Point Counter Point (12 page)

Philip excused himself; he was only a writer of novels, not a politician, not a journalist.’do you know old Daulat Singh?’ he added with apparent irrelevance. ‘The one who lives at Ajmere?’

‘I have met de man,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, in a tone that made it quite clear that he didn’t like Daulat Singh, or perhaps (more probably, thought Philip) hadn’t been liked or approved by him.

‘A fine man, I thought,’ said Philip. For men like Daulat Singh justice would have to mean something very different from what it meant for Mr. Sita Ram or the station-master of Bhowanipore. He remembered the noble old face, the bright eyes, the restrained passion of his words. If only he could have refrained from chewing pan….

The time came for them to go. At last. They said goodbye with an almost excessive cordiality, climbed into the waiting car and were driven away. The ground beneath the palm trees of Joohoo was littered with a mintage of shining silver, splashed with puddles of mercury. They rolled through a continuous flickering of light and dark—the cinema film of twenty years ago—until, emerging from under the palm trees, they found themselves in the full glare of the enormous moon.

‘Three-formed Hecate,’ he thought, blinking at the round brilliance. ‘But what about Sita Ram and Daulat Singh and the station-master, what about old appalling India, what about justice and liberty, what about progress and the future? The fact is, I don’t care. Not a pin. It’s disgraceful. But I don’t. And the forms of Hecate aren’t three. They’re a thousand, they’re millions. The tides. The Nemorensian goddess, the Tifatinian. Varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distances. A florin at arm’s length, but as big as the Russian Empire. Bigger than India. What a comfort it will be to be back in Europe again! And to think there was a time when I read books about yoga and did breathing exercises and tried to persuade myself that I didn’t really exist! What a fool! It was the result of talking with that idiot Burlap. But luckily people don’t leave much trace on me. They make an impression easily, like a ship in water. But the water closes up again. I wonder what this Italian ship will be like to-morrow? The Lloyd Triestino boats are always supposed to be good. “Luckily,” I said; but oughtn’t one to be ashamed of one’s indifference? That parable of the sower. The seed that fell in shallow ground. And yet, obviously, it’s no use pretending to be what one isn’t. One sees the results of that in Burlap. What a comedian! But he takes in a lot of people. Including himself, I suppose. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a conscious hypocrite, except for special occasions. You can’t keep it up all the time. All the same, it would be good to know what it’s like to believe in something to the point of being prepared to kill people or get yourself killed. It would be an experience….’

Elinor had lifted her face towards the same bright disc. Moon, full moon…. And instantly she had changed her position in space and time. She dropped her eyes and turned towards her husband; she took his hand and leaned tenderly against him.

‘Do you remember those evenings?’ she asked. ‘In the garden, at Gattenden. Do you remember, Phil?’

Elinor’s words came to his ears from a great distance and from a world in which, for the moment, he felt no interest. He roused himself with reluctance. ‘Which evenings? ‘ he asked, speaking across gulfs, and in the rather flat and colourless voice of one who answers an importunate telephone.

At the sound of that telephone voice Elinor quickly drew away from him. To press yourself against someone who turns out simply not to be there is not only disappointing; it is also rather humiliating. Which evenings, indeed!

‘Why don’t you love me any more?’ she asked despairingly. As if she could have been talking about any other evenings than those of that wonderful summer they had spent, just after their marriage, at her mother’s house. ‘You don’t even take any interest in me now—less than you would in a piece of furniture, much less than in a book.’

‘But, Elinor, what are you talking about?’ Philip put more astonishment into his voice than he really felt. After the first moment, when he had had time to come to the surface, so to speak, from the depths of his reverie, he had understood what she meant, he had connected this Indian moon with that which had shone, eight years ago, on the Hertfordshire garden. He might have said so, of course. It would have made things easier. But he was annoyed at having been interrupted, he didn’t like to be reproached, and the temptation to score a debater’s point against his wife was strong. ‘I ask a simple question,’ he went on, ‘merely wanting to know what you mean. And you retort by complaining that I don’t love you. I fail to see the logical connection.’

