Philip had been right, of course. Those months in the cottage hadn’t been at all like Epipsychidion or La Maison du Berger. What with the well and the walk to the village…. But even if there hadn’t been the well and the walk, even if he had had Marjorie unadulterated, would it have been any better? It might even have been worse. Marjorie unadulterated might have been worse than Marjorie tempered by irrelevancies.
That refinement of hers, for example, that rather cold virtuousness, so bloodless and spiritual—from a distance and theoretically he admired. But in practice and close at hand? It was with that virtue, that refined, cultured, bloodless spirituality that he had fallen in love—with that and with her unhappiness; for Carling was unspeakable. Pity made him a knight errant. Love, he had then believed (for he was only twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out, just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and the lucubrations of philosophers and mystics), love was talk, love was spiritual communion and companionship. That was real love. The sexual business was only an irrelevancy, unavoidable, because unfortunately human beings had bodies, but to be kept as far as possible in the background. Afdently pure with the ardour of young desires taught artificially to burn on the side of the angels, he had admired that refined and quiet purity which, in Marjorie, was the product of a natural coldness, a congenitally low vitality.
‘You’re so good,’ he had said. ‘It seems to come to you so easily. I wish I could be good, like you.’
It was the equivalent, but he did not realize it, of wishing himself half dead. Under the shy, diffident, sensitive skin of him, he was ardently alive. It was indeed hard for him to be good, as Marjorie was good. But he tried. And meanwhile, he admired her goodness and purity. And he was touched-at least until it bored and exasperated him-by her devotion to him, he was flattered by her admiration.
Walking now towards Chalk Farm station he suddenly remembered that story his father used to tell about an Italian chauffeur he had once talked to about love. (The old man had a genius for getting people to talk; all sorts of people, even servants, even workmen. Walter envied him the talent.) Some women, according to the chauffeur, are like wardrobes. Sono come cassettoni. How richly old Bidlake used to tell the anecdote! They may be as lovely as you like; but what’s the point of a lovely wardrobe in your arms? What on earth’s the point? (And Marjorie, Walter reflected, wasn’t even really good looking.) ‘Give me,’ said the chauffeur, ‘the other kind, even if they’re ugly. My girl,’ he had confided, ‘is the other kind. Č un frullino, proprio un frullino—a regular egg-whisk.’ And the old man would twinkle like a jovial, wicked old satyr behind his monocle. Stiff wardrobes or lively egg-whisks? Walter had to admit that his preferences were the same as the chauffeur’s. At any rate, he knew by personal experience that (whenever ‘real’ love was being tempered by the sexual irrelevancies) he didn’t much like the wardrobe kind of woman. At a distance, theoretically, purity and goodness and refined spirituality were admirable. But in practice and close to they were less appealing. And from someone who does not appeal to one, even devotion, even the flattery of admiration are unbearable. Confusedly and simultaneously he hated Marjorie for her patient, martyred coldness; he accused himself of swinish sensuality. His love for Lucy was mad and shameful, but Marjorie was bloodless and half dead. He was at once justified and without excuse. But more without excuse, all the same; more without excuse. They were low, those sensual feelings; they were ignoble. Eggwhisk and chest of drawers—could anything be more base and ignoble than such a classification? In imagination he heard his father’s rich and fleshy laugh. Horrible! Walter’s whole conscious life had been orientated in opposition to his father, in opposition to the old man’s jolly, careless sensuality. Consciously he had always been on the side of his mother, on the side of purity, refinement, the spirit. But his blood was at least half his father’s. And now two years of Marjorie had made him consciously dislike cold virtue. He consciously disliked it, even though at the same time he was still ashamed of his dislike, ashamed of what he regarded as his beastly sensual desires, ashamed of his love for Lucy. But oh, if only Marjorie would leave him in peace! If only she’d refrain from clamouring for a return to the unwelcome love she persisted in forcing on him! If only she’d stop being so dreadfully devoted! He could give her friendship-for he liked her, genuinely; she was so good and kind, so loyal and devoted. He’d be glad of her friendship in return. But love-that was suffocating. And when, imagining she was fighting the other woman with her own weapons, she did violence to her own virtuous coldness and tried to win him back by the ardour of her caresses-oh, it was terrible, really terrible.
