The Dark Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page A

unreliable faculty at the best. The thought had been, of course, sufficient to dislocate his life to a degree—and yet there need have been no reason. After the first day the expectation of death had assumed a kind of uniform greyness; he referred back to it as he had, when a schoolboy, referred back to the expectation of a thrashing scheduled for the next day. There was an element of pleasure in it too; at times it gave him a sense of isolation and detachment from the rest of the human race, and then he was forced to remind himself that they were also going to die. They, however, were not disturbed by the accent upon a particular time. Yet the idea, which he had confided to nobody, was disturbing. At times he felt almost ashamed of the knowledge—as if it were a disease that should be hidden from his fellows. That was really why he had resigned. It would be somehow awful to die in the Museum. “It might happen quite suddenly,” the doctor had said, adding, “Pop, just like that.” Graecen had been impressed by the phrase. He had found himself saying absently to an assistant curator apropos of a badly-arranged terra-cotta. “It might fall down and break—pop, just like that.”
    And once more logic began to intervene with its clearer assessments. Just look (he had invited himself for the last three mornings running) at Sir Fennystone Crutch. He could not go on for ever. No sane medical man would give him more than six months to live. Toothless, buried in his Sanscrit, forgetting his lunch-hour every day and leaving a jumble of gnawed crusts all over the reading-room floor. He could have no delicacy about the idea of dying at his desk, could he? What would they do if he did? Graecen decided that they would put him on the trolley—already groaning under tomes of Sanscrit—and lay his carpet-bag, skull-cap and slippers beside him. Then they would wheel him away. Would they go through the North Library, and so avoid the main entrance?
    Graecen became exasperated with himself for wasting his time like this … Following up these fatuous chains of possibility. What the devil did it matter which way they wheelec him? He pictured them wheeling the old man’s body across the Graeco-Roman section. Young Stubbs would obviously be the one to wheel him.… He frowned at himself and drew his mind back to the task in hand.
    All this time his eye had been travelling across the sedate columns of the newspaper searching for a review of Syrinx . He was eating buttered toast, his face growing more and more innocent and childish as he felt the butter trickle to his chin. He got out a handkerchief and started absently to dab it. Could he say that life had gained in value from the possibility of its extinction? He knotted his brows in a scowl and cracked the top of the egg. In one way, yes. Everything had been thrown into dark relief—as though he had woken one morning and found the whole world inked in at the edges by a fall of snow. It had informed his critical sense—that was rather an awful phrase. And yet his feelings neither rose nor fell at the idea. Why?
    Even his poetry—had it shown any inclination to strike a deeper note? No, it was just the same. He remembered that his work had been described by a young critic in a little review as “pre-atomic, non-radioactive, non-conducting bilge”. It had annoyed him considerably. “Lord Graecen sticks to the rut of rentier poetry”, was another phrase from the same article. Was he honestly so bad?
    When torpid winter covers
    The city and its lovers ,
    The cold finality of snow
    Whitens the signs and clear defines
    The way mortality must go .
    It was all of a range, but he liked it. Of course the demonic element he admired so much in Emily Brontë, that was missing. But was it, as the young men said, cake without currants? It seemed on the contrary rather full of plums. At any rate Yeats had printed one in an