Point Counter Point (51 page)

With Molly d’Exergillod everything had to be articulate, formulated, expressed. The whole of experience was, for her, only the raw material out of which an active mind could manufacture words. Ironstone was of no use to man until he learnt to smelt it and hammer out the pure metal into tools and swords. For Molly, the raw facts of living, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts and recollections, were as uninteresting in themselves as so many lumps of rock. They were of value only when they had been transformed by conversational art and industry into elegant words and well-shaped phrases. She loved a sunset because she could say of it: ‘It’s like a mixture of Bengal lights, Mendelssohn, soot and strawberries and cream’; or of spring flowers: ‘They make you feel as you feel when you’re convalescent after influenza. Don’t you think so?’ And leaning intimately she would press the rhetorical question. ‘Don’t you think so?’ What she liked about a view of distant mountains in a thunderstorm was that it was so like El Greco’s landscapes of Toledo. As for love, why, the whole charm of love, in Molly’s eyes, was its almost infinite capacity for being turned into phrases. You could talk about it for ever. She was talking about it now to Philip Quarles-had been talking about it for the last hour; analysing herself, recounting her experiences, questioning him about his past and his feelings. Reluctantly and with difficulty (for he hated talking about himself and did it very badly) he answered her.

‘Don’t you think,’ she was saying, ‘that the most exciting thing about being in love is the discoveries it enables you to make about yourself?’

Philip duly thought so.

‘I’d no idea how motherly I really was, before I married Jean. I’m so preoccupied now when he gets his feet wet.’

‘I’d be very worried if you got your feet wet,’ said Philip essaying a gallantry. Too stupid! he thought. He was not very good at gallantries. He wished he wasn’t so much attracted by Molly’s rather creamy and florid beauty. He wouldn’t be here making a fool of himself if she were ugly.

‘Too sweet of you,’ said Molly. ‘Tell me,’ she added, leaning towards him with offered face and bosom, ‘why do you like me.’

‘Isn’t it fairly obvious why?’ he answered.

Molly smiled. ‘Do you know why Jean says I’m the only woman he could ever fall in love with?’

‘No,’ said Philip, thinking that she was really superb in her Junonian way.

‘Because,’ Molly went on, ‘according to him, I’m the only woman who isn’t what Baudelaire calls
le contraire du dandy
. You remember that fragment in
Mon Coeur Mis a Nu
? “La femme a faim et elle veut manger; soif, et elle veut boire. La femme est
naturelle
, c’est-a-dire abominable. Aussi est-elle…”’

Philip interrupted her. ‘You’ve left out a sentence,’ he said, laughing. ‘Soif, et elle veut boire. And then: Elle est en rut, et elle veut etre…They don’t print the word in Crepet’s edition; but I’ll supply it if you like.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Molly, rather put out by the interruption. It had spoilt the easy unfolding of a welltried conversational gambit. She wasn’t accustomed to people being so well up in French literature as Philip. ‘The word’s irrelevant.’

‘Is it?’ Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘I wonder.’

‘Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire,’ Molly went on, hurrying back to the point at which she had been interrupted, ‘c’est-a-dire le contraire du dandy. Jean says I’m the only female dandy. What do you think?’

‘I’m afraid he’s right.’

‘Why “afraid”?’

‘I don’t know that I like dandies much. Particularly female ones.’ A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind—a good character, he reflected, for his novel. But trying in private life, very trying indeed. ‘I prefer them natural,’ he added.

‘But what’s the point of being natural unless you have enough art to do it well and enough consciousness to know how natural you’re being?’ Molly was pleased with her question. A little polishing and it would be epigrammatically perfect. ‘There’s no point in being in love with a person unless you know exactly what you feel and can express it.’

‘I can see a great deal of point,’ said Philip. ‘One doesn’t have to be a botanist or a still-life painter to enjoy flowers. And equally, my dear Molly, one doesn’t have to be Sigmund Freud or Shakespeare to enjoy you.’ And sliding suddenly nearer to her along the sofa, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘But what
are
you thinking about?’ she cried in pained astonishment.

‘I’m not thinking about anything,’ he answered rather angrily from the other end of the arm with which she had pushed him away from her. ‘Not thinking; only wanting.’ He felt humiliated, made a fool of. ‘But I’d forgotten you were a nun.’

