Most Loving Mere Folly

by Edith Pargeter

  She drew a little nearer, until the tiny gleam of light was a pale gloss upon her ice-cold feet. She stood looking down at him, and felt the intent stare of his eyes devouring her. He did not move, and she did not touch him.

  ‘I’m very fond of you, Theo. I always shall be. If this hadn’t happened, I should have gone on living quite happily in the conviction that I loved you. But the difference is unmistakable now that it has happened. I hadn’t looked for it – but you won’t expect me to look it squarely in the face and deny that it exists. I might as well swear the earth is flat.’

  ‘With your convictions,’ he said expressionlessly, ‘you could hardly do that.’

  ‘Nor to deny its right to exist, nor mine to have it, nor his!’ Against that heavy stillness of his her voice beat helplessly, forcing the words upon his consciousness with a hardening insistence, because he made no move to receive or reject them.

  ‘You’ve made everything very clear,’ he said. ‘There’s really nothing more to be said. What do you want from me?’

  ‘I should be glad to hear you say that you understand. And don’t blame us too much.’

  ‘What right have I got to blame you?’ he said, suddenly harsh with pain. ‘I don’t own you. Did I ever claim any rights to bend you out of shape? Have I accused you of anything? It’s you who make so many words about it. I’ve made no claims, I’m not trying to confine you. All I want is for you to go back to bed, and let me alone.’

  ‘You could have come a step to meet me,’ she said, perceptibly drawing back from him, shadowy into the shadows of the room. ‘It would have made things easier.’ But she said it with a regretful coldness, as if she had abandoned the possibility of contact, as if she sighed after it: ‘What a pity!’

  ‘Easier! Isn’t it enough that I make them no harder?’ he said hoarsely, suddenly shrinking together in the depths of the chair in a contortion of unmistakable pain. ‘Have I put any obstacles in your way? Or tried to deny you your rights? Don’t expect me to be your justification, as well. You’re a person, you do what you have to, and you must carry your own burdens. I can’t be responsible for your soul!’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, chilled beyond expression. ‘No, I suppose one can’t have it both ways.’ She drew another step back, fading into the dark, from which her voice came low and heavily. ‘I thought I knew you better,’ she said, marvelling. ‘I didn’t realise we could find ourselves suddenly in different compartments, like this. I told him there was no way you could get between us – that you wouldn’t want to—’

  ‘My God!’ he said, clutching his head between his long hands. ‘Are you reproaching me? Did I make this situation? How am I getting between you?’

  ‘By suffering!’ she said, in a soft, protesting cry, and the lamenting sound issued from a darkness in which she was now quite lost but for the floating oval of pallor which was her face.

  ‘I can no more help that,’ he said, groaning, ‘than you can help loving. You must allow me the same freedom to feel as I allow you.’ He drew in his breath hard, wrenching himself round in the chair that he might not even see the half-luminous shape she had left in the empty air where she had stood. ‘Go away!’ he said, his voice shattering like trodden glass. ‘Go away now – stop this! I understand you, if that’s enough. Now please go!’

  It was not enough, coming as it did out of an arctic estrangement which had no place at all between two such people as they had seemed to be. But she had no right to ask more from him than he could bring himself to offer. Moreover, she began, in her deepest heart, to understand the wall of ice he had erected against her, and had no wish to thaw it too suddenly, for fear of a flood which might destroy him, even if she survived it. The world was not going to end tonight. She said with recovered calm, and almost the practicality of everyday: ‘I wish you’d come to bed. It’s far too cold to be sitting about here.’

  But he did not reply, and the exhausted head lay back now against the cushion with the look of death about it. So she went quietly to the fire, and fed its last sparks with crumpled paper and sticks until it revived a little, and then carefully built a little hollow house of coal over it. It began to draw readily, it was never difficult. Then she brought a rug from the cupboard under the stairs, and spreading it at arms’ length, for fear he should recoil from her touch, let it fall over his knees.

