Eyeless In Gaza (47 page)

Brian was waiting on the platform when the train drew in, and at the sight of him Anthony felt a sudden pang of pitying distress. For between the man and his clothes there was a startling and painful incongruousness. The rough homespun jacket and breeches, the stockings, the nailed boots, the bulging rucksack were emblems of energy and rustic good health. But the Brian who wore these emblems was the living denial of their significance. The long face was emaciated and sallow. The nose seemed larger than in the past, the eye-sockets deeper, the cheek-bones more prominent. And when he spoke, he stammered more uncontrollably than ever.

‘But what
is
the matter with you?' cried Anthony, laying a hand on his friend's shoulder. ‘You look wretched.'

Half touched by this display of a genuine solicitude (it was extraordinary, he reflected, how charming Anthony could unexpectedly be), half annoyed by having been, as he felt, found out, Brian shook his head and mumbled something about being a bit tired and in need of a rest.

But his idea of a rest, it turned out, was to walk twenty miles a day up and down the steepest hills he could find.

Anthony looked at him disapprovingly. ‘You ought to be lying out in a deck-chair,' he said, but could see, as he spoke,
that his advice was unwelcome. With Brian it was a kind of dogma that taking violent exercise in mountain scenery was intrinsically good. Good, because of Wordsworth; because, in his mother's version of Christianity, landscape took the place of revelation.

‘I 1-like w-walking,' Brian insisted. ‘S-saw a d-dipper yesterday. The p-place is f-full of nice b-birds.'

In his distress at finding his friend so ill, Anthony had forgotten all about Joan and the events of the last days; but those birds (those bö-öds, this piddle-warblers) reminded him violently of what had happened. Feeling suddenly ashamed, as though he had been caught in some unworthy display of hypocrisy, Anthony withdrew his hand from Brian's shoulder. They made their way in silence along the platform and out into the street. There they halted for a discussion. Brian wanted to send the luggage by the carrier and walk to their cottage in Langdale. Anthony proposed that they should take a car.

‘You've no business to walk a step further today,' he said; then, when the other protested that he hadn't yet taken enough exercise, changed ground and insisted that it was he who was tired after the journey, and that anyhow he couldn't walk because he was wearing unsuitable clothes and shoes. After a final plea to be allowed to walk back to Langdale by himself, Brian was overruled and submitted to the car. They drove away.

Breaking a long silence, ‘Have you seen J-joan lately?' Brian asked.

The other nodded without speaking.

‘How w-was she?'

‘Quite well,' Anthony found himself replying in the brightly vague tone in which one answers questions about the health of those in whom one takes no particular interest. The lie – for it was a lie by omission – had come to him of its own accord. By means of it, his mind had defended itself against Brian's question as automatically and promptly as his body, by
blinking, by lifting an arm, by starting back, would have defended itself against an advancing fist. But the words were no sooner spoken than he regretted their brevity and the casualness with which they had been uttered, than he felt that he ought at once to qualify them with additional information, in another and more serious tone. He ought to rush in immediately, and without further delay make a clean breast of everything. But time passed; he could not bring himself to speak; and within a few seconds he had already begun to dignify his cowardice with the name of consideration, he was already assuring himself that it would be wrong, Brian's health being what it was, to speak out at once, that the truly friendly thing was to wait and choose an occasion, tomorrow perhaps or the day after, when Brian was in a better state to receive the news.

‘You d-don't think she was w-worrying?' Brian went on. ‘I m-mean ab-bout all this d-delay in our g-getting married?'

‘Well, of course,' Anthony admitted, ‘she's not altogether happy about it.'

Brian shook his head. ‘N-nor am I. But I th-think it's r-right; and I th-think in the l-long r-run she'll see it was r-right.' Then, after a silence, ‘If only one were a-absolutely certain,' he said. ‘S-sometimes I w-wonder if it isn't a k-kind of s-selfishness.'

‘What is?'

‘St-sticking to p-principles, reg-gardless of p-people. P-people – o-other p-people, I mean – p-perhaps they're m-more imp-portant e-even than what one kn-knows is a r-right p-principle. But if you d-don't st-tick to your p-principles . . .' he hesitated, turned a puzzled and unhappy face towards Anthony, then looked away again: ‘well, where are you?' he concluded despairingly.

