Eyeless in Gaza, Page 31

  The door burst open, and with a yell like the whistle of an express train a small round child of about five came rushing into the room and fairly hurled herself upon her mother. Another little girl, three or four years older than the first, came hurrying after.

  ‘Helen!’ she kept calling, and her face, with its expression of anxious disapproval, was the absurd parody of a governess’s face. ‘Helen! You mustn’t. Tell her she mustn’t shout like that, Mummy,’ she appealed to Mrs Amberley.

  But Mrs Amberley only laughed and ran her fingers through the little one’s thick yellow hair. ‘Joyce believes in the Ten Commandments,’ she said, turning to Anthony. ‘Was born believing in them. Weren’t you, darling?’ She put an arm round Joyce’s shoulder and kissed her. ‘Whereas Helen and I . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears.’

  ‘Nanny says it’s the draught that gives her a stiff neck,’ Joyce volunteered, and was indignant when her mother and Anthony, and even, by uncomprehending contagion, little Helen, burst out laughing. ‘But it’s true!’ she cried; and tears of outraged virtue were in her eyes. ‘Nanny says so.’

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  June 25th 1934

  THE FACILITY WITH which one could become a Stiggins in modern dress! A much subtler, and therefore more detestable, more dangerous Stiggins. For of course Stiggins himself was too stupid to be either intrinsically very bad or capable of doing much harm to other people. Whereas if I set my mind to it, heaven knows what I mightn’t achieve in the way of lies in the soul. Even with not setting my mind to it, I could go far – as I perceived, to my horror, today, when I found myself talking to Purchas and three or four of his young people. Talking about Miller’s ‘anthropological approach’; talking about peace as a way of life as well as an international policy – the way of life being the condition of any policy that had the least hope of being permanently successful. Talking so clearly, so profoundly, so convincingly. (The poor devils were listening with their tongues hanging out.) Much more convincingly than Purchas himself could have done; that muscular-jocular-Christian style starts by being effective, but soon makes hearers feel that they’re being talked down to. What they like is that the speaker should be thoroughly serious, but comprehensible. Which is a trick I happen to possess. There I was, discoursing in a really masterly way about the spiritual life, and taking intense pleasure in that mastery, secretly congratulating myself on being not only so clever, but also so good – when all at once I realized who I was: Stiggins. Talking about the theory of courage, self-sacrifice, patience, without any knowledge of the practice. Talking, moreover, in the presence of people who had practised what I was preaching – preaching so effectively that the proper roles were reversed: they were listening to me, not I to them. The discovery of what I was doing came suddenly. I was overcome with shame. And yet – more shameful – went on talking. Not for long, however. A minute or two, and I simply had to stop, apologize, insist that it wasn’t my business to talk.

  This shows how easy it is to be Stiggins by mistake and unconsciously. But also that unconsciousness is no excuse, and that one’s responsible for the mistake, which arises, of course, from the pleasure one takes in being more talented than other people and in dominating them by means of those talents. Why is one unconscious? Because one hasn’t ever taken the trouble to examine one’s motives; and one doesn’t examine one’s motives, because one’s motives are mostly discreditable. Alternatively, of course, one examines one’s motives, but tells oneself lies about them till one comes to believe that they’re good. Which is the conviction of the self-conscious Stiggins. I’ve always condemned showing off and the desire to dominate as vulgar, and imagined myself pretty free of these vulgarities. But in so far as free at all, free, I now perceive, only thanks to the indifference which has kept me away from other people, thanks to the external-economic and internal-intellectual circumstances which made me a sociologist rather than a banker, administrator, engineer, working in direct contact with my fellows. Not to make contacts, I have realized, is wrong; but the moment I make them, I catch myself showing off and trying to dominate. Showing off, to make it worse, as Stiggins would have done, trying to dominate by a purely verbal display of virtues which I don’t put into practice. Humiliating to find that one’s supposed good qualities are mainly due to circumstances and the bad habit of indifference, which made me shirk occasions for behaving badly – or well, for that matter, seeing that it’s very difficult to behave either well or badly except towards other people. More humiliating still to find that when, with an effort of goodwill, one creates the necessary opportunities, one immediately responds to them by behaving badly. Note: meditate on the virtues that are the contraries of vanity, lust for power, hypocrisy.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  May 24th 1931