‘But you know quite well what I was talking about,’ said Elinor. ‘And besides, it is true—you don’t love me any more.’

‘I do, as it happens,’ said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit, vainly as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination. ‘But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started. We began with evenings and now…’

But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic. ‘Oh, I know you don’t want to say you don’t love me,’ she interrupted. ‘Not in so many words. You don’t want to hurt my feelings. But it would really hurt them less if you did so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now. Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement. And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there’s suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain. So long as the words haven’t been definitely spoken, there’s always just a chance that they mayn’t have been tacitly implied. Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied. There’s still room for hope. And where there’s hope there’s disappointment. It isn’t really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it’s crueller.’

‘But I don’t evade the question,’ he retorted. ‘Why should I, seeing that I do love you?’

‘Yes, but how? How do you love me? Not in the way you used to, at the beginning. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten. You didn’t even remember the time when we were first married.’

‘But, my dear child,’ Philip protested,’do be accurate. You just said “those evenings” and expected me to guess which.’

‘Of course I expected,’ said Elinor. ‘You ought to have known. You would have known, if you took any interest. That’s what I complain of. You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you. Do you think I can forget those evenings?’

She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall, where they had sat together. She remembered what he had said and his kisses, the touch of his hands. She remembered everything—remembered with the minute precision of one who loves to explore and reconstruct the past, of one who is for ever turning over and affectionately verifying each precious detail of recollected happiness.

‘It’s all simply faded out of your mind,’ she added, mournfully reproachful. For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.

‘But of course I remember,’ said Philip impatiently. ‘Only one can’t readjust one’s mind instantaneously. At the moment, when you spoke, I happened to be thinking of something else; that was all.’

Elinor sighed. ‘I wish I had something else to think about,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble; I haven’t. Why should I love you so much? Why? It isn’t fair. You’re protected by an intellect and a talent. You have your work to retire into, your ideas to shield you. But I have nothing—no defence against my feelings, no alternative to you. And it’s I who need the defence and the alternative. For I’m the one who really cares. You’ve got nothing to be protected from. You don’t care. No, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.’

And after all, she was thinking, it had always been like this. He hadn’t ever really loved her, even at the beginning. Not profoundly and entirely, not with abandonment. For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her. On her side she had offered everything, everything. And he had taken, but without return. His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld. Always, even from the first, even when he had loved her most. She had been happy then—but only because she had not known better than to be happy, because she had not realized, in her inexperience, that love could be different and better. She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity, in laying waste her memories. The moon, the dark and perfumed garden, the huge black tree and its velvet shadow on the lawn…. She denied them, she rejected the happiness which they symbolized in her memory.

Philip Quarles, meanwhile, said nothing. There was nothing, really, to say. He put his arm round her and drew her towards him; he kissed her forehead and her fluttering eyelids; they were wet with tears.

The sordid suburbs of Bombay slid past them—factories and little huts and huge tenements, ghastly and bone-white under the moon. Brown, thin-legged pedestrians appeared for a moment in the glare of the headlights, like truths apprehended intuitively and with immediate certainty, only to disappear again almost instantly into the void of outer darkness. Here and there, by the roadside, the light of a fire mysteriously hinted at dark limbs and faces. The inhabitants of a world of thought starrily remote from theirs peered at them, as the car flashed past, from creaking bullock carts.

‘My darling,’ he kept repeating, ‘my darling…’

Elinor permitted herself to be comforted. ‘You love me a little?’

‘So much.’

She actually laughed, rather sobbingly, it is true; but still, it was a laugh. ‘You do your best to be nice to me.’ And after all, she thought, those days at Gattenden had really been blissful. They were hers, she had had them; they couldn’t be denied. ‘You make such efforts. It’s sweet of you.’

