CHAPTER XXXVIII
Today Helen talked again about Miller. Talked with a kind of
resentful vehemence. (Certain memories, certain trains of thought are
like the aching tooth one must always be touching just to make sure it still
hurts). Non-violence: this time, it was not only a mere trick, insignificant;
it was also wrong. If you're convinced
people are wicked, you've no right not to try to make them behave
decently. Agreed: but how are you most
likely to succeed? By
violence? But violence may make
people assume the forms of good behaviour for the moment; it won't produce the
reality of genuine and permanent good behaviour. She accused me of shirking real issues,
taking refuge in vague idealism. It all
boiled down at last to her vengeful hatred for the Nazis. Peace all round, except for Nazis and, by
contagion, Fascists. These should be
punished, painfully exterminated like rats. (Note that we're all ninety-nine
percent pacifists. Sermon on Mount, provided we're allowed to play Tamburlane or Napoleon
in our particular one percent of selected cases. Peace, perfect peace, so
long as we can have the war that suits us.
Result: everyone is the predestined victim of somebody else's
exceptionally permissible war. Ninety-nine percent pacificism is merely another name for
militarism. If there's to be peace,
there be hundred percent pacifism.)
We
exchanged a lit of arguments; then, for some time, said nothing. Finally, she began to talk about
Giesebrecht. Executed
after God only knew what tortures, 'Can you be surprised if I feel like this about
the Nazis?' Not surprised at all
any more than by the Nazis themselves.
Surprising would have been tolerance on their part, forgiveness of
hers. 'But the person who might have
forgiven vanished when Ekki vanished. I
was good while he was with me. Now I'm
bad. If he were still here I might be
able to forgive them for taking him away.
But that's an impossible condition.
I can't ever forgive.' (There were answers to that, of course. But it didn't seem to me that I had any
right, being what I am, acting as I still do, to make
them.) She went on to describe what he had been to her. Someone she didn't have to be ashamed of
loving, as she had had to be ashamed of loving Gerry. Someone she had been able to love with her
whole being 'not just occasionally and with part of me, on a roof; or just
for fun, in a studio, before dinner.'
And she came back to the same point that Ekki had made her kind,
truthful, unselfish, as well as happy.
'I was somebody else while I was with him. Or perhaps I was myself for the first
time.' Then, 'Do you remember how you
laughed at me that time on the roof, when I talked about my real self?' Did I not remember! I hadn't even been real enough, at that
moment, to perceive my own remoteness from reality. Afterwards, when I saw her crying, when I
knew that I'd been deliberately refusing to love her, I did perceive it.
After
a silence, 'At the beginning I believe I could have loved you almost as much as
I loved Ekki.'
And
I'd done my best, of course, to prevent her.
Her
face brightened with sudden malicious derision.
Like her mother's. 'Extraordinary
how funny a tragedy is, when you look at it from the wrong side!' Then, still smiling, 'Do you imagine you care
for me now? Lo-ove me,
in a word?'
Not
only imagined; did really.
She
held up a hand, like a policeman. 'No
film stuff here. I'd have to throw you
out if you began that game. Which I don't want to do.
Because, oddly enough, I really like you. In spite of everything. I never thought I should. Not after that dog. But I do.'
That painful brightness came back into the face. 'All the things I thought I should never do
again! Such as eating a square meal; but
I was doing it after three days. And wanting to make love.
That seemed inconceivably sacrilegious.
And yet within three or four months it was occurring to me, I was having
dreams about it. And one of these days,
I suppose, I shall actually be doing it.
Doing it without any obligation, as they say when they send you the
vacuum-cleaner on approval. Exactly as I did before.'
She laughed again. 'Most probably with you, Anthony. Till the next dog comes
down. Would you be ready to begin
again?'
Not
on the old basis. I'd want to give more,
receive more.
'It
takes two to give and receive.' Then she
switched the conversation on to another line; who was I having an affair with
at the moment? and when I answered: with nobody, asked
whether it was difficult and disagreeable to be continent, and why I should
want to imitate Mark Staithes. Tried to
explain that I wasn't imitating Mark, that Mark's asceticism was undertaken for
its own sake and above all for his, that he might feel himself more
separate, more intensely himself, in a better position to look down on other
people. Whereas what I was trying to do
was to avoid occasions for emphasizing individual separateness through
sensuality. Hate, anger, ambition
explicitly deny human unity; lust and greed do the same indirectly and by
implication by insisting exclusively on particular individual experiences
and, in the case of lust, using other people merely as
a means for obtaining such experiences.
Less dangerously so than malevolence and the passions for superiority,
prestige, social position, lust is still incompatible with pacificism; can be
made compatible only when it ceases to be an end in itself and becomes a means
towards the unification through love of two separate individuals. Such particular union, a
paradigm of union in general.