Read Online The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy - Free Book Online Page B

joyously, seamlessly merging with the fatal ebb and slippage of life, chanting:
    My bird, it has a red, red ring,
    It sings the end of everything.
    Straining and humming, the heavy wire curved up into the covering storm. Clouds concealed the kite. Pain congealed in his heart. He saw he’d never vault that chasm. The kite was all out, and the will was at its ecliptic — it would not be denied or cranked down. Rain splashed through his skull. His clothes filled with wind. The cable was stretching, and he could feel his clenched teeth grinding and sparking. Flashing through the lightning glints, the world shone before him like a lucid lake. For one wondrous moment, he could actually see it — could actually feel the lightning coils pooling in the hot blackness. In the hollows and vacuums, surges of value were collecting to infuse the loss, the pooling pain. In those holes, eternal value was welling, then exploding into thunderclaps of life. He was less already than the air — his pleasure when the cable snapped was almost obscene. Rain lashed his face, and drumming in his ears he heard that child’s chiding chant:
    Â 
    My bird, it has a red, red ring,
    It sings the end of everything.
The Distance from Thee to You
    T HAT SAME SUMMER , on a beach on the south coast of England, Bertrand Russell was witnessing a very different conflagration. Splashing down the shingle, a pack of pranksters were carrying on their shoulders Queen Mab, “Her Modesty” having no sooner been coronated with a seaweed wig and tin-can crown than the young ninnies plunged her, heartlessly, into the cold ocean.
    Stop! Dropping her jeroboam scepter, Mab spat and sputtered, pulling slimy green strings of weed from her face. You’re all w-orrrr-ible!
    Chief among Mab’s happy train were some healthy lads clad in woolen black one-pieces. Supple and young, infused with champagne, they stumbled along, their polished limbs glowing like amber in the gritty August sunshine. With these were other friends, prudent dears who by day never went unclad, yet who were so caught up in the merriment that they had dropped their Chinese parasols and soaked their creamy flannels in the waves. Down the beach, meanwhile, several prying neighbors, already wise to Mab and her weekend mob, could be seen peering, hands shading their eyes. Anxious not to further damage her reputation, Mab — Bertrand Russell’s new love, Lady Ottoline Morrell — cried, Enough! Put me down!
    Mab had relished this play at first, but now she had reverted to the imperious voice of m’lady , wife of an MP and mother. Lytton! she cried to the instigator, Lytton Strachey. Do you hear me? Then, in despair, she called out, Bertie !
    But Bertie just stood there, the lump. Such a dry bob, that Bert, so aghast and emphatically un drunk in his white shirt, braces and trousers. Sad, was he, with his big, droopy brown mustache? Sad and feeling — what?
    Old? Jealous? A little left out in love’s drains, was it, captive to Ottoline’s artistic friends? Seeing her on their shoulders, he was reminded of an ungainly nesting bird perched over this clutch that she, mother hen, had laid, as it were. And all men! And all of them young — younger than he, a lovesick forty. And suddenly he felt angry, not at his adored Ottoline, but at her husband, Philip — angry that Philip should be such a blasted fool to permit his wife the dangerous impropriety of a weekend virtually alone with him and six other men, at least if one didn’t count her cousin Adelaide and some older woman who apparently wrote novels. But come to think of it, thought Russell, Philip wasn’t such a fool after all. As Ottoline obviously knew, there was safety in numbers. Russell had scarcely had a moment alone with her, nor did he dare among such gossips.
    By then the lads had had their fun. Setting her down, they fell in a clump on the sand, panting and laughing. Ottoline took her