Eyeless in Gaza, Page 35

  Anthony listened in astonishment. Those pathetically few real friends had been transformed, as though by magic, into positively a host of eager lovers. Did she seriously believe in her own inventions? But anyhow, he went on to think, it didn’t seem to matter whether she believed in them or not. Even unbelieved, these fictions evidently had power to raise her spirits, to restore her, at least for the moment, to a state of cheerful self-confidence.

  ‘That time in Paris,’ she was saying intimately. ‘Do you remember?’

  But this was awful!

  ‘The Hôtel des Saints-Pères.’ Her voice deepened and vibrated with a subterranean laughter.

  Anthony nodded without raising his head. She had obviously wanted him to echo her hint of significant mirth, to take up the scabrous reference to that old joke of theirs about the Holy Fathers and their own amusements under that high ecclesiastical patronage. In their private language, ‘doing a slight Holy Father,’ or, yet more idiomatically, ‘doing Holiers,’ had signified ‘making love.’ He frowned, feeling suddenly very angry. How did she dare . . .?

  The seconds passed. Making a desperate effort to fill the icy gulf of his silence, ‘We had a lot of fun,’ said Mary in a tone of sentimental reminiscence.

  ‘A lot,’ he repeated, as unemphatically as possible.

  Suddenly she took his hand. ‘Dear Anthony!’

  ‘Oh, God!’ he thought, and tried, as politely as might be, to withdraw. But the clasp of those hot dry fingers never relaxed.

  ‘We were fools to quarrel,’ she went on. ‘Or rather, I was a fool.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said politely.

  ‘That stupid bet,’ she shook her head. ‘And Sidney . . .’

  ‘You did what you wanted to do.’

  ‘I did what I didn’t want to do,’ she answered quickly. ‘One’s always doing things one doesn’t want – stupidly, out of sheer perversity. One chooses the worse just because it is the worse. Hyperion to a satyr – and therefore the satyr.’

  ‘But for certain purposes,’ he couldn’t resist saying, ‘the satyr may be more satisfactory.’

  Ignoring his words, Mary sighed and shut her eyes.

  ‘Doing what one doesn’t want,’ she repeated, as though to herself. ‘Always doing what one doesn’t want.’ She released his hand, and, clasping her own behind her head, leaned back against the pillows in the attitude, the known and familiar attitude, that in the Hôtel des Saints-Pères had been so delicious in its graceful indolence, so wildly exciting because of that white round throat stretched back like a victim’s, those proffered breasts, lifted and taut beneath the lace. But today the lace was soiled and torn, the breasts hung tired under their own weight, the victim throat was no more a smooth column of white flesh, but withered, wrinkled, hollow between starting tendons.

  She opened her eyes, and, with a start, he recognized the look she gave him as the same, identically the same look, at once swooning and cynical, humorous and languidly abandoned, as had invited him, irresistibly then, in Paris, fifteen years ago. It was the look of 1913 in the face of 1928 – painfully out of its context. He stared at her for a second or two, appalled; then managed to break the silence.

  ‘I shall have to go.’

  But before he could rise, Mrs Amberley had quickly leaned forward and laid her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘No, don’t go. You mustn’t go.’ She tried to repeat that laughingly voluptuous invitation, but could not prevent a profound anxiety from showing in her eyes.

  Anthony shook his head and, in spite of that sickening smell of ether, did his best to smile as he lied about the supperparty he had promised to join at eleven. Gently, but with a firm and decided movement, he lifted her confining hands and stood up by the side of the bed.

  ‘Good-night, dear Mary!’ The tone of his voice was warm; he could afford to be affectionate, now. ‘Bon courage!’ he squeezed her hands; then, bending down, kissed first one, then the other. Now that he was on his feet, and with the road to freedom clear before him, he felt at liberty to plunge into almost any emotional extravagance. But, instead of taking the cue, Mary Amberley returned him a look that had now become fixed and as though stony with unwavering misery. The mask he had adjusted to be so radiant with whimsical affectionateness seemed all of a sudden horribly out of keeping with the real situation. He could feel its irrelevance, physically, in the muscles of his face. Fool, hypocrite, coward! But it was almost at a run that he made towards the door and hurried down the stairs.