‘The sabbath is made for man,' said Anthony; and thought resentfully what a fool Brian had been not to take whatever money he could get and marry out of hand. If Joan had been
safely married, there would have been no confidences, no bet, no kiss and none of the appalling consequences of kissing. And then, of course, there was poor Joan. He went on to feel what was almost righteous indignation against Brian for not having grasped the fundamental Christian principle that the sabbath is made for man, not man for the sabbath. But was it made for man, an intrusive voice suddenly began asking, to the extent of man's having the right, for a bet, to disturb the equilibrium of another person's feelings, to break up a long-established relationship, to betray a friend?

Brian meanwhile was thinking of the occasion, a couple of months before, when he and Joan had talked over the matter with his mother.

‘You still think,' she had asked, ‘that you oughtn't to take the money?' and went on, when he told her that his opinions hadn't changed, to set forth all the reasons why it wouldn't be wrong for him to take it. The system might be unjust, and it might be one's duty to alter it; but meanwhile one could use one's financial advantages to help the individual victims of the system, to forward the cause of desirable reform.

‘That's what I've always felt about it,' his mother concluded.

And had been right, he insisted; and that he didn't dream of criticizing what she had done, of even thinking it criticizable. But that was because her circumstances had been so different from his. A man, he had opportunities to make his own living such as she had never had. Besides, she had been left with responsibilities; whereas he . . .

‘But what about Joan?' she interrupted, laying her hand affectionately, as she spoke, on Joan's arm. ‘Isn't she a responsibility?'

He dropped his eyes and, feeling that it was not for him to answer the question, said nothing.

There were long seconds of an uncomfortably expectant
silence, while he wondered whether Joan would speak and what, if she didn't, he should say and do.

Then, to his relief, ‘After all,' Joan brought out at last in a curiously flat and muffled voice, ‘Brian was a child then. But I'm grown up, I'm responsible for myself. And I'm able to understand his reasons.'

He raised his head and looked at her with a smile of gratitude. But her face was cold and as though remote; she met his eyes for only a moment, then looked away.

‘You understand his reasons?' his mother questioned.

Joan nodded.

‘And you approve them?'

She hesitated for a moment, then nodded again. ‘If Brian thinks it's right,' she began, and broke off.

His mother looked from one to the other. ‘I think you're a pair of rather heroic young people,' she said, and the tone of her voice, so beautiful, so richly vibrant with emotion, imparted to the words a heightened significance. He felt that he had been confirmed in his judgment.

But later, he remembered with a pained perplexity, later, when Joan and he were alone together and he tried to thank her for what she had done, she turned on him with a bitterly resentful anger.

‘You love your own ideas more than you love me. Much more.'

Brian sighed and, shaking himself out of his long distraction, looked at the trees by the side of the road, at the mountains so sumptuously shadowed and illumined by the late afternoon sunlight, at the marbly islands of cloud in the sky – looked at them, saw that they were beautiful, and found their beauty hopelessly irrelevant.

‘I wish to G-god,' he said, ‘I knew what to d-do.'

So did Anthony, though he did not say so.

IT TOOK LONGER
than Mark expected to dispose of his business, and at moments, during the long weeks that preceded their departure, the temptation to throw up the whole ridiculous enterprise and scuttle back into the delicious other-world of Mediterranean sunshine and abstract ideas became, for Anthony, almost irresistible.

‘What are you really going for?' he asked resentfully.

‘Fun,' was all the answer that Mark condescended to give.

‘And your Don Jorge,' Anthony insisted. ‘What does he hope to achieve by this little revolution of his?'

‘His own greater glory.'

‘But the peasants, the Indians?'

‘They'll be exactly where they were before, where they always will be: underneath.'

‘And yet you think it's worth while to go and help this Jorge of yours?'

‘Worth while for me.' Mark smiled anatomically. ‘And worth while for you. Very much worth while for you,' he insisted.

‘But not for the peons, I gather.'

‘It never is. What did the French peons get out of their revolution? Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter? A few years of pleasant intoxication. Then the same old treadmill. Gilded, perhaps; repainted. But in essentials the old machine.'

