the outward show would have been different, but that which was essential—their deep sense of intimacy, of companionship, their belief in a kingdom shared—would have been the same. Almost, at this point, we would beg for a little less than the truth—almost we would have the author lift his book from the deep shadow which—nevertheless—so wonderfully sustains it. But Mr. Prowse knows better.

‘Stephen—I want so intensely to live!’

It was the cry of cries—a cry from the depth of my own life as well as from the depth of hers.

‘I, too,’ I murmured.

‘Ah, you!’

‘Yes, I too, my dear, I too!’

We said no more for some time. We remained silent and still and near: our nearness was the one sure possession that we had, but at least we knew we should have it to the end.

These are the closing words of a memorable novel.