‘I’m nothing of the kind,’ she protested. ‘I’m merely civilized. All this pouncing and clawing—it’s really too savage.’ She readjusted a water-waved lock of hair, and began to talk about platonic relationships as aids to spiritual growth. The more platonic the relations between an amorous man and woman, the more intense in them the life of the conscious mind.

‘What the body loses, the soul gains. Wasn’t it Paul Bourget who pointed that out in his
Psychologie Contemporaine
? A bad novelist,’ she added, finding it necessary to apologize for quoting from so very old-fashioned and disreputed an author; ‘but good as an essayist, I always find. Wasn’t it Paul Bourget?’ she repeated.

‘I should think it must have been Paul Bourget,’ said Philip wearily.

‘The energy which wanted to expend itself in physical passion is diverted and turns the mills of the soul.’ (‘Turn the mills of the soul’ was perhaps a shade too romantic, Victorian, Meredithian, she felt as she pronounced the words.)’ The body’s dammed and canalized,’ she emended, ‘and made to drive the spiritual dynamos. The thwarted unconscious finds vent in making consciousness more intense.’

‘But does one want one’s consciousness intensified?’ asked Philip, looking angrily at the rather luscious figure at the other end of the sofa. ‘I’m getting a bit tired of consciousness, to tell you the truth.’ He admired her body, but the only contact she would permit was with her much less interesting and beautiful mind. He wanted kisses, but all he got was analytical anecdotes and philosophic epigrams. ‘Thoroughly tired,’ he repeated. It was no wonder.

Molly only laughed. ‘Don’t start pretending you’re a paleolithic cave-man,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t suit you. Tired of consciousness, indeed!
You
! Why, if you’re tired of consciousness, you must be tired of yourself.’

‘Which is exactly what I am,’ said Philip. ‘You’ve made me tired of myself. Sick to death.’ Still irritated, he rose to take his leave.

‘Is that an insult?’ she asked, looking up at him. ‘Why have I made you tired of yourself?’

Philip shook his head. ‘I can’t explain. I’ve given up explaining.’ He held out his hand. Still looking enquiringly into his face, Molly took it. ‘If you weren’t one of the vestal virgins of civilization,’ he went on, ‘you’d understand without any explaining. Or rather, there wouldn’t be any explaining to do. Because you wouldn’t have made me feel tired of myself. And let me add, Molly, that if you were really and consistently civilized, you’d take steps to make yourself less desirable. Desirability’s barbarous. It’s as savage as pouncing and clawing. You ought to look like George Eliot. Goodbye.’ And giving her hand a final shake, he limped out of the room. In the street he gradually recovered his temper. He even began to smile to himself. For it was a joke. The spectacle of a biter being bitten is always funny, even when the bitten biter happens to be oneself. Conscious and civilized, he had been defeated by someone even more civilized than himself. The justice was poetic. But what a warning! Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms. In Molly he perceived a kind of Max Beerbohm version of himself. The spectacle was alarming. Having smiled, he became pensive.

‘I must be pretty awful,’ he thought.

Sitting on a chair in the Park, he considered his shortcomings. He had considered them before, often. But he had never done anything about them. He knew in advance that he wouldn’t do anything about them this time. Poor Elinor! That rigmarole of Molly’s about platonic relations and Paul Bourget gave him a notion of what she had to put up with. He decided to tell her of his adventure with Molly—comically, for it was always easier to talk unseriously—and then go on to talk about themselves. Yes, that was what he’d do. He ought to have spoken before. Elinor had been so strangely and unnaturally silent of late, so far away. He had been anxious, had wanted to speak, had felt he ought to have spoken. But about what? The ridiculous episode with Molly provided him with an opening gambit.

‘I saw Molly d’Exergillod this afternoon,’ he began, when he saw Elinor. But the tone of her ‘Did you?’ was so coldly uninterested, that he went no further. There was a silence. Elinor went on with her reading. He glanced at her surreptitiously over the top of his book. Her pale face wore an expression of calm remoteness. He felt a renewal of that uneasy anxiety which had come upon him so often during the last few weeks.

‘Why don’t you ever talk now?’ he screwed up the courage to ask her that evening after dinner.

