CHAPTER FIVE

 

Luncheon, in the absence of Mr Stoyte, was a very cheerful meal.  The servants went about their business unreprimanded.  Jeremy could talk without the risk of being snubbed or insulted.  Dr Obispo was able to tell the story about the chimney-sweep who applied for life-insurance after going on his honeymoon and, from the far-away depths of that almost trance-like state of fatigue -  that state which she deliberately fostered, so as not to have to think too much and feel too badly about what was happening - Virginia was at liberty to laugh at it as loudly as she liked.  And though with one part of herself she would have liked not to laugh at all, because she didn't want to make Sig think she was encouraging him in any way, with another part she wanted to laugh, indeed couldn't help laughing, because, after all, the story was really very funny.  Besides, it was such a relief not to have to put on that act with Pete for the benefit of Uncle Jo.  No double-crossing.  For once, she could be herself.  The only fly in the ointment was that this self she was being was such a miserable specimen: a self with bones that would go like rubber whenever that horrible Sig chose to come along; a self without the strength to keep a promise even to Our Lady.  Her laughter abruptly ceased.

      Only Pete was consistently unhappy - about the chimney-sweep, of course, and Virginia's burst of merriment; but also because Barcelona had fallen and, with it, all his hopes of a speedy victory over fascism, all prospect of ever seeing any of his old comrades again.  And that wasn't all.  Laughing at the story of the chimney-sweep was only a single painful incident among many.  Virginia had allowed the first two courses of the meal to come and go without once paying any attention to him.  But why, why?  His distress was aggravated by bitter bewilderment.  Why?  In the light of what had been happening during the past three weeks it was inexplicable.  Ever since the evening of the day she had turned back at the Grotto, Virginia had been simply wonderful to him - going out of her way to talk to him, inviting him to tell her things about Spain and even about biology.  Why, she had actually asked to look at something under the microscope.  Trembling with happiness, so that he could hardly adjust the slide, he had focused the instrument on a preparation of the carp's intestinal flora.  Then she had sat down in his place, and as she bent over the eyepiece her auburn curls had swung down on either side of the microscope and, above the edge of her pink sweater, the nape of her neck had been uncovered, so white, so tangibly inviting, that the enormous effort he had had to make to prevent himself from kissing it had left him feeling almost faint.

      There had been times during the ensuing days when he wished that he hadn't made that effort.  But then his better self would reassert its rule and he was glad again that he had.  Because, of course, it wouldn't have been right.  For, though he had long since given up the family belief in the Blood-of-the-Lamb business, he still remembered what his pious and conventional mother had said about kissing anyone you weren't engaged to; he was still at heart the earnest adolescent whom Reverend Schlitz's eloquence had fired during the perplexities of puberty with a passionate determination to be continent, a conviction of the Sacredness of Love, an enthusiasm for something wonderful called Christian marriage.  But at the moment, unfortunately, he wasn't earning enough to feel justified in asking Virginia to accept his sacred love and enter into Christian marriage with him.  And there was the added complication that on his side the Christian marriage wouldn't be Christian except in substance, whereas Virginia was attached to the institution which Reverend Schlitz sometimes called the Whore of Babylon and the Marxists regarded as pre-eminently detestable.  An institution, moreover, that would think as poorly of him as he thought of it - though he thought rather less poorly of it now that Hitler was persecuting it in Germany and since he had been looked after by those Sisters of Mercy in Spain.  And even if those religious and financial difficulties could somehow be miraculously smoothed away, there remained the dreadful fact of Mr Stoyte.  He knew, of course, that Mr Stoyte was nothing more than a father to Virginia, or at most an uncle - but knew it with that excessive certainty that is born of desire; knew it in the same way as Don Quixote knew that the pasteboard visor of his helmet was as strong as steel.  It was the kind of knowledge about which it is prudent to make no enquiries; and, of course, if he asked Virginia to marry him, such enquiries, or the information such enquiries might be expected to elicit, would almost inevitably be forced upon him.

