Read Online The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online Page A

stalking upward into the darkness, leperlike, eaten by roads and villas. From the fag end of Anerley where the tramlines curve away above a wilderness of falling tombstones; Elmers End, a locality of white stumps in the snow; to the Crystal Palace stuck against the sky, dribbling softly, pricked with lamps. Lawrence knew this world. Look up suddenly into the night. O ponderous phalloi, you have impregnated the world, you are the hostage of these delicate girls whose virginities are hard as the iron rails of the beds on which they toss!
    The hotel is crowded with ghosts. Since Edwardian times no one has dusted this statuary, these carpets, these indestructible potted plants. I am thinking now of the Welshman. Morgan stooping along these corridors as if under invisible blows, with a mop in his hand. Or at night, seated by the humming iron boilers in a battered chair, draining his whisky at a gulp, and coughing up a bloodshot story. Morgan found drunk one night, twined round the figure of a Greek goddess, fearfully excited by its utter stillness. Or giving himself an erection solemnly, to show you exactly what the catheter did to him when he had the clap. The beautiful mutilations and barbarities of Wales, the valleys strung with sores, the religion. And to the seaboard of his world the eternal beating of the Atlantic, the white races. Morgan’s inheritance is a queer barbarity, a religious anger, which jumps from nothing along the dents of his face. I am fascinated by him, because to my own crude struggle against a protracted adolescence, he presents a bold and solid picture, in large round lively colours. He presents as nearly as he can the quality of an experience without dressing it up: puzzled, louring, hooking the writhing words from his vocabulary like octopods, as he sits there by the boiler, drinking and yarning. Look, one night I came down here to find the furnace doors open, the dirty linoleum bathed in flames. He was working, stripped to the waist, the liquid dust rolling down his body, the contours of chest and arm frilled in flame, tossing great mouthfuls of clinkers into the furnace. His dugs were a tangle of hair and dust. When he saw me he was suddenly leaning on the shovel in delighted agitation. (Gwen, of course. He has been shaping for Gwen for months now.) I could only guess at the reality through his imprecision. “She come down ’arf an hour ago. ’Ere. By the boiler.” His face was like a flower. “She come to me with nothing under her dress. She said: ‘Do you want it, Mister Morgan?’ Gor but it was surprising, like. I dint know what to say. Then she lies down here, in front of the bloody fire, as God’s truth, sir, in front of the fire ’ere.” He choked on his own spittle and produced a grin. Phenomenon. Then, turning aside, latched the boiler doors fast. In my role of echo I sat and waited. He was angry now, sort of resentful with me for being at all interested. Then he ended with terrific naturalness: “She was what you might call fruity. Draws it out of you, sir.” Then, as if a little bewildered by such a literary figure, he stared at his feet and blurted out, “Juicy as fruit, sir, and that’s no error.”
    From this epic to the minor myth of Gregory is a step that seems unbridgeable, to me at any rate. Morgan at one uncouth jump reaching beyond the boundaries of our idealism, our dilute passion, our effete aesthetic. I am helpless to do anything but move the green bishop to a new paragraph. Helpless.

    Here begins Gregory:
    The unbearable poignance of being inarticulate—or do I mean only too articulate?—for I have words enough. “ Christ ” she said to me once lying there covered by my body, “ Say yer love me, why don’t you? You never says it, Gregory, you never says it. It’s not good without you saying it. ”
    She had never cried out before; never tried to cross the forbidden territory which lies