Elinor looked up at him from her book. ‘Don’t I ever talk?’ she said, ironically smiling. ‘Well, I suppose there’s nothing of any particular interest to say.’

Philip recognized one of the answers he was in the habit of making to her reproaches, and was abashed into silence. And yet it was unfair of her to retort it upon him. For in his case it was true: there really wasn’t anything of interest to say. By dint of being secretive about them, he had almost abolished his intimate feelings. Very little seemed to go on in the unintellectual part of his mind—very little, at any rate, that wasn’t either trivial or rather discreditable. Whereas Elinor always had a mass of things to say. Things that said themselves, that came out of their own accord from the depths of her being. Philip would have liked to explain this to her; but somehow it was difficult, he couldn’t.

‘All the same,’ he brought himself to say, after a pause, ‘you used to talk much more. It’s only in these last days…’

‘I suppose I’m rather tired of talking, that’s all.’

‘But why should you be tired?’

‘Mayn’t one be tired sometimes?’ She uttered a rather resentful little laugh. ‘You seem to be permanently tired.’

Philip looked at her with a kind of anxiety. His eyes seemed to implore. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be touched. She had allowed herself to be touched too often. He had exploited her love, systematically underpaid her and, whenever she threatened rebellion, had turned suddenly rather pathetic and helpless, appealing to her better feelings. This time she was going to be hard. He might look as imploring and anxious as he liked, but she wouldn’t take any notice. It only served him right. All the same she felt rather guilty. And yet it was his own fault. Why couldn’t he love her actively, articulately, outright? When she gave him her love, he took it for granted, he accepted it passively as his right. And when she stopped giving it, he looked dumbly anxious and imploring. But as for saying anything, as for doing anything…

The seconds passed. Elinor waited, pretending to read. If only he’d speak or move! She longed for an excuse to love him again. As for Everard—why, Everard simply didn’t count. To the deep instinctive core of her being he really didn’t matter and if Philip would only take the trouble to love her a little, he wouldn’t matter any more even to the conscious part of her that was trying to love him—to love him on principle, so to speak, to love him deliberately, of set purpose. But the seconds passed in silence. And at last, with a little sigh (for he too would have liked to say something, to do something; only it was impossible, because the something said or done would have to be personal), Philip picked up his book and, in the interests of the zoological novelist in his novel, went on reading about the possessive instinct in birds. Reading again. He wasn’t going to say anything after all. Oh, very well; if he wanted her to become Everard’s mistress, then he’d have only himself to blame. She tried to shrug her shoulders and feel truculently. But the threat, she inwardly felt, was directed against herself rather than against Philip. It was she, not he, who was being condemned. Condemned to be Everard’s mistress.

Taking a lover had seemed to Elinor, thoeretically and in advance, a matter of no great difficulty. Morally wrong she did not think it. All the fuss that Christians and the heroines of novels managed to make about it! It was incomprehensible. ‘If people want to go to bed with one another,’ she would say, ‘why can’t they do it quite simply and straightforwardly, without tormenting themselves and everyone else within range?’ Nor had she any fear of the social consequences of taking a lover. The people who, if they knew, would object, were precisely the people she herself had always objected to. By refusing to meet her, they would be doing her a favour. As for Phil, he would have deserved it. He had had it in his power to prevent any such thing happening. Why couldn’t he have come nearer, given a little more of himself? She had begged for love; but what he had given her was a remote impersonal benevolence. Mere warmth, that was all she wanted; mere humanity. It was not much to ask. And she had warned him so often of what would happen if he didn’t give it.

Didn’t he understand? Or was it that he simply didn’t care? Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt him at all; the punishment wouldn’t punish. That would be humiliating. But after all, she would go on to remind herself, whenever she had arrived (yet once more) at this point in her inward argument, after all it wasn’t only or mainly to punish Philip, it wasn’t primarily to teach him humanity by pain and jealousy, that she was going to take a lover. It was in the interest of her own happiness. (She would try to forget how very wretched the pursuit of her own happiness made her.) Her own independent happiness. She had grown accustomed to think and act too exclusively in relation to Philip. Even when she planned to take a lover, it was still of him that she thought. Which was absurd, absurd.