And then, he went on to reflect, she was really rather a bore with her heavy, insensitive earnestness. Really rather stupid in spite of her culture-because of it perhaps. The culture was genuine all right; she had read the books, she remembered them. But did she understand them? Could she understand them? The remarks with which she broke her long, long silences, the cultured, earnest remarks-how heavy they were, how humourless and without understanding! She was wise to be so silent; silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves. Marjorie knew how to listen well and sympathetically. And when she did break silence, half her utterances were quotations. For Marjorie had a retentive memory and had formed the habit of learning the great thoughts and the purple passages by heart. It had taken Walter some time to discover the heavy, pathetically uncomprehending stupidity that underlay the silence and the quotations. And when he discovered, it was too late.
He thought of Carling. A drunkard and religious. Always chattering away about chasubles and saints and the Immaculate Conception, and at the same time a nasty drunken pervert. If the man hadn’t been quite so detestably disgusting, if he hadn’t made Marjorie quite so wretched-what then? Walter imagined his freedom. He wouldn’t have pitied, he wouldn’t have loved. He remembered Marjorie’s red and swollen eyes after one of those disgusting scenes with Carling. The dirty brute!
‘And what about me?’ he suddenly thought.
He knew that the moment the door had shut behind him, Marorie had started to cry. Carling at least had the excuse of whiskey. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. He himself was never anything but sober. At this moment, he knew, she was crying.
‘I ought to go back,’ he said to himself. But instead, he quickened his pace till he was almost running down the street. It was a flight from his conscience and at the same time a hastening towards his desire.
‘I ought to go back, I ought.’
He hurried on, hating her because he had made her so unhappy.
A man looking into a tobacconist’s window suddenly stepped backwards as he was passing. Walter violently collided with him.
‘Sorry,’ he said automatically, and hurried on without looking round.
‘Where yer going?’ the man shouted after him angrily. ‘Wotcher think you’re doing? Being a bloody Derby winner?’
Two loitering street boys whooped with ferociously derisive mirth.
‘You in yer top ‘at,’ the man pursued contemptuously, hating the uniformed gentleman.
The right thing would have been to turn round and give the fellow back better than he gave. His father would have punctured him with a word. But for Walter there was only flight. He dreaded these encounters, he was frightened of the lower classes. The noise of the man’s abuse faded in his ears.
Odious! He shuddered. His thoughts returned to Marorie.
‘Why can’t she be reasonable? ‘ he said to himself. ‘Just reasonable. If only at least she had something to do, something to keep her occupied.’
She had too much time to think, that was the trouble with Marjorie. Too much time to think about him. Though after all it was his fault; it was he who had robbed her of her occupation and made her focus her mind exclusively on himself. She had taken a partnership in a decorator’s shop when he first knew her;
one of those lady-like, artistic, amateurish decorating establishments in Kensington. Lampshades and the companionship of the young women who painted them and above all devotion to Mrs. Cole, the senior partner, were Marjorie’s compensations for a wretched marriage. She had created a little world of her own, apart from Carling; a feminine world, with something of the girl’s school about it, where she could talk about clothes and shops, and listen to gossip, and indulge in what schoolgirls call a ‘ pash’ for an elder woman, and imagine in the intervals that she was doing part of the world’s work and helping on the cause of Art.