  ‘Good-night!’ she said, and left him there motionless, looking after the faint sound of her feet as she climbed the stairs.

  2

  In the morning, when the broad bleak light of a frosty day made it impossible for them to hide from each other, she tried again. It seemed to her that they could not find any means of remaining strangers in the obvious atmosphere of the breakfast-table. But as soon as she reverted to the exchanges of the night the illusion of reality crumbled, and he evaded her with a frigidly veiled look, and went back into his tower of brass. She almost heard the door clang to between them. His lips made the careful, distinct phrases due to his principles, testifying yet again to the essential singleness of human liberty. But when she persisted, he slipped from under her fingers, and went out, and put his head into the house again only to say that he was driving down to town, and would not be back until tomorrow.

  She felt him gather up after him, and carefully, jealously carry away, the last trailing thread of his generosity towards her. She knew then that this would not end, however many days she waited for the shock and the revulsion to pass. There would never be a time when he would meet her fully again, and sit down with her in a tried and reliable companionship to discuss the crisis which had overtaken them, and see what could be made out of the breakages. Not because he had frankly found his principles, when it came to the point, a little too heavy to be borne, not because his nature, under the shock of her defection, had rediscovered its own human weakness, and found itself outraged and angry. That she could have understood. Many a man has sincerely held views which, when it came to the point of sacrificing himself for them, he could not sustain. But this was something quite different. He clung to his declared views still, reasserted them as his only contribution to a solution; but they were no contribution at all, since he had withdrawn all his powers into paralysis for fear they should somehow be induced to take action in support of his declaration.

  ‘I don’t condemn you—!’ No, and I don’t absolve you, either! I don’t claim any rights in you, but I don’t release any of the impalpable rights I’ve acquired in you over the years. I’m not holding you – and by God, I’m not letting you go! Drag yourself clear if you can, but you won’t do it without the reproach of knowing that you’ve destroyed me, torn me apart in pulling your roots clear, sent me to hell climbing into your new little heaven. I may not be able to keep you from getting there, but I’ll poison the air for you, there or wherever you go!

  Then she thought, driving herself frantically round the house upon unnecessary and ill-done jobs all the day long: ‘No, that isn’t altogether fair. It’s worse than that for me! He’s doing all that, with just that intention, but he doesn’t know it. Subconsciously he’s finding a way of keeping what he wants. He wants me. If I weaken and send Dennis away for good—’ But she could not conceive such an event; it had to become the more distant and undisturbing: ‘—if I weakened, if I sent Dennis away—’

  What then? Theo would relax gradually, assuaged by his power, forgiving for that preference of himself and responsiveness to his suffering every former betrayal. For that, after all, must be how he saw her acceptance of the late and unheralded angel. He would live out the rest of his life upon the bread of this triumph, perhaps not even reproaching her once in the whole sequence of the years, for the sweet taste of his magnanimity in his own mouth.

  And if she did not weaken, and did not send Dennis away, but reorientated her life to the new pole in every particular, in spite of Theo’s visible and calculating pain, he would rot and die, so that she might know that the loss of his talent to the world, as well as his own suffering, lay
at her door. And then let her enjoy the boy if she could, with that burden of regret for ever poisoning her mind.

  Love, unless she was greatly mistaken, caused people to will things like that, too. It could destroy, as well as create. That was something she had to know about it, and could hardly learn until the reality of love arrived to instruct her. It seemed to her a terrible blasphemy, this negative power of love, until she considered that every energy in the world is dual, adaptable for good or evil, according to the desire of the mind which employs it. How could the most tremendous energy of all be the exception to the rule?

  She was calmer by the time the day had dwindled away to evening again. She had been into town, and shopped, and sat through a half-hour of dreary tea-time music in a café, and the accents of normality had reassured her that time is neutral, and inaction a weapon apt for both attack and defence. When Dennis came she was ready for him, prepared even for the first sight of him, so pale and resolute and vulnerably young, keyed up for a difficult encounter which would never take place.

