Free A Garden of Trees by Nicholas Mosley Page B

Annabelle was making so much noise that he had to stop.
    â€œAnd when you catch it?” I said.
    â€œWhy, you catch it,” he said, putting his hands together gently. “Like this. It is so soft and heavy. And the sound it makes is like love.”
    â€œLove!” Annabelle said, indignant.
    â€œAnd you had plenty of grapefruits?” I said. “Then where did you live?”
    â€œWhere you did,” he said. “On an island in the West Indies.”
    I had not imagined this. For an instant it was as if I had a premonition of disaster. In the moonlight Marius’s face had almost assumed the features of a negro or a half-caste—the queer brooding stillness of them that lies at the centre of their laughter. “Which island?” I asked.
    He told me. I remembered it. I remembered the dead-smelling town beneath the dead volcano, the deep green of the vegetation that was deeper than seaweed, the tall ruined sugar-cane factories that waited among the trees like monoliths. I had stayed there for a while and had been disquieted by it. It seemed alone among the islands. It was all softness there, all untouchable, the sea deep and dark, unfathomable, alarming to swim in; no boats on it, no slanting square sails to give it colour, no fish; just the deep unending stillness of rottenness among the mountains, and in the town the static garbage smell around the twisted people and above them the bells of the cathedral.
    â€œBut there,” he said, “I agree with you. It is impossible to live.”
    â€œHow strange that I should never have asked you where you were born,” Annabelle said.
    â€œYou don’t ask many questions.”
    â€œNo.” She sat down and shivered for the first time in the cold.
    â€œAnd will you ever go back there?” I said.
    â€œI shall go back when there is something to do. I should not know what to do there at the moment.”
    â€œWhat is there that you do here?” I said.
    â€œNot much,” he said.
    â€œNo.”
    Peter came towards us across the grass. “I have been talking to a beggar,” he said.
    â€œI thought he was a dustman.”
    â€œHe was a beggar,” Peter said. “He is selling shoe-strings. I asked him why he did not work and he said why should he? He was standing at the entrance to some fashionable club from which bachelors were emerging after their evening’s game of squash. Well, why should he?”
    â€œWhy do you call them shoe-strings?” Marius said.
    â€œBecause shoe-strings are what one tries to lift oneself up by when there is nothing else to lift with. No one bought his shoe-strings. Do you suppose it is possible to lift oneself up by one’s feet?”
    â€œNo,” Annabelle said.
    â€œIt is true that there is no reason to work. There is not even the reason of making money if one can get it by begging. He said he made ten pounds a week. I am sure if one tried hard enough one could lift oneself up by one’s feet.”
    â€œTry it,” Annabelle said.
    â€œI’m always trying it. I am a nonconformist. Sooner or later I shall do it or I shall break my back.”
    â€œAnd what will you do when you have done it?” Marius said.
    â€œI will be God. What more need I do? Those bachelors, now, why do they not try it instead of playing squash? It would be better exercise. Why does no one try it except me?”
    â€œI knew you would be talking of the moon,” Annabelle said.
    â€œNo one is serious. I cannot bear that no one is serious. There is only one thing in life that is of any importance, and that is to get oneself off the ground. If there is nothing to lift you you must lift yourself. That is what I mean by shoe-strings. He realized that. He was a poetic beggar. He realized the enormous importance of doing nothing but dealing in shoe-strings. He is going home to-night to practise getting himself off his feet.”
    â€œHe will be wasting his