No, it was not just physical, in the scientific sense of the word. Connie knew this when he was dancing with her himself. He held her hand lightly, but kindly, and his arm against her shoulder had a certain protectiveness in its guidance. But essentially, he was a thousand miles away from her, he held himself most perfectly out of contact with her, at the same time sharing the rhythm of the dance with her.
‘Why do you talk about a democracy of touch, when you can’t really touch any woman, not to save your life?’ she asked him.
‘I tell you, I’m on the wrong side of the fence,’ he said. ‘I don’t belong to the democracy of touch myself: I only prognosticate it.’
‘If you did belong to it, you’d have to be in touch with a woman, wouldn’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes! Yes, I’m sure I would. But something would have had to change in me, and in women, before it took place. And it hasn’t changed in either of us, and won’t. I tell you, I’m a long way on the wrong side of the fence.’
‘You mean you’re not touchable, either.’
‘I suppose that’s what I do mean. Don’t touch me! for I am not yet ascended unto the Father! Perhaps that’s about where we stand.’
‘And I too?’ she asked.
‘I don’t want to judge about you. You must decide for yourself!’
The dance came to an end, and he left her. But vaguely in her consciousness the words of Jesus were moving: ‘Noli me tangere! Touch me not! for I am not yet ascended unto the Father!’ What did they mean?
It meant they had died, these men. In the war, finally, they had died. And though they were still walking about in the flesh, and were still struggling for the life that should be theirs, after the resurrection, they had not yet got the body of the new life. Their bodies were the old, tormented bodies which had died, but which had not yet come to life again. The spirit was struggling into new life, a resurrection. But the body was not yet filled with new blood and new fire, which was the Father, the resurrection into full life.
How terrible the story of Jesus! It was the epitome of the story of all men. They had all been crucified, these men: all except Jack, who had balked it. But Clifford and Tommy Dukes and even Winterslow, they had all been killed, in some subtle way. And it was the strange, dim, grey era of the resurrection, with them, before the ascension into new life.
And perhaps they would never ascend really into life. They would remain the shadowy, almost incorporeal beings of the era between the rolling open of the tomb, and the ascending into the firmament of a new body. They lived and walked and spoke, but theirs was still the old, tortured body that could not be touched.
There was no hope, in them, of a new body: that did not wince with the unspeakable memory of death. And between the old bodies, there was no possibility of contact. Those that had never died, who had, in a way, dodged, like Olive and Jack and so many second-rate people, were utterly out of touch with those who had died and were walking now in the dim, grey days before ascending unto the Father. There was no touch with that which lay behind. The new body could not touch the old. The old must be connected with the old, the new with the new.
Clifford, at least, could never rise to a new body: no, nor even hope for it. Lately, since the excitement at the rolling back of the gates of the tomb had died down in him, he had known. That was why he had told her to have lovers. He thought she could be connected with the old body of life, like Jack — men who had got the old body, which had dodged the descent into hell.
But she knew, the old body of life, these second-rate men, were to her untouchables. She could have loved Tommy Dukes, but for the dark, cold death that was still at the centre of his heart. But men like Jack she could not even touch: nor any of the ordinary men, who had dodged the real descent into hell. Brave men had made the descent: but they were still wincing and saying noli me tangere — It was malicious, really, of Clifford, to suggest she should find lovers among the second-rate men who had never suffered the awful adventure.
But Clifford was becoming a little malicious. He was gradually coming to the old position, of those who did not believe in the resurrection of the body. He talked a great deal about immortality. The subject obsessed him. But it was the immortality of the spirit he insisted on. The resurrection of the body — the bodies of living men, even if not one’s own private body — this did not interest him. It was the private and egoistic resurrection of his own spirit, into the ideal eternity, that obsessed him.
Constance could see that he and Tommy Dukes were no longer in accord.