  ‘It’s all right, my dear,’ she said with a wry smile, ‘he isn’t here.’

  ‘Not here?’ echoed Dennis, frowning blankly upon behaviour so far out of his scope. ‘But didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Yes, I told him.’ She watched the boy’s face relax from its sharp white tension, between relief and disappointment, and she smiled again, but secretly within herself, in the pure dark centre of her instinctive being, where no other creature had ever penetrated, but this one, it seemed to her, was almost perfectly at home.

  ‘Well, what did he say? What’s he going to do about it?’

  She wondered if she had only been indulging this same naïve view of man when she, too, had supposed that Theo must intend to do something about it.

  ‘He said that he isn’t stopping us. He said that he claims no rights in me that would interfere with my rights as an individual. As for what he’s going to do—Nothing! Nothing at all, except elude any outright discussion with either of us, and make it certain that whatever happens, he has no part in it – except as the victim!’

  To a simple mind like Dennis’s, it made no sense at all. He had expected, perhaps, an open and angry contest for her, or a scene of sophisticated renunciation; he was not prepared for the devious shifts to which the mind can go to keep both face and possessions. She explained to him as clearly as one can explain to a beloved creature of experience more limited than one’s own.

  ‘If he won’t meet us,’ said Dennis, setting his jaw, ‘we’ve got to do something about it without him, that’s all. It’s got to be resolved somehow. If he won’t come to any agreement or take any action, we must.’

  It sounded beautifully easy, and so it might have been if they could have thought of Theo as an enemy. The boy, after all, had known him only a few months, and seen him, during most of that time, only as a sort of fifth limb of Suspiria’s body. But ten years of close companionship cannot be written off like that; and Theo was taking frantic, feverish care not to be an outright enemy.

  ‘Action!’ she said, sighing. ‘Listen, my darling – if there’s anything certain in this world, it’s your position with me. What more do you want? You wanted him to know the truth. Well, he knows it. There’s no deception about it, there never was. With almost everything in your hands, do you have to be in such a hurry to push Theo into place? Let him alone a little while. Maybe he’ll get used to the idea, and come to terms with us. Maybe he’ll even help us a little. Give him time!’

  ‘You said yourself,’ said Dennis, studying her face with eyes of the most intense and urgent gravity, ‘that he means to keep us in the wrong – to be a victim.’

  ‘I did, I know, but in a little while – after all, how can a man get over a thing like that all in a moment? We’ve been together so long, and he relies on me – he loves me.’

  ‘It’s a sign of love, is it, to make these high-flown claims about leaving you your freedom, and then to set out to make you feel a criminal as soon as you want to take it? I don’t call that love!’

  ‘It is love, all the same,’ she said.

  ‘To want to hurt you? To make you wretched?’

  ‘He knows nothing else to do. He doesn’t want to hurt me, he just wants to keep me.’

  ‘Dead or alive! And that’s loving you? I don’t believe it!’ said Dennis fiercely.

  ‘You will, one day.’ For a moment she thought of his future without a place for her anywhere in it, and could see only the blank, featureless ovals of young faces about him, drawing his eyes and inhabiting his heart. Then she turned back from the nightmare with a start of revulsion, and taking him by the shoulders held him facing her, closely and gently, until the warm flooding excitement, so soft and passionate, mantled in his cheeks, and his eyes darkened and deepened, opening clean down into the guarded centre of his being. He did not know when his look unfolded upon her thus like a flower to the sun; but when it happened she knew that it was for her, and that no one else would ever enjoy it.

  ‘Trust me! You know you can. I shall never love anyone but you. We can afford to be gentle with other people. Listen – go away now, and don’t come for a week. Leave Theo to me, and let’s see if we can’t do what must be done with as little damage as possible. It will be better for us to remember, afterwards, if no one is badly hurt. And I’m very fond of him! And you liked him, too!’