      Yet another complicating factor in the situation was Mr Propter.  For if Mr Propter was right, as Pete was coming to feel more and more certain that he was, then it was obviously unwise to do something that would make more difficult the passage from the human level to the level of eternity.  And though he loved Virginia, he found it difficult to believe that marriage to her would be anything but an obstacle to the enlightenment of everybody concerned.

      Or rather, he had thought this; but in the course of the last week or two his opinion had changed.  Or, to be more exact, he no longer had an opinion; he was just uncertain and bewildered.  For Virginia's character seemed almost certainly to have changed.  From being childlike, loud and extraverted, her innocence had become quiet and inscrutable.  In the past, she had treated him with the jocular and casual friendliness of mere goodfellowship; but recently there had been a strange alteration.  The jokes had stopped and a kind of earnest solicitude had taken their place.  She had been simply wonderful to him - but not in the way a girl is wonderful to a man she wants to fall in love with her.  No, Virginia had been wonderful like a sister - and not an ordinary sister, either: almost a Sister of Mercy.  Not just any Sister of Mercy: that particular Sister who had nursed him when he was in hospital at Gerona; the young Sister with the big eyes and the pale oval face, like the face of the Virgin Mary in a picture; the one who always seemed to be secretly happy, not because of anything that was going on around her, but because of something inside, something extraordinary and beautiful behind her eyes that she could look in at; and when she'd looked at it, there was no reason any more why she should feel scared by an air-raid, for example, or upset by an amputation.  She evidently saw things from what Mr Propter called the level of eternity; they didn't affect her in the way they'd affect a person living on the human level.  On the human level you were scared and angry; or, if you were calm, you made yourself calm by an effort of will.  But the Sister was calm without making an effort of will.  At the time, he had admired without comprehension.  Now, thanks to Mr Propter, he could begin to understand as well as admire.

      Well, that was the face that Virginia's had reminded him of during the past weeks.  There had been a kind of sudden conversion from the outward-looking life to the inward, from open responsiveness to secret and mysterious abstraction.  The cause of this conversion was beyond his comprehension; but the fact was manifest, and he had respected it.  Respected it by not kissing her neck as she bent over the microscope; by never even touching her arm or taking her hand; by not saying to her one word of all he felt about her.  In the strange, inexplicable circumstances of her transformation, such actions, he had felt, would have been inappropriate to the point positively of sacrilege.  It was as a sister that she had chosen to be wonderful to him; it was therefore as a brother that he had responded.  And now, for no known reason, she seemed suddenly to have become unaware of his existence.

      The sister had forgotten her brother; and the Sister of Mercy had forgotten herself - forgotten herself so far as to listen to Dr Obispo's ignoble anecdote about the chimney-sweep, even to laugh at it.  And yet, Pete noticed in bewilderment, the moment she stopped laughing, her face resumed its expression of inwardness and secrecy and detachment.  The Sister of Mercy remembered herself as promptly as she had forgotten.  It was beyond him; he simply couldn't figure it out.

      With the arrival of the coffee, Dr Obispo announced that he proposed to take the afternoon off and, as there was nothing that urgently needed doing in the laboratory, he advised Pete to do the same.  Pete thanked him and, pretending to be in a hurry (for he didn't want to go through the humiliation of being ignored when Virginia discussed her plans for the afternoon), swallowed his coffee and, mumbling excuses, left the room.  A little later he was out in the sunshine, walking down towards the plain.

      As he went, he thought of some of the things Mr Propter had said to him in the course of his recent visits.

      Of what he had said about the silliest text in the Bible and the most sensible.  'They hated me without a cause' and 'God is not mocked; as a man sows, so shall he reap.'

      Of what he had said about nobody ever getting something for nothing - so that a man would pay for too much money, for example, or too much power, or too much sex, by being shut up more tightly inside his own ego; so that a country that moved too quickly and violently would fall under a tyranny, like Napoleon's, or Stalin's, or Hitler's; and a people that was prosperous and internally peaceful would pay for it by being smug and self-satisfied and conservative, like the English.