‘I believe in the resurrection of Man, and the Son of Man, and that is a great comfort to me,’ she heard Dukes saying to Clifford. ‘Somehow, I shall always be part of mankind. That’s what I feel. So that if men can rise up again, with new flesh on their spirits, and new feelings in their flesh, and a new fire to erect their phallus — that is immortality to me.’
‘But that is merely temporal,’ said Clifford. ‘Even granted it happens, give it, say, another two thousand years, and it will be where we are once more — descended into hell!’
‘What does that matter? Even eternity is in rhythms. What can rise up to life again is eternal, in the fact that it rises from the dead. If once there is a rising from the dead, then death is part of the life rhythm: and that is immortality. And if we have died, and only got as far as pushing back the stones of the tomb, without ever ascending unto the Father, we’ve performed one of the great acts of the life-cycle. If we never ascend and never know the joy of new life: well, those that come after us will know it! We’ve died: that’s patent. But if we’ve even pushed open the doors of the tomb a chink, we’ve kept up the immortality. What does it matter if we go through the rest of our lives with sore, untouchable bodies, and the incessant noli me tangere! in our mouths? We have done the worst bit. And those that come after, even if they aren’t my children, will be able to make the ascent on to a new earth. By which I mean have new bodies, with new good blood in them, born for a new epoch of mankind. Surely that’s heaven on earth! It would be to me! though I shall never experience it. But I believe I’ve made a bit of a way for it, and I’ll go on trying. If I can’t have a new body, and new blood in my veins and a new song in my mouth, I can at least go on shoving the stone from the mouth of the tomb, so the others will come a little quicker to the ascension and to the next day, the human tomorrow, that’ll be theirs all right, though we only shiver in the darkest hour before the dawn.’
There was an obstinate pause on Clifford’s part.
‘But I still believe the individual spirit is immortal!’ he insisted. ‘I still believe that my spirit, after having striven sincerely after truth, or knowledge, or self-awareness, will enter into the realm of perfect knowledge, perfect universal self-awareness, the great light, or the godhead, or the nirvana! I still feel that as the greatest truth.’
‘Then for you it is the greatest truth, and therefore it is true,’ said Dukes. ‘I suppose men only surge out towards one door of truth at a time. The survival of my individual, spirit, and its incorporation into the great light, or the perfect knowledge —I’ve no doubt it’s quite true for me too — but I feel it isn’t a poignant truth. The poignant truth, for me, is the resurrection of the body. That’s what I yearn for. But if there is one perfect knowledge, and one eternal light, so, ultimately, to me there is one body: the body of men and the animals and the earth! And if this body is capable of newness, then that is my resurrection. But only that is born again which rises from the dead. And so, knowing I have died, I want to make at least the first grey movements of the resurrection: the pushing back of the rock from the tomb. — We are not divided, all one body we —The hymn says it: and I feel it is acutely true, of all those who rise from the dead.’
‘But women?’ said Winterslow.
‘They die too, the best of them. And they’re as bad as we are, just as much wincing from being touched. But they’ve got to roll back the stone from their own tomb. We can’t do it for them: nor they for
us.’
‘I can’t see, honestly I can’t, that the body matters, in the face of death. Admitting the obvious fact of dust to dust, — can the body really matter?’ Clifford insisted.
‘If matter is indestructible, there is only one body, and that is eternal,’ said Dukes.
‘And why not leave it at that?’ said Clifford.
‘Because my soul yearns for a new body of man.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t feel that way,’ said Clifford.
‘ Why should you then, if you don’t?’ said Dukes. ‘Every man his own immortality!’
‘Myself!’ said Winterslow. ‘I don’t so much yearn for a new body, as set my teeth absolutely against the fact of being nothing but spirit. I am a body. I am even somebody. And that I’m going to be, forever.’
Connie had been eavesdropping. The men were talking in Clifford’s bedroom, where he lay in bed. And she sat by the folding doors, listening to every word. If they’d known she was there, they wouldn’t have talked. But she wanted to hear.
So! the immortality of the body! It set her yearning for children. If only she could have children, by a man with a risen body! Even by Dukes! — if only he hadn’t got that fatal little memory of death occupying his heart! No! Not Tommy Dukes! He was still too overshadowed.