Walter had persuaded her to give it all up. Not without difficulty, however. For her happiness in being devoted to Mrs. Cole, in having a sentimental ‘pash’ for her, was almost a compensation for her misery with Carling. But Carling turned out to be more than Mrs. Cole could compensate for. Walter offered what the lady perhaps could not, and certainly did not wish to, provide—a place of refuge, protection, financial support. Besides, Walter was a man, and a man ought, by tradition, to be loved, even when, as Walter had finally concluded about Marjorie, one doesn’t really like men and is only naturally attuned to the company of women. (The effect of literature again! He remembered Philip Quarles’s comments on the disastrous influence which art can exercise on life.) Yes, he was a man; but ‘different,’ as she had never tired of telling him, from ordinary men. He had accepted his ‘ difference’ as a flattering distinction, then. But was it? He wondered. Anyhow, ‘different’ she had then found him and so was able to get the best of both worlds—a man who yet wasn’t a man. Charmed by Walter’s persuasions, driven by Carling’s brutalities, she had consented to abandon the shop and with it Mrs. Cole, whom Walter detested as a bullying, slave-driving, blood-sucking embodiment of female will.
‘You’re too good to be an amateur upholsterer,’ he had flattered her out of the depths of a then genuine belief in her intellectual capacities.
She should help him in some unspecified way with his literary work, she should write herself. Under his influence she had taken to writing essays and short stories. But they were obviously no good. From having been encouraging, he became reticent; he said no more about her efforts. In a little while Marjorie abandoned the unnatural and futile occupation. She had nothing after that but Walter. He became the reason of her existence, the foundation on which her whole life was established. The foundation was moving away from under her.
‘If only,’ thought Walter, ‘she’d leave me in peace!’
He turned into the Underground station. At the entrance a man was selling the evening papers. SOCIALIST ROBBERY SCHEME. FIRST READING. The words glared out from the placard. Glad of an excuse to distract his mind Walter bought a paper. The LiberalLabour Government’s Bill for the nationalization of the mines had passed its first reading by the usual majority. Walter read the news with pleasure. His political opinions were advanced. Not so the opinions of the proprietor of the evening paper. The language of the leading article was savagely violent.
‘The ruffians,’ thought Walter as he read it. The article evoked in him a stimulating enthusiasm for all that it assailed, a delightful hatred for Capitalists and Reactionaries. The barriers of his individuality were momentarily thrown down, the personal complexities were abolished. Possessed by the joy of political battle, he overflowed his boundaries, he became, so to speak, larger than himself-larger and simpler.
‘The ruffians,’ he repeated, thinking of the oppressors, the monopolizers.
At Camden Town station a wizened little man with a red handkerchief round his neck took the seat next to his. The stink of the old man’s pipe was so suffocating, that Walter looked up the car to see if there were not another vacant seat. There was, as it happened; but on second thoughts, he decided not to move. To retire from the stink would seem too offensively pointed, might occasion comment from the stinker. The acrid smoke rasped his throat; he coughed.
‘One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts,’ Philip Quarles used to say. ‘What’s the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn’t the rationalization of your feelings? If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.’
A whiff of stale sweat came up with the nicotine fumes to Walter’s nostrils. ‘The Socialists call it Nationalization,’ he read in his paper; ‘but the rest of us have a shorter and homelier name for what they propose to do. That name is Theft.’ But at least it was theft from thieves and for the benefit of their victims. The little old man leaned forward and spat, cautiously and perpendicularly, between his feet. With the heel of his boot he spread the gob over the floor. Walter looked away; he wished that he could personally like the oppressed and personally hate the rich oppressors. One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts. But one’s tastes and instincts were accidents. There were eternal principles. But if the axiomatic principles didn’t happen to be your personal major premiss…?
And suddenly he was nine years old and walking with his mother in the fields near Gattenden. Each of them carried a bunch of cowslips. They must have been up to Batt’s Corner; it was the only place where cowslips grew in the neighbourhood.
‘We’ll stop for a minute and see poor Wetherington,’ his mother said. ‘He’s very ill.’ She knocked at a cottage door.
Wetherington had been the under-gardener at the Hall; but for the past month he had not been working. Walter remembered him as a pale, thin man with a cough, not at all communicative. He was not much interested in Wetherington. A woman opened the door. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Wetherington.’ They were shown in.