  ‘If a woman,’ Helen was reading in the Encyclopaedia, ‘administers to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or unlawfully uses any instrument or other means to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of . . .’ The sound of Anthony’s feet on the stairs caught her ear. She rose, and quickly walked to the door and out on to the landing.

  ‘Well?’ She smiled no greeting in answer to his, simulated no pleasure at seeing him. The face she lifted was as tragically naked of all the conventional grimaces as her mother’s had been.

  ‘But what’s the matter, Helen?’ he was startled into exclaiming. She looked at him for a few seconds in silence, then shook her head and began to ask him about those shares, the whole financial position.

  Obviously, he was thinking as he answered her questions, one would expect her to find it all very upsetting. But upsetting to this point – he looked at her again: no – one wouldn’t have expected that. It wasn’t as if the girl had ever had a wild devotion for her mother. In the teeth of Mary’s ferocious egotism, how could she? And after all, it was nearly a year since the wretched woman had started on her morphia. One would think that by this time the horror would have lost some of its intensity. And yet he had never seen an unhappier face. Such youth, such freshness – it wasn’t right that they should be associated with an expression of so intense a despair. The sight of her made him feel somehow guilty – guiltily responsible. But when he made another gesture of enquiring sympathy, she only shook her head again and turned away.

  ‘You’d better go,’ she said.

  Anthony hesitated a moment, then went. After all, she wanted him to go. Still feeling guilty, but with a sense of profound relief, he closed the front door behind him, and, drawing a deep breath, set off towards the Underground station.

  Helen went back to her volume of the Encyclopaedia ‘. . . to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of felony. The punishment for this offence is penal servitude for life, or not less than three years, or imprisonment for not more than two years. If the child is born alive . . .’ But they didn’t say which the proper poisons were, nor what sort of instruments you had to use, and how. Only this stupid nonsense about penal servitude. Yet another loophole of escape had closed against her. It was as though the whole world had conspired to shut her in with her own impossibly appalling secret.

  Melodiously, the clock in the back drawing-room struck eleven. Helen rose, put the heavy volume back in its place, and went upstairs to her mother’s room.

  With an unwontedly careful precision of movement, Mrs Amberley was engaged, when her daughter entered, in filling a hypodermic syringe from a little glass ampoule. She started as the door opened, looked up, made a movement as if to hide syringe and ampoule under the bedclothes, then, fearful of spilling any of the precious liquor, checked herself in the midst of her gesture.

  ‘Go away!’ she called angrily. ‘Why do you come in without knocking? I won’t have you coming into my room without knocking,’ she repeated more shrilly, glad of the excuse she had discovered for her fury.

  Helen stood for a second or two in the doorway, quite still, as if incredulous of the evidence of her own eyes; then hurried across the room.

  ‘Give those things to me,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  Mrs Amberley shrank back towards the wall. ‘Go away!’ she shouted.

  ‘But you promised . . .’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You did, Mummy.’

  ‘I did not. And, anyhow, I shall do
what I like.’

  Without speaking, Helen reached out and caught her mother by the wrist. Mrs Amberley screamed so loudly that, fearful lest the servants should come down to see what was the matter, Helen relaxed her grip.

  Mrs Amberley stopped screaming; but the look she turned on Helen was terrifying in its malevolence. ‘If you make me spill any of this,’ she said in a voice that trembled with rage, ‘I shall kill you. Kill you,’ she repeated.

  They looked at one another for a moment without speaking. It was Helen who broke the silence. ‘You’d like to kill me,’ she said slowly, ‘because I don’t let you kill yourself.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I suppose if you really want to kill yourself . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished.