And perhaps she herself had not sufficiently risen from the dead. But then, she did not feel she had died, with all the absoluteness these men seemed to feel. Died! Yes! she had died many deaths. But none so awful, such a cold time in the tomb, as these men seemed to think they had known. Though probably they exaggerated, as men, in women’s eyes, nearly always do, in order to make themselves more important to themselves.
Anyhow, the talk, though it moved her, did not settle her own problems. What she wanted, for herself, was that her body should not go dead. She was by no means anxious to have it dead, so that it could gruesomely resurrect and push at the cold stone of the tomb, and murmur continually, with cold lips: noli me tangere! No no! her great problem was to keep her body alive. And between second-rate men who had never died the death, and first-rate men who, over-shadowed and benumbed by death, could only murmur: noli me tangere! where was she to go? Perhaps even her father’s way of knowing so much about the mouth of the tomb that he trained a Dorothy Perkins rambler rose over it, and a profuse pink geranium, perhaps that, after all, was best. Yet one can never repeat the excellencies of one’s parents! alas!
She felt repelled by the men, and very much more drawn towards Lady Eva and Olive. Olive tried to live by Sir Malcolm’s principles. She tried gathering roses while she might. She picked up a lover where she could. But invariably she found him terribly unsatisfactory, and invariably she returned to her tension with Jack. That seemed to her the only thing in her life: the tight string that tied her to Jack, and made her spend most of her time strangling his soul, while he, equally canny at the game, had tight strings round all her limbs and pulled them till he paralysed her. A great deal of it was mutual torment! And that was the most real thing she had in her life. She felt herself like an embodied demon. She envied her cousin Connie her placidity and her soft, if ridiculous, abstractedness.
Lady Eva was another matter. Constance liked her, but was always depressed by her. In her simple, very well-made black dresses, the elderly slim woman had the look of a girl, when she sat still: and she sat so often so very still, just murmuring her gossip. But when she came to walk, she creaked with rheumatism. And it was the same with her manner: she was so simple, almost like a child, yet she managed to preserve the curious prestige of the grande dame. But when you came nearer to her, you found the joints of her soul as stiff as those of her body. At the centre of her, she was completely insentient. At the middle of her, she had no feelings at all. She didn’t even know that, at the centre, anyone could have feelings. She thought that the core of everybody was quite hard and quite without feeling, as every crystal is centred upon a grain of cold dust. Only, of course, the way you were elaborated upon this centre of nothingness mattered. It was that which established your quality.
And she didn’t think her niece Constance had any very definite quality. That peculiar quality of the diamond, which makes it able to cut all the other stones, Constance had not got; whereas Lady Eva, in her own way, had it, and so, she thought, had Clifford. It was the quality of the ruling class. That the diamonds were mostly flawed, not very much wanted, didn’t matter to the diamonds themselves. Nothing mattered to them, because they had the quality of ultimate imperviousness. Only they had begun to realize that they, like diamonds, were nowadays mostly used merely as settings for baser, more coloured stones.
Constance understood Lady Eva fairly well, and expected absolutely nothing from her: not one single deep or warm feeling. The diamond is the most bloodless of all stones. But she liked her: and she felt sorry for her. Poor Lady Eva, the grande dame in her was her trump card, when she was dealing with people. And it didn’t always work. All sorts of other trumps were continually being called. She had to fall back, at last, in her aristocracy, upon an infinitely cunning impudence. That was what her aristocracy amounted to, in the very last issue.
But still — why jump to ultimates? She was a figure! And she was interesting, in a quaint way, with her frail grandeur of the queer, unreal days of Queen Alexandra.
She loved to talk tête-à-tête with women, in a slightly whispering voice. So she came limping slowly but still aristocratically up to Constance’s room: and Constance gave her a brandy-and-water.
‘My dear, you have by far the pleasantest room in the house. You really are wonderful!’