  THE BLINDS WERE up; the sunlight lay bright across the dressing-table. Helen, as usual, was still in bed. The days were so long. Lying in the soft, stupefying warmth of her own body under the quilt, she shortened them with sleep, with vague inconsequential thoughts, with drowsy reading. The book, this morning, was Shelley’s poems. ‘Warm fragrance,’ she read, articulating the words in an audible whisper, ‘seemed to fall from her light dress . . .’ (She saw a long-legged figure in white muslin, with sloping shoulders and breasts high set.)

  . . . from her light dress

  And her loose hair; and where some heavy

  tress

  The air of her own speed has disentwined . . .

  (The figure was running now, in square-toed pumps cross-gartered with black ribbon over the white cotton stockings.)

  The sweetness seems to satiate the faint

  wind;

  And in the soul a wild odour is felt

  Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt

  Into the bosom of a frozen bud . . .

  The half-opened rose gave place to Mark Staithes’s strangely twisted face. Those things he had told her the other night about perfumes. Musk, ambergris . . . And Henri Quatre with his bromidrosis of the feet. Bien vous en prend d’être roi; sans cela on ne vous pourrait souffrir. Vous puez comme charogne. She made a grimace. Hugh’s smell was like sour milk.

  A clock struck. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve! She felt guilty; then defiantly decided that she would stay in bed for lunch. A remembered voice – it was Cynthia’s – sounded reproachfully in her memory. ‘You ought to go out more, see more people.’ But people, Cynthia’s people, were such bores. Behind closed eyelids, she saw her mother rapping the top of her skull: ‘Solid ivory, my dear!’ Hopelessly stupid, ignorant, tasteless, slow. ‘I was brought up above my mental station,’ was what she had said to Anthony the other night. ‘So that now, if ever I have to be with people as silly and uneducated as myself, it’s torture, absolute torture!’

  Cynthia was sweet, of course; always had been, ever since they were at school together. But Cynthia’s husband – that retriever! And her young men, and the young men’s young women! ‘My boy friend. My girl friend.’ How she loathed the words and, still more, the awful way they spoke them! So coy, such saucy implications of sleeping together! When, in fact, most of them were utterly respectable. In the few cases where they weren’t respectable, it seemed even worse – a double hypocrisy. Really sleeping together, and pretending to be only archly pretending to do it. The dreary, upper-class Englishness of it all! And then they were always playing games. ‘Ga-ames,’ Mrs Amberley drawled out of a pre-morphia past. ‘A Dear Old School in every home.’ See more of those people, do more of the things they did . . . She shook her head.

  Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate

  Whose course has been so starless . . .

  Was it all nonsense? Or did it mean something – something marvellous she had never experienced? But, yes, she had experienced it.

  For in the fields of Immortality

  My spirit should at first have worshipped

  thine,

  A divine presence in a place divin
e . . .

  It was humiliating, now, to admit it; but the fact remained that, with Gerry, she had known exactly what those lines signified. A divine presence in a place divine. And it had been the presence in bed of a swindler who was also a virtuoso in the art of love-making. She found a perverse pleasure in insisting, as brutally as she could, upon the grotesque disparity between the facts and what had then been her feelings.

  I love thee; yes, I feel

  That on the fountain of my heart a seal

  Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright

  For thee . . .