  Mrs Amberley stared at her in silence. ‘If you really want . . .’ She remembered the words she had spoken to Anthony only a few minutes since, and suddenly the tears ran down her cheeks. She was overwhelmed with self-pity. ‘Do you think I want to do this?’ she said brokenly. ‘I hate it, I absolutely hate it. But I can’t help it.’

  Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Helen put her arm round her mother’s shoulders. ‘Mummy darling!’ she implored. ‘Don’t cry. It’ll be all right.’ She was profoundly moved.

  ‘It’s all Gerry’s fault,’ Mrs Amberley cried; and without noticing the little shuddering start Helen gave, ‘everything’s his fault,’ she went on. ‘Everything. I always knew he was a beast. Even when I cared for him most.’

  As though her mother had suddenly become a stranger whom it was not right to be touching so intimately, Helen withdrew her encircling arm. ‘You cared for him?’ she whispered incredulously. ‘In that way?’

  Answering quite a different question, parrying a reproach that had never been made, ‘I couldn’t help it,’ Mrs Amberley replied. ‘It was like this.’ She made a little movement with the hand that held the hypodermic syringe.

  ‘You mean,’ said Helen, speaking very slowly, and as though overcoming an almost invincible reluctance, ‘you mean he was . . . he was your lover?’

  The strangeness of the tone aroused Mrs Amberley, for the first time since their conversation had begun, to something like a consciousness of her daughter’s real, personal existence. Turning, she looked at Helen with an expression of astonishment. ‘You didn’t know?’ Confronted by that extraordinary pallor, those uncontrollably trembling lips, the older woman was seized with a sudden compunction. ‘But, darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t imagine . . . You’re still so young; you don’t understand. You can’t . . . But where are you going? Come back! Helen!’

  The door slammed. Mrs Amberley made a move to follow her daughter, then thought better of it, and, instead, resumed the interrupted task of filling her hypodermic syringe.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  August 4th 1934

  RETURNED DEPRESSED FROM an evening with Helen and half a dozen of her young political friends. Such a passion for ‘liquidating’ the people who don’t agree with them! And such a sincere conviction that liquidation is necessary!

  Revolting – but only to be expected. Regard the problem of reform exclusively as a matter of politics and economics, and you must approve and practise liquidation.

  Consider recent history. Industrialism has grown pari passu with population. Now, where markets are expanding, the two besetting problems of all industrial societies solve themselves. New inventions may create technological unemployment; but expanding markets cure it as it’s made. Each individual may possess inadequate purchasing power; but the total number of individuals is steadily rising. Many small purchasing powers do as much as fewer big ones.

  Our population is now stationary, will soon decline. Shrinkage instead of expansion of markets. Therefore, no more automatic solution of economic problems. Birth control necessitates the use of co-ordinating political intelligence. There must be a large-scale plan. Otherwise the machine won’t work. In other words, politicians will have to be about twenty times as intelligent as heretofore. Will the supply of intelligence be equal to the demand?

  And of course intelligence, as Miller’s always insisting, isn’t isolated. The act of intelligently planning modifies the emotions of the planners. Consider English politics. We’ve made plenty of reforms – without ever accepting the principles underlying them. (Compare the King’s titles with his present position. Compare our protestations that we’ll never have anything to do with socialism with the realities of state control.) There are no large-scale plans in English politics, and hardly any thinking in terms of first principles. With what results? Among others, that English politics have been on the whole very good-natured. The reason is simple. Deal with practical problems as they arise and without reference to first principles; politics are a matter of higgling. Now higglers lose tempers, but don’t normally regard one another as fiends in human form. But this is precisely what men of principle and systematic planners can’t help doing. A principle is, by definition, right; a plan, for the good of the people. Axioms from which it logically follows that those who disagree with you and won’t help to realize your plan are enemies of goodness and humanity. No longer men and women, but personifications of evil, fiends incarnate. Killing men and women is wrong; but killing fiends is a duty. Hence the Holy Office, hence Robespierre and the Ogpu. Men with strong religious and revolutionary faith, men with well-thought-out plans for improving the lot of their fellows, whether in this world or the next, have been more systematically and cold-bloodedly cruel than any others. Thinking in terms of first principles entails acting with machine-guns. A government with a comprehensive plan for the betterment of society is a government that uses torture. Per contra, if you never consider principles and have no plan, but deal with situations as they arise, piecemeal, you can afford to have unarmed policemen, liberty of speech and habeas corpus. Admirable. But what happens when an industrial society learns (a) how to make technological advances at a constantly accelerating speed, and (b) to prevent conception? Answer: it must either plan itself in accordance with general political and economic principles, or else break down. But governments with principles and plans have generally been tyrannies making use of police spies and terrorism. Must we resign ourselves to slavery and torture for the sake of co-ordination?

