CHAPTER XLIII

 

July 20^th and 21^st 1914

 

The right, the auspicious moment for telling Brian the truth – or at any rate as much of the truth as it was expedient for him to know – never seemed to present itself.  That first evening had been ruled out in advance – because Anthony felt that he must treat himself to a respite, because poor Brian was looking so ill and tired.  At supper, and after it, Anthony kept the conversation as entertainingly impersonal as he could make it.  He talked about Sorel's Réflexions sur la Violence – uncomfortable reading for Fabians!  And had Brian seen how effectively his beloved Bergson had been punctured by Julien Benda?  And what about Lascelles Abercrombie's blank verse?  And the latest Gilbert Cannan?  Next morning they set out for a walk on the Langdale Pikes.  Both were out of training; but in spite of shortened breath and bumping heart,  Brian pressed on with a kind of Spartan determination that to Anthony seemed at first absurd, then exasperating.  When they got home, late in the afternoon, they were both thoroughly tired; but Anthony was also resentful.  Rest and a meal did something to change his mood; but he still found it impossible to behave towards Brian except as a man, forgiving indeed, but still on his dignity; was dignity was obviously quite incompatible with the telling of this particular truth.  They spent a silent evening – Anthony reading, the other restlessly prowling about the room, as though on the watch for an occasion to speak – an occasion which Anthony's air of intense preoccupation was deliberately intended not to give him.

      In bed the next morning Anthony found himself startled broad awake by the uncomfortable thought that time was passing, and passing not only for himself but also for Joan and Brian.  Joan's impatience might get the better of her promise not to write to Brian; besides, the longer he postponed the inevitable explanation with Brian, the worse Brian would think of him.

      Inventing a blistered heel for the occasion, he let Brian go out by himself, and having watched him indomitably striding away up the steep slope behind the cottage, sat down to write his letter to Joan.  To try to write it, rather; for every one of the drafts he produced displayed one or other of two faults, and each of the two faults exposed him, he realized, to a particular danger: the danger that, if he insisted too much on the esteem and affection which had prepared him to lose his head on that accursed evening, she would reply that so much esteem and affection accompanied by head-losing amounted to love, and were his justification (since love was supposed to justify everything) for betraying Brian; and the other danger that, if he insisted too exclusively on the head-losing and temporary insanity, she would feel insulted and complain to Brain, to Mrs Foxe, to her relations, raise a regular hue and cry against him as a cad, a seducer, and heaven only knew what else.  After the expense of three hours and a dozen sheets of paper, the best of his efforts seemed to him too unsatisfactory to send off.  He put it angrily aside, and, in his mood of exasperation, dashed off a violent letter of abuse to Mary.  Damned woman!  She was responsible for everything.  'Deliberate malice …' 'Shameless exploitation of my love for you …' 'Treating me as though I were some sort of animal you could torment for your private amusement …’ The phrases flowed from his pen.  'This is goodbye,' he concluded, and, with half his mind, believed in what he was dramatically writing.  'I never want to see you again.  Never.'  But a quarrel, the other half of his mind was reflecting, can always be made up: he would give her this lesson: then, perhaps, if she behaved well, if he felt he simply couldn't do without her … He sealed up the letter, and at once walked briskly to the village to post it.  This act of decision did something to restore his self-esteem.  On his way home he made up his mind, quite definitely this time, that he would have his talk with Brian that evening, and then, in the light of his knowledge of Brian's attitude, re-write the letter to Joan the following morning.

      Brian was back at six, triumphing in the fact that he had walked further and climbed to the tops of more mountains than on any previous occasion in his life, but looking, in spite of his exultations, completely exhausted.  At the sight of that face he had known so long, that face now so tragically worn and emaciated beneath the transfigurement of the smile, Anthony felt an intenser renewal of the first evening's emotions – of anxious solicitude for an old friend, of distressed sympathy with a human being's suffering, and along with these an excruciating sense of guilt towards the friend, of responsibility for the human being.  Instant confession might have relieved the pain, might have allowed him at the same time to express his feelings; but he hesitated; he was silent; and in a few seconds, by an almost instantaneous process of psychological chemistry, the sympathy and the solicitude had combined with the sense of guilt to form a kind of anger.  Yes, he was positively angry with Brian for looking so tired, for being already so miserable, for going to be so much more miserable the moment he was told the truth.

      'You're mad to overtire yourself like this,' he said gruffly, and drove him into the house to take a rest before supper.

      After the meal they went out on to the strip of terraced lawn in front of the cottage and, spreading out a rug, lay down and looked up into a sky green at their arrival with the last trace of summer twilight, then gradually and ever more deeply blue.

