O Caledonia

After that summer term all terms merged in Janet’s mind. She had tried St. Uncumba’s in every season, months without end, fogs impenetrable, cold, windy sunlight — and she found it wanting, wanting in human kindness, in vision, in apprehension of the glories of the world. But the raw, sheer edge of her misery was blunted; she had learnt to cope, even to survive, by deviousness, by reading, and, as always, by day-dreaming. She saw other, younger girls become the persecuted quarry; although she was sometimes troubled by a perverse impulse to join their tormentors she never did so. Her reason for this was not honourable; it was simply disdain. She believed that she moved on a higher plane, beyond spite, beyond compromise. She had found a French word, mesquin

; this she applied silently and liberally to the preoccupations of others. Her heart was hardened. Leafing through a magazine one day, her eye was caught by a photograph. For a moment, she took it to be a frieze from a Greek vase, nymphs and cupidons stepping through a graceful pastoral. Then she read the caption. It had been taken by a German war photographer and it showed Jewesses and their infants on their way to the gas chambers. Soon afterwards she came upon John Hersey’s account of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She could no longer have faith in God or man. She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods, who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds, and passions. Now when she prayed she stood in darkness, beneath the moon, and repeated her message three times, with rigidly clenched fists and unwinking stare, forcing all her strength upwards to the chilly disc or crescent which sometimes glanced slyly back at her, sometimes reeled drunkenly off into the torn clouds. She was in retreat from the world, in a state of numb and impotent horror. Francis told her that she was a boring monolith, concentred all in self. He was right, she thought, but she knew no way of expressing her state in words, no way of escaping her carapace. The lonely call of an owl, which once had thrilled her, now pierced her with apprehension. Man’s inhumanity to man and beast dominated a world of vicious anarchy and disgrace. Only the trees and hills and the night sky held to their orderly beauty: “O look upon the starry firmament.” She found an astronomical globe and took it to her room; she sat on the floor studying it and she wept. She did not know why she was weeping.