‘And you expect me to come along with you for fun?' The thought of the Mediterranean and his books heightened Anthony's indignation. ‘It's crazy, it's abominable.'

‘In other words,' said Mark, ‘you're afraid. Well, why not? But if you are, for God's sake say so. Have the courage of your cowardice.'

How he had hated Mark for telling him the home truths he knew so well! If it hadn't been for Mr Beavis, and that interview with Helen, and finally Beppo Bowles, perhaps he
would
have had the courage of his cowardice. But they made it impossible for him to withdraw. There was his father, first of all, still deep in the connubial burrow, among the petticoats and the etymologies and the smell of red-haired women – but agitated, as Anthony had never seen him agitated before, hurt, indignant, bitterly resentful. The presidency of the Philological Society, which ought, without any question, to have come to him, had gone instead to Jenkins. Jenkins, if you please! A mere ignorant popularizer, the very antithesis of a real scholar. A charlatan, a philological confidence trickster, positively (to use an American colloquialism) a ‘crook.'

Jenkins's election had taken Mr Beavis long strides towards death. From being a man much younger than his years, he had suddenly come to look his age. An old man; and tired into the bargain, eroded from within.

‘I'm worried,' Pauline had confided to Anthony. ‘He's making himself ill. And for something so childish, really. I can't make him see that it doesn't matter. Or rather I can't make him
feel
it. Because he sees it all right, but goes on worrying all the same.'

Even in the deepest sensual burrow, Anthony reflected as he walked back to his rooms, even in the snuggest of intellectual other-worlds, fate could find one out. And suddenly he perceived that, having spent all his life trying to react away from the standards of his father's universe, he had succeeded only in becoming precisely what his father was – a man in a burrow. With this small difference, that in his case the burrow happened to be intermittently adulterous instead of connubial all the time; and that the ideas were about societies and not words. For the moment, he was out of his burrow – had been chased out, as though by ferrets. But it would be easy and was already a temptation to return. To return and be snug, be safe. No, not safe; that was the point. At any moment a Jenkins might be elected to some presidency or other, and then, defenceless in one's burrow of thought and sensuality, one would be at the mercy of any childish passion that might arise. Outside, perhaps, one might learn to defend oneself against such contingencies. He decided to go with Mark.

But in the succeeding days the temptation kept coming back. In spite of the spectacle of Mr Beavis's self-destroying childishness, the quiet life seemed immensely attractive. ‘Mark's mad,' he kept assuring himself. ‘We're doing something stupid and wrong. And after all, my sociology is important. It'll help people to think clearly.' Wasn't it (ridiculous word!) a ‘duty' to go on with it? But then, more than six weeks after his return to London, he saw Helen and Beppo Bowles – saw them both in the course of a single afternoon. The meeting with Helen was a chance one. It was in the French Room at the National Gallery. Anthony was stooping to look closely into Cezanne's Mont Sainte Victoire, when he became aware that two other visitors had halted just behind them. He shifted a little to one side, so as to let them see the picture, and continued his meticulous examination of the brushwork.

A few seconds passed; then, very slowly and with a foreign accent, a man's voice said: ‘See now here how the nineteenth-century petit bourgeois tried to escape from industrialism. Why must he paint such landscapes, so romantic? Because he will forget the new methods of production. Because he will not think of the proletariat. That is why.'

‘Yes, I suppose that is the reason,' said another voice.

With a start, Anthony recognized it as Helen's. ‘What shall I do?' he was wondering, when the voice spoke again.

‘Why, it's Anthony!' A hand touched his arm.

He straightened himself up and turned towards her, making the gestures and noises appropriate to delighted astonishment. That face, which he had last seen alternately stony and bright with mockery, then in the rapt agony of pleasure, then dabbled with blood and pitiably disintegrated by a grief extreme beyond expression, finally hard as it had been at first, harder, more rigidly a stone – that face was now beautifully alive, and tender, illuminated from within by a kind of secure joy. She looked at him without the least trace of embarrassment. It was as though the past had been completely abolished, as though, for her, only the present existed and were real.