  Breakdown on the other hand, Inquisition and Ogpu rule on the other. A real dilemma, if the plan is mainly economic and political. But think in terms of individual men, women, and children, not of States, Religions, Economic Systems and such-like abstractions: there is then a hope of passing between the horns. For if you begin by considering concrete people, you see at once that freedom from coercion is a necessary condition of their developing into full-grown human beings; that the form of economic prosperity which consists in possessing unnecessary objects doesn’t make for individual well-being; that a leisure filled with passive amusements is not a blessing; that the conveniences of urban life are bought at a high physiological and mental price; that an education which allows you to use yourself wrongly is almost valueless; that a social organization resulting in individuals being forced, every few years, to go out and murder one another must be wrong. And so on. Whereas if you start from the State, the Faith, the Economic System, there is a complete transvaluation of values. Individuals must murder one another, because the interests of the Nation demand it; must be educated to think of ends and disregard means, because the schoolmasters are there and don’t know of any other method; must live in towns, must have leisure to read the newspapers and go to the movies, must be encouraged to buy things they don’t need, because the industrial system exists and has to be kept going; must be coerced and enslaved, because otherwise they might think for themselves and give trouble to their rulers.

  The sabbath was made for man. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things – science, industry, nation, money, religion, schools – which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempt
ed to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one’s interests as a human being, and, having become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind. It’s almost wearisome, the way one always comes back to the same point. Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, if there were another way out of our difficulties! A short cut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some ‘enemy of society’ to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a dose of calomel.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  July 19th 1914

  IN THE TRAIN going north, Anthony thought of what was in store for him. Within the next two days, or at the outside three, Brian would have to be told about what had happened, and a letter would have to be written to Joan. In what words? And what excuses should he make for himself? Should he tell the whole truth about his bet with Mary? For himself, the truth had certain advantages; if he told it, he could throw most of the blame for what had happened on Mary – but at the risk, he went on to think, of seeming miserably feeble. And that was not the only disadvantage; for Joan, the truth would be intolerably humiliating. However much blame he threw on Mary, the insult to Joan would remain. If only he could tell the truth to Brian and something else to Joan!

  But that wasn’t possible. They would have to be told the same story, and, for Joan’s sake, a story that wasn’t true. But what story? Which explanation of the facts would throw least discredit upon himself and inflict the least humiliation on Joan? On the whole, he decided, the best thing to say would be that he had lost his head – been carried away by a sudden impulse, an impulse that he had subsequently seen the madness of and regretted. It was somebody else who had kissed her: that was what he would write to Joan. Somebody else – but not too else. She wouldn’t like it if she were made to feel that it was a mere momentary baboon who had behaved like that in the unlighted drawing-room. The person who had kissed her would have to be partially himself. Enough himself to have been all the time very fond of her, profoundly sorry for her; but someone else to the extent of allowing the circumstances of the evening to transform the affection and sympathy into – what? Love? Desire? No, he would have to avoid saying anything so specific; would have to talk about confusions, temporary insanities spoiling a relationship which had been so fine, and so forth. Meanwhile he could only say that he was sorry and ashamed; that he felt, more strongly than ever now, that Brian was the only man who was worthy of her, that the difficulties that had arisen between herself and Brian were only temporary and would soon . . . And all the rest.