      The time, thought Anthony, with a certain sinking of the heart, had come, irrevocably; and through a long silence he prepared himself to begin, trying out in his mind one opening gambit after another; hesitating between the abrupt and precipitate clean-breast-of-it-all and a more devious strategy that would prepared the victim gradually for the final shock.

      But before he had decided which was the best approach to his confession, the other broke out all at once into stammering speech.  He too, it was evident, had been waiting for an opportunity to ease his mind, and instead of acting the penitent, as he had intended, Anthony found himself (to the relief of a part of his mind, to the dismay and embarrassment of the inhabitant of a deeper layer of consciousness) suddenly called upon to play the part of confessor and director of conscience; called upon to listen all over again to the story that Joan had already told him – the story that, adorned with St Monicas and uterine reactions, he had so joyfully passed on  to Mary Amberley.  He had to hear how humiliating, how painful his friend found it to be unable to gain the mastery of his body, to banish all the low desires unworthy of the love he felt for Joan.  Or perhaps, Brian had qualified, citing Meredith's great volcano flinging fires of earth to sky, perhaps not unworthy when circumstances should have allowed them to take their place in the complex whole of a perfect marriage; but unworthy at that moment when it was not yet possible for them to find their legitimate expression, unworthy insofar as they were able to defy the authority of the conscious mind.

      'I've had to r-run away,' he explained, 'h-had to remove my b-body to a safe d-distance.  B-because I wasn't able to c-c-c …'; 'control' would not come; he had to be satisfied with another less expressive word; 'to m-manage myself with my w-will.  One's ash-shamed of being so weak,' Brian continued.

      Anthony nodded.  Weak in making up one's mind to kiss, and no less weak when it came to interrupting a momentarily agreeable experience – though there had been something more than weakness there, something positive, a perverse revelling in an action known to be stupid, dangerous, wrong.

      'But if one kn-knows one c-can't overc-come it,' Brian was saying, 'I s-suppose it's b-best to r-run away.  B-better than l-letting it g-get one into av-avoidable trouble.'

      'Yes, I agree,' said Anthony, wondering why he hadn't followed his impulse and turned back to Kendal.

      'And not only ones-self, but o-other people.  G-getting th-them into trouble t-too.'  There was a long silence; then, slowly and laboriously, he set out to explain that the lovely, the splendid thing about Joan was her naturalness.  She had the strength of natural things and their spontaneity; she was warm, like nature, and generous and profoundly innocent.  She had the qualities of a summer landscape, of a flowering tree, of a water-bird darting bright-eyed and glossy between the rushes.  This naturalness was what he had chiefly loved in her, because it was the complementary opposite of his own scrupulousness and intellectualism.  But it was this same naturalness that had made it all but impossible for Joan to understand why he had found her presence so dangerous, why he had felt it necessary to keep away from her.  She had been hurt by his withholding of himself, had thought it was because he didn't love her; whereas the truth was …

      The truth was, Anthony said to himself, finding a kind of consolation, a renewal of his sense of superiority, in the derisive cynicism of his thoughts, the truth was that she was thirsty for kisses, that at his first caress her whole body revealed itself a shuddering and palpitating protest against the continence that had been imposed on it.

      'The t-truth,' Brian was laboriously saying, 'is that I l-love her m-more than I e-ever did.  Unspeakably much.'  He was silent once more for a little; then, looking up at Anthony, 'What shall I d-do?' he asked.

      Still in his cynical mood, Anthony scored, with the grossness of his unspoken answer, another private triumph – as short-lived, however, as it was easy; for the first thought was succeeded almost instantaneously by the disquieting realization that he was being faced by a choice: either to tell Brian what had happened between himself and Joan; or else to make some anodyne and non-committal reply to his question, and postpone the telling of the truth till later on.  By omission, the anodyne reply would be a monstrous falsehood; and when at last he came to tell the truth, this lie and all the other lies implied in more than two days of silence or irrelevant chatter would inevitably be remembered against him.  But to tell the truth at once, in this particular context, would be specially painful – and painful, he went on to think, not only to himself but also, and above all, to Brian.  After what Brian had been saying this evening, to blurt out a plain account of what had happened would be sheer cruelty and deliberate insult.

      'What o-ought I to d-do?' Brian was insisting.

      'I think,' Anthony answered softly, 'I think you ought to come to terms with reality.'

      He had made his decision – or rather, as he preferred to put it when, later on, in the privacy of his bedroom, he thought of the events of the evening, the decision had made itself.  Looking back, he felt that he had had nothing to do with the matter.

 

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