  Dennis did as she wished, without complaint, though the week she had asked for seemed like a year cut out of his life. He kissed her with a solemn, dedicated gentleness, and went away home.

  Theo came back from London next day; she had almost expected him to stay away longer, but he came, sober, remote, and looking rather ill. She had made up a bed for herself in the attic room by that time, to avoid the wincing reminders he would suffer from either her presence, or the immediate pain of witnessing her removal. She had taken away all her own things, and made it pointless for him to refuse to accept the change. Moreover, she had met him with careful calm, as if nothing had happened which was not already perfectly understood and acknowledged between them. Within the confines of the house, he lived as fastidiously drawn back from her as he could, answered her impersonally when she spoke to him about indifferent things, withheld himself hard from every smallest service she tried to offer him, and shut himself away from her in the studio or fled from the house whenever she attempted to speak of Dennis and the future. She would not have believed it possible to live with a man for ten years, to know him as well as she had thought she knew Theo, and suddenly to be unable to get near him. It was like trying to hold a handful of quicksilver.

  She could not work, with her mind for ever poised alert for some opportunity which never came. Nor, she thought, did Theo accomplish much, though he shut himself into the studio so often, and for such long periods, that he might have been engaged upon a masterpiece. Towards the end of the week for which she had bargained, he began to drink again, and with an intense and purposeful concentration which suggested that all other means of eluding her had failed him. And all the while, as she watched him steadily and waited for him to turn and face her, the accumulation of their days together was fighting for Theo.

  During those last three days he hardly left the studio, except to forage now and again for food, and long after she had gone to bed, to creep to his, and sleep like a log until the following noon. He had made sure of his refuge this time; he was not once sober enough to understand what she tried to say to him, and his tower was impenetrable at last. It was useless to persist; she let him alone, and sat empty-handed in the living-room when he hid himself. There would be nothing to report to Dennis, now or ever.

  Drifting aimlessly through the house, she tried the door of the studio and found it open. She did not even know why she had tried it, for there was no reaching him now, and all that long kindness had turned sour for both of them; all the same, she opened the door, and looked in.

  He had heard her come, and he swung away from his easel, brush
in hand, to stare across the bright room at her with a face at once outraged and impervious. He could not quarrel with her now even for this intrusion, he was too far gone; but still the dazzling blue eyes in the sodden face scintillated with that redoubled awareness they kept always through his body’s drunkenness. The core of his mind did not know how to get drunk, it renewed its nervous energy in the disintegration of his physical powers, as sometimes the activities of his hands seemed to quicken their intensity at the cost of his body’s torpor. He would go on painting until he dropped and slept where he lay, and this was what would come out of his driven agony, this limpid little still-life, astonishingly coherent and compact from the hand and heart of a man who was falling apart in front of her eyes.

  She had never seen it so clearly before. For a moment he was nothing but a pair of great eyes, blind as sapphires, into which she fell drowning as into a vortex of pain. From the height of her own defiant happiness she was plunged into the unimaginable depths of sorrow and loss, and those without reproach or appeal. When the waves went over her fully she drew back, shivering, her eyes closed, and shut the door.

  How easy it is to see only one profile of some other poor living creature who happens to be a problem to us! How simple to attribute to all his actions, and even his inaction, the meaning which comes nearest to justifying our own! Perhaps subconsciously he was indeed willing her to feel his suffering, so that she could not abandon him to it, but no one, no one as utterly on the side of life as Theo, could ever have willed to endure the anguish she had seen in his eyes. To want to share a suffering like that is no more than the leaning back in extremity upon any comfort, even the slight and fallible one of hurting someone else with a part of it. They do it to remain alive, the positive duty of man; to remain alive, to go on doing and feeling. What is unbearable must be rubbed off against any creature unlucky enough to come by. There is nothing selfish in it, it is one of the laws of life to survive if you can. And she was blaming him for it, she who in her own extremity had made the situation, and let fall the demon upon him.