‘It’s silly to talk like that,’ he protested. ‘You know I love you.’

‘Yes, I know you do.’ She smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘When you have time and then by wireless across the Atlantic.’

‘No, that isn’t true.’ But secretly he knew that it was. All his life long he had walked in a solitude, in a private void, into which nobody, not his mother, not his friends, not his lovers had ever been permitted to enter. Even when he held her thus, pressed close to him, it was by wireless, as she had said, and across an Atlantic that he communicated with her.

‘It isn’t true,’ she echoed, tenderly mocking. ‘But, my poor old Phil, you couldn’t even take in a child. You don’t know how to lie convincingly. You’re too honest. That’s one of the reasons why I love you. If you knew how transparent you were!’

Philip was silent. These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable. They threatened his solitude—that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone, nevertheless, his spirit could live in comfort, in which alone he felt himself free. At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives. But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air. But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence. He entrenched himself now in silence, in that calm, remote, frigid silence, which he was sure that Elinor would not attempt, knowing the hopelessness of the venture, to break through. He was right; Elinor glanced at him for an instant, and then, turning away, looked out at the moonlit landscape. Their parallel silences flowed on through time, unmeeting.

They were driven on through the Indian darkness. Almost cool against their faces, the moving air smelt now of tropical flowers, now of sewage, or curry, or burning cow-dung.

‘And yet,’ said Elinor suddenly, unable any longer to contain her resentful thoughts, ‘you couldn’t do without me. Where would you be, if I left you, if I went to somebody who was prepared to give me something in return for what I give? Where would you be?’

The question dropped into the silence. Philip made no answer. But where would he be? He too wondered. For in the ordinary daily world of human contacts he was curiously like a foreigner, uneasily not at home among his fellows, finding it difficult or impossible to enter into communication with any but those who could speak his native intellectual language of ideas. Emotionally, he was a foreigner. Elinor was his interpreter, his dragoman. Like her father, Elinor Bidlake had been born with a gift of intuitive understanding and social ease. She was quickly at home with anybody. She knew, instinctively, as well as old John himself, just what to say to every type of person—to every type except, perhaps, her husband’s. It is difficult to know what to say to someone who does not say anything in return, who answers the personal word with the impersonal, the particular and feeling word with an intellectual generalization. Still, being in love with him, she persisted in her efforts to lure him into direct contact; and though the process was rather discouraging—like singing to deaf-mutes or declaiming poetry to an empty hall—she went on giving him her intimacies of thought and feeling. There were occasions, when, making a great effort, he did his best, in exchange, to admit her into his own personal privacies. But whether it was that the habit of secrecy had made it impossible for him to give utterance to his inward feelings, or whether the very capacity to feel had actually been atrophied by consistent silence and repression, Elinor found these rare intimacies disappointing. The holy of holies into which he so painfully ushered her was almost as naked and empty as that which astonished the Roman invaders, when they violated the temple ofJerusalem. Still, she was grateful to Philip for his good intentions in at least wanting to admit her to his emotional intimacy, even though there mightn’t be much of an emotional life to be intimate with. A kind of Pyrrhonian indifference, tempered by a consistent gentleness and kindness, as well as by the more violent intermittences of physical passion—this was the state of being which nature and second nature had made normal for him. Elinor’s reason told her that this was so; but her feelings would not accept in practice what she was sure of in theory. What was living and sensitive and irrational in her was hurt by his indifference, as though it were a personal coldness directed only against herself. And yet, whatever she might feel, Elinor knew all the time that his indifference wasn’t personal, that he was like that with everybody, that he loved her as much as it was possible for him to love, that his love for her hadn’t diminished, because it had never really been greater—more passionate once perhaps, but never more emotionally rich in intimacies and self-giving, even at its most passionate, than it was now. But all the same her feelings were outraged; he oughtn’t to be like this. He oughtn’t to be; but there, he was. After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence—that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including the emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.