Wetherington was lying in bed propped up with pillows. His face was terrible. A pair of enormous, large-pupilled eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. Stretched over the starting bones, the skin was white and clammy with sweat. But almost more appalling even than the face was the neck, the unbelievably thin neck. And from the sleeves of his nightshirt projected two knobbed sticks, his arms, with a pair of immense skeleton hands fastened to the end of them, like rakes at the end of their slender hafts. And then the smell in that sickroom! The windows were tightly shut, a fire burned in the little grate. The air was hot and heavy with a horrible odour of stale sick breath and the exhalations of a sick body—an old inveterate smell that seemed to have grown sickeningly sweetish with long ripening in the pent-up heat. A new, fresh smell, however pungently disgusting, would have been less horrible. It was the inveterateness, the sweet decaying over-ripeness of this sickroom smell that made it so peculiarly unbearable. Walter shuddered even now to think of it. He lit a cigarette to disinfect his memory. He had been brought up on baths and open windows. The first time that, as a child, he was taken to church, the stuffiness, the odour of humanity made him sick; he had to be hurried out. His mother did not take him to church again. Perhaps we’re brought up too wholesomely and aseptically, he thought. An education -that results in one’s feeling sick in the company of one’s fellow-men, one’s brothers-can it be good? He would have liked to love them. But love does not flourish in an atmosphere that nauseates the lover with an uncontrollable disgust.
In Wetherington’s sickroom even pity found it hard to flourish. He sat there, while his mother talked to the dying man and his wife, gazing, reluctant but compelled by the fascination of horror, at the ghastly skeleton in the bed and breathing through his bunch of cowslips the warm and sickening air. Even through the fresh delicious scent of the cowslips he could smell the inveterate odours of the sickroom. He felt almost no pity, only horror, fear and disgust. And even when Mrs. Wetherington began to cry, turning her face away so that the sick man should not see her tears, he felt not pitiful so much as uncomfortable, embarrassed. The spectacle of her grief only made him more urgently long to escape, to get out of that horrible room into the pure enormous air and the sunshine.
He felt ashamed of these emotions as he remembered them. But that was how he had felt, how he s
till felt. ‘One should be loyal to one’s instincts.’ No, not to all, not to the bad ones; one should resist these. But they were not so easily overcome. The old man in the next seat relit his pipe. He remembered that he had held every breath for as long as he possibly could, so as not to have to draw in and smell the tainted air too often. A deep breath through the cowslips; then he counted forty before he let it out again and inhaled another. The old man once more leaned forward and spat. ‘The idea that nationalization will increase the prosperity of the workers is entirely fallacious. During the past years the tax-payer has learned to his cost the meaning of bureaucratic control. If the workers imagine…’ He shut his eyes and saw the sickroom. When the time came to say goodbye, he had shaken the skeleton hand. It lay there, unmoving, on the bedclothes; he slipped his fingers underneath those dead and bony ones, lifted the hand a moment and let it fall again.
It was cold and wettish to the touch. Turning away, he surreptitiously wiped his palm on his coat. He let out his long-contained breath with an explosive sigh and inhaled another lungfull of the sickening air. It was the last he had to take; his mother was already moving towards the door. Her little Pekingese frisked round her, barking.
‘Be quiet, T’ang!’ she said in her clear, beautiful voice. She was perhaps the only person in England, he now reflected, who regularly pronounced the apostrophe in T’ang.
They walked home by the footpath across the fields. Fantastic and improbable as a little Chinese dragon, T’ang ran on ahead of them bounding lightly over what were to him enormous obstacles. His feathery tail fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, when the grass was very long he sat up on his little flat rump as though he were begging for sugar, and looked out with his round bulgy eyes over the tussocks, taking his bearings.
Under the bright dappled sky Walter had felt like a reprieved prisoner. He ran, he shouted. His mother walked slowly, without speaking. Every now and then she halted for a moment and shut her eyes. It was a habit she had, when she felt pensive or perplexed. She was often perplexed, Walter reflected, smiling tenderly to himself. Poor Wetherington must have perplexed her a great deal. He remembered how often she had halted on their way home.
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