496
PARTISAN REVIEW
sor lives on the grounds of the school, and the main theme of the
book is his growing fear of eviction at the hands of the hostile head–
mistresses. Two of the girls disappear; there is a love affair between
the old man's daughter and one of the masters; the book ends with
a dance for the pupils. The book's title is misleading, for it is the
most deliberately inconclusive novel which can ever have been writ–
ten. Nothing is settled. We do not learn what has happened to the
vanished girls, or what will happen either to the professor or to his
daughter. On the first page we enter a sort of timeless dream, and on
the last page the dream breaks off.
It
breaks off but it does not
end.
The world of
Concluding
is a world of pure hallucination, timeless,
unhampered by the accepted sequence of cause and effect, yet
strangely unified, strangely possessed of its own private logic. It
is
an
exceedingly uncomfortable world to inhabit, a beautiful but pitiless
nightmare in which the only warmth comes from the treacherous
adolescent bodies of the girls.
Quite soon, girls began to cut in. While Inglefield kept the instru–
ment hard at it, the original partners began to break up, to step back
over the wax mirror floor out of one another's arms, moving sideways
by such as would not be parted yet, each to tap a second favorite on
a bare, quiet shoulder. Then the girl so chosen would give a little start,
open those great shut eyes, much greater than jewels as she circled, and,
circling yet, would dip into these fresh limbs which moved already in
the dance, disengaging thus to leave her first choice to slip sideways in
tum past established, whirling partners until she found another who
was loved and yet alone.
This passage
is
typical of the last stage of Green's curious man–
ner, typical in its deliberate clumsiness, its complexity and its curious
effectiveness.
It
is also typical of Green's emotional stance. He is
erotically enchanted by the dancing girls, and we are enabled to
share
his
enchantment. But the final reaction to that dance
is
a shiver
down the spine, as if the girls had really been ghosts and were to fall
into dust at the last note of the gramophone. And this, indeed, may
well be a reader's final reaction to the whole book, a sense that he
has been enchanted by an uneasy suspicion that the magic was black.
There is not only no compassion in this book; there is, for the first
time, a subtle assault on compassion. Not that the book is cruel
in
any obvious way, but that by the curious purity of its negation it
inspires a sort of chilly despair.