      The baboons were gibbering as he passed.  Pete recalled some of Mr Propter's remarks about literature.  About the wearisomeness, to an adult mind, of all those merely descriptive plays and novels which critics expected one to admire.  All the innumerable, interminable anecdotes and romances and character-studies, but no general theory of anecdotes, no explanatory hypothesis of romance or character.  Just a huge collection of facts about lust and greed, fear and ambition, duty and affection; just facts, and imaginary facts at that, with no co-ordinating philosophy superior to common sense and the local system of conventions, no principle of arrangement more rational than simple aesthetic expediency.  And then the astonishing nonsense talked by those who undertake to elucidate and explain this hodgepodge of prettily patterned facts and fancies!  All that solemn tosh, for example, about Regional Literature - as though there were some special and outstanding merit in recording uncoordinated facts about the lusts, greeds and duties of people who happen to live in the country and speak in dialect!  Or else the facts were about the urban poor and there was an effort to co-ordinate them in terms of some post-Marxian theory that might be partly true, but was always inadequate.  And in that case it was the great Proletarian Novel.  Or else somebody wrote yet another book proclaiming that Life is Holy; by which he always meant that anything people do in the way of fornicating, or getting drunk, or losing their tempers, or feeling maudlin, is entirely O.K. with God and should therefore be regarded as permissible and even virtuous.  In which case it was up to the critics to talk about the author's ripe humanity, his deep and tender wisdom, his affinities with the great Goethe, and his obligations to William Blake.

      Pete smiled as he remembered, but with a certain ruefulness as well as amusement; for he too had taken this sort of thing with the seriousness its verbiage seemed to demand.

      Misplaced seriousness - the source of some of our most fatal errors.  One should be serious, Mr Propter had said, only about what deserves to be taken seriously.  And, on the strictly human level, there was nothing that deserved to be taken seriously except the suffering men inflicted upon themselves by their crimes and follies.  But, in the last analysis, most of these crimes and follies arose from taking too seriously things which did not deserve it.  And that, Mr Propter had continued, was another of the enormous defects of so-called good literature; it accepted the conventional scale of values; it respected power and position; it admired success; it treated as though they were reasonable the mainly lunatic preoccupations of statesmen, lovers, businessmen, social climbers, parents.  In a word, it took seriously the causes of suffering as well as the suffering.  It helped to perpetuate misery by explicitly or implicitly approving the thoughts and feelings and practices which could not fail to result in misery.  And this approval was bestowed in the most magnificent and persuasive language.  So that even when a tragedy ended badly, the reader was hypnotized by the eloquence of the piece into imagining that it was all somehow noble and worthwhile.  Which of course it wasn't.  Because, if you considered them dispassionately, nothing could be more silly and squalid than the themes of Phèdre, or Othello, or Wuthering Heights, or the Agamemnon.  But the treatment of these themes had been in the highest degree sublime and thrilling, so that the reader or the spectator was left with the conviction that, in spite of the catastrophe, all was really well with the world, the all too human world, which had produced it.  No, a good satire was much more deeply truthful and, of course, much more profitable than a good tragedy.  The trouble was that so few good satires existed, because so few satirists were prepared  to carry their criticism of human values far enough.  Candide, for example, was admirable as far as it went; but it went no further than debunking the principal human activities in the name of the ideal of harmlessness.  Now, it was perfectly true that harmlessness was the highest ideal most people could aspire to; for, though few had the power to do much positive good, there was nobody who could not refrain, if he so desired, from evil.  Nevertheless, mere harmlessness, however excellent, most certainly didn't represent the highest possible ideal.  Il faut cultiver notre jardin was not the last word in human wisdom; at the best it was only the last but one.