  Noiselessly, Helen laughed. The sound of the clock chiming the quarter made her think again of Cynthia’s advice. There were also the other people – the people they met when Hugh and she dined with the Museum or the University. ‘Those god-fearing people’ (her mother spoke again), ‘who still go on fearing God even though they’ve pitched him overboard.’ Fearing God on committees. Fearing him in W.E.A. lecture-rooms. Fearing him through interminable discussions of the Planned Society. But Gerry’s good looks, Gerry’s technique as a lover – how could those be planned out of existence? Or the foetus irrepressibly growing and growing in the womb? ‘A co-ordinated housing scheme for the whole country.’ She remembered Frank Ditchling’s eager, persuasive voice. He had a turned-up nose, and the large nostrils stared at one like a second pair of eyes, insistently. ‘Redistribution of the population . . . Satellite towns . . . Green belts . . . Lifts even in working-class flats . . .’ She had listened, she had succumbed to the spell of his hypnotic nostrils, and at the time it had seemed splendid, worth dying for. But afterwards . . . Well, lifts were very convenient – she wished there were one to her own flat. Parks were nice to walk in. But how would Frank Ditchling’s crusade affect any of the serious issues? Co-ordinated housing wouldn’t make her mother any less dirty, any less hopelessly at the mercy of an intoxicated body. And Hugh – would Hugh be any different in a satellite town and with a lift from what he was now, when he walked up four flights of stairs in London? Hugh! She thought, derisively, of his letters – all the delicate, beautiful things he had written – and then of the man as he had been in everyday reality, as a husband. ‘Show me how I can help you, Hugh.’ Arranging his papers, typing his notes, looking up references for him in the library. But always, his eyes glassy behind glass, he had shaken his head: either he didn’t need help, or else she wasn’t capable of giving it. ‘I want to be a good wife, Hugh.’ With her mother’s laughter loud in her imagination, it had been difficult to pronounce those words. But she had meant them; she did want to be a good wife. Darning socks, making hot milk for him before he went to bed, reading up his subject, being sérieuse, in a word, for the first time and profoundly. But Hugh didn’t want her to be a good wife, didn’t want her, so far as she could see, to be anything. A divine presence in a place divine. But the place was his letters; she was present, so far as he was concerned, only at the other end of the postal system. He didn’t even want her in bed – or at any rate not much, not in any ordinary way. Green belts, indeed!

  It was all beside the point. For the point was those silences in which Hugh enclosed himself at meals. The point was that martyred expression he put on if ever she came into his study while he was working. The point was the furtive squalor of those approaches in the darkness, the revolting detachment and gentleness of a sensuality, in which the part assigned to her was purely ideal. The point was that expression of dismay, almost of horror and disgust, which she had detected that time, within the first few weeks of their marriage, when she was laid up with the flu. He had shown himself solicitous; and at first she had been touched, had felt grateful. But when she discovered how heroic an effort it had cost him to attend upon her sick body, the gratitude had evaporated. In itself, no doubt, the effort was admirable. What she resented, what she couldn’t forgive was the fact that an effort had had to be made. She wanted to be accepted as she was, even in fever, even vomiting bile. In that book on mysticism she had read, there was an account of Mme Guyon picking up from the floor a horrible gob of phlegm and spittle and putting it in her mouth – as a test of will. Sick, she had been Hugh’s test of will; and, since then, each month had renewed his secret horror of her body. It was an intolerable insult – and would be no less intolerable in one of Ditchling’s satellite towns, in the planned world those god-fearing atheists were always talking about.

  But there was also Fanny Carling. ‘The mouse’ was Helen’s name for her – she was so small, so grey, so silently quick. But a mystical mouse. A mouse with enormous blue eyes that seemed perpetually astonished by what they saw behind the appearances of things. Astonished, but bright at the same time with an inexplicable happiness – a happiness that to Helen seemed almost indecent, but which she envied. ‘How does one believe in things that are obviously false?’ she had asked, half in malice, half genuinely desirous of learning a valuable secret. ‘By living,’ the mouse answered. ‘If you live in the right way, all these things turn out to be obviously true.’ And she went on to talk incomprehensible stuff about the love of God and the love of things and people for the sake of God. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Only because you don’t want to, Helen.’ Stupid, maddening answer! ‘How do you know what I want?’