‘Am I? Why?’ said Constance, by no means caught.
‘Oh, altogether! The way you manage as you do! I was always such a bad house-keeper! And your patience with Clifford! Wonderful!’
‘But he is patient with me,’ said Constance.
‘He is! He is wonderful too! It is dreadful! Of course his brain is as perfect as ever — he can be so witty! — and that’s the part that matters most in a man. I think brains so much more important than looks in a man, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do! But Clifford is quite good-looking!’
‘Quite! Oh quite! Very good-looking. But you know what I mean! — only half a man, as you may say. It is dreadful.’
Lady Eva sipped her brandy, and her moist blue eyes became vaguer. And yet there was a determined point within the vagueness. She was after something or other. Constance remained silent.
‘Being a woman, it’s your side that appeals to me,’ Lady Eva went on. ‘It’s so dreadful for you to be deprived of — of one side of a woman’s life, as you may say! Almost worse for you, because you’re healthy.’
‘But what am I deprived of?’ asked Constance.
Lady Eva looked at her with those vague blue eyes, in which yet was some remote point of determination.
‘You’re bound to miss not having a real husband, you know,’ she said. ‘You’re bound to suffer, with that being taken away from you. — Or don’t you really mind?’
Lady Eva was probing very close, in a queer, female curiosity and intimacy.
‘But I’ve got a real husband,’ Constance said. ‘I mind for his’ sake that he is paralysed. But why should I pity myself?’
‘No! Perhaps you’re right! Perhaps you don’t care for a man in that way! I believe most women don’t, if you ask me. If a man gives a woman an interesting life, that is what she really wants of him. She isn’t very keen on the other. I know I wasn’t. But I had a wonderful life, in politics, with my husband. It was wonderful at the time. You know ours was a real love-match, mine and my husband’s.’
She looked at Constance queerly. And it was as if some queer long, elegant insect, a stick-insect, or a mantis, were talking about its love-match.
‘Yes, I know!’ murmured Constance.
‘Isn’t it queer, how it’s all gone! My husband has been dead only five years! Yet it seems to me as if all the years I lived with him had never been real: all that
reform and the politics I thought so much of, and the electioneering down there in our own place! Oh, it was wonderful! Yet it doesn’t seem any more real to me now than a cigarette one has smoked. A man makes a woman’s life for her, but he never enters into her life, don’t you think?’
‘You see I don’t know very well,’ said Constance.
‘No, you don’t, really!’ Lady Eva rather waveringly lit a cigarette, having reminded herself. ‘No, I don’t think men enter really into a woman’s life. They make her life for her — but they never really come in to it. That’s how it seems to me. When I look back, and think of my husband, I can see him making my life for me, and of course, I adored him, I’m almost sure I did. Yet he’s hardly more real to me now than Lord Palmerston, whom I just met, or than other men whom I remember. No, he never really. came into my life at all. No man has.’
‘Perhaps men don’t enter into a woman’s inner life,’ said Constance.
‘That’s what I mean!’ said Lady Eva quickly, pointing her cigarette. ‘When I think of all the men I’ve known, not one of them has ever affected my inner life. No more than CoIlingwood, my butler, has. Yes! And he’s my butler.’
Lady Eva pursed her lips and looked oddly at her cigarette point. Constance knew Collingwood. He was a big, burly Lincolnshire man, about Lady Eva’s own age, who had come with her when she married from her father’s place. All these years he had been with her, and was the same huge, strong Lincolnshire fisherman’s son, with a face redder than Lady Eva’s by far, through drinking whiskey where she drank brandy. But he had a genuine gentle feeling for her. To him, the girlish pathos of her was complete. He knew her very well, and he loved her with the queer passion a man might feel for his slender, girl-like sister, who was just a little younger than himself. He had a wife and grown-up children, but when Lady Eva moved to her house in Dieppe, he moved with her, and kept house for her. He was like a big, burly brother to her: but of course, always the butler. And she could never have got on for a month, without him.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 8