      The sun was in such a position that, as he walked down the hill, Pete saw two little rainbows spouting from the nipples of Giambologna's nymph.  Thoughts of Noah immediately arose in conjunction with thoughts of Virginia in her white satin bathing-costume.  He tried to repress the latter as incompatible with the new thoughts he was trying to cultivate about the Sister of Mercy; and since Noah was not a subject that would bear much thinking about, he proceeded instead to concentrate on that talk he had had with Mr Propter about sex.  It had begun with his own puzzled questionings as to what sort of sexual behaviour was normal - not statistically normal, of course, but normal in that absolute sense in which perfect vision or unimpaired digestion may be called normal.  What sort of sexual behaviour was normal in that sense of the word?  And Mr Propter had answered: None.  But there must be, he had protested.  If good could be manifested on the animal level, then there must be some kind of sexual behaviour that was absolutely normal and natural, just as there was an absolutely normal and natural sort of digestive activity.  But man's sexual behaviour, Mr Propter had answered, wasn't on the same level as digestion.  A rat's love-making - yes, that was on the same level as digestion; for the entire process was instinctive; in other words, was controlled by the physiological intelligence of the body - the same physiological intelligence as correlated the actions of heart and lungs and kidneys, as regulated temperature, as nourished the muscles and made them do the work demanded of them by the central nervous system.  Men's bodily activities were controlled by the same physiological intelligence and it was that intelligence which, on the animal level, manifested good.  In human beings, sexual behaviour was almost completely outside the jurisdiction of this physiological intelligence.  It controlled only the cellular activities which made sexual behaviour possible.  All the rest was non-instinctive and took place on the strictly human level of self-consciousness.  Even when men thought that they were being most exclusively animal in their sexuality, they were still on the human level.  Which meant that they were still self-conscious, still dominated by words - and where there were words, there, of necessity, were memories and wishes, judgements and imaginations.  There, inevitably, were the past and the future, the actual and the fantastic; regret and anticipation; good and evil; the creditable and the discreditable; the beautiful and the ugly.  Among men and women, even the most apparently bestial acts of eroticism were associated with some or all of these non-animal factors - factors which were injected into every human situation by the existence of language.  This meant that there was no one type of human sexuality that could be called 'normal' in the sense in which one could say that there was a normality of vision or digestion.  In that sense, all kinds of human sexuality were strictly abnormal.  The different kinds of sexual behaviour could not be judged by referring them to an absolute natural norm.  They could only be judged in reference to the ultimate aims of each individual and the results observed in each case.  Thus, if an individual wanted to be well thought of in any given society, he or she could safely regard as 'normal' the type of sexual behaviour currently tolerated by that local religion and approved by the 'best people'.  But there were some individuals who cared little for the judgement of an angry God or even of the best people.  Their principal desire was for intense and reiterated stimulation of their senses and their feelings.  For these, it was obvious, 'normality' in sexual behaviour would be quite different from what it was for the more social-minded.  Then there would be all the kinds of sexuality 'normal' to those desirous of making the best of both worlds - the personal world of sensations and emotions, and the social world of moral and religious conventions.  The 'normalities' of Tartuffe and Pecksniff; of the clergymen who can't keep away from schoolgirls, the cabinet ministers with a secret mania for handsome youths.  And, finally, there were those who were concerned neither to get on in society, nor to placate the local deity, nor to enjoy repeated emotional and sensuous stimulations, but whose chief preoccupation was with enlightenment and liberation, with the problem of transcending personality, of passing from the human level to the level of eternity.  Their conceptions of 'normality' in sexual behaviour would not resemble those of the men and women in any of our other categories.

      From the concrete tennis-court the children of the Chinese cook were flying kites in the shape of birds and equipped with little whistles, so that they warbled plaintively in the wind.  The cheerful quacking sound of Cantonese drifted down to Pete's ears.  Across the Pacific, he reflected, millions upon millions of such children had died already or were dying.  Below them, in the Sacred Grotto, stood the plaster figure of Our Lady.  Pete thought of Virginia kneeling in white shorts and a yachting-cap, of the abusive eloquence of Reverend Schlitz, of Dr Obispo's jokes, of Alexis Carrel on the subject of Lourdes, of Lee's History of the Inquisition, of Tawney on the relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism, of Niemöller and John Knox and Torquemada and that Sister of Mercy and again of Virginia, and finally of Mr Propter as the only person he knew who could make some sense out of the absurd, insane, diabolical confusion of it all.