  Sighing, Helen returned to her book.

  I never was attached to that great sect,

  Whose doctrine is, that each one should select

  Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

  (‘One of my boy friends . . .’)

  And all the rest, though fair and wise

  commend

  To cold oblivion, though it is the code

  Of modern morals, and the beaten road

  Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps

  tread,

  Who travel to their home among the dead

  By the broad highway of the world, and so

  With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous

  foe,

  The dreariest and the longest journey go.

  The dreariest and the longest, she repeated to herself. But it could be as long, she thought, and as dreary with several as with only one – with Bob and Cecil and Quentin as with Hugh.

  True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

  That to divide is not to take away.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said aloud; and anyhow there hadn’t been much love to divide. For poor little Cecil she had never pretended to be more than sorry. And with Quentin it was just – well, just hygiene. As for Bob, he had genuinely cared for her and she, on her side, had done her best to care for him. But under those charming manners of his, under those heroic good looks there was really nothing. And as a lover, how hopelessly clumsy he had been, how barbarous and uncomprehending! She had broken with him after only a few weeks. And perhaps, she went on to think, that was her fate – to lose her heart only to men like Gerry, to be loved only by men like Hugh, and Bob and Cecil. To worship cruelty and meanness, be adored by deficiency.

  The telephone bell rang; Helen picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hullo.’

  It was the voice of Anthony Beavis that answered. He wanted her to dine with him tomorrow.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said, though she had promised the evening to Quentin.

  There was a smile on her face, as she leaned back again on the pillows. An intelligent man, she was thinking. Worth fifty of these wretched little Cecils and Quentins. And amusing, charming, even rather good-looking. How nice he had been to her the other night at Mark’s dinner! Had gone out of his way to be nice. Whereas that pretentious ass Pitchley had gone out of his way to be rude and snubbing. She had wondered at the time whether Anthony wasn’t rather attracted by her. Had wondered and rather hoped so. Now, this invitation gave her reasons, not only for hoping, but for thinking so as well. She hummed to herself; then, suddenly energetic, threw back the bed-clothes. She had decided that she would get up for lunch.

  CHAPTER XXX

  July 2nd 1914 br />
  SO FAR AS Mary Amberley was concerned, that spring and early summer had been extremely dull. Anthony was a charming boy, no doubt. But two years were a long time; he had lost his novelty. And then he was really too much in love. It was pleasant having people in love with you, of course, but not too violently, not if it went on too long. They became a nuisance in that case; they began to imagine that they had rights and that you had duties. Which was intolerable. All the fuss that Anthony had made last winter about that art critic in Paris! Flattering, in a certain sense. Mary had rarely seen anyone so desperately upset. And seeing that the art critic had turned out, on a nearer acquaintance, to be a bit of a bore, she had quite enjoyed the process of letting herself be blackmailed by Anthony’s dumb miseries and tears. But the principle was wrong. She didn’t want to be loved in that blackmailing way. Particularly if it was a long-drawn blackmail. She liked things to be short and sharp and exciting. Another time, and with anyone who wasn’t the art critic, she wouldn’t allow Anthony to blackmail her. But the trouble was that, except for Sidney Gattick – and she wasn’t really sure if she could tolerate Sidney’s voice and manner – there was nobody else in sight. The world was a place where all amusing and exciting things seemed, all of a sudden, to have stopped happening. There was nothing for it but to make them happen. That was why she went on at Anthony about what she called ‘Joan’s treatment,’ went on and on with a persistence quite out of proportion with any interest she felt in Joan, or in Brian Foxe, or even in Anthony – went on simply in the hope of creating a little fun out of the boring nothingness of the time.

  ‘How’s the treatment advancing?’ she asked yet again that afternoon in July.