CHAPTER VI

 

'De Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,' said Mr Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly.  He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles.  The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India.  One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose.  It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments.  There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it.  At the word 'fountain', it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr Sita Ram's plate.

      'Burke and Bacon,' Mr Sita Ram went on sonorously, 'Milton and Macaulay ...'

      'Oh, look!'  Elinor Quarles's voice was shrill with alarm.  She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backwards.  Mr Sita Ram turned towards her.

      'What's de matter?' he asked in a tone of annoyance.  It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.

      Elinor pointed.  A very large grey toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda.  In the silence its movements were audible - a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.

      'De toad can do no harm,' said Mr Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.

      Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband.  The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.

      'Really, my darling,' he protested.  He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals.  But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically.  It was the same with the food.  There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish.   But he had managed, nonetheless, to eat it.  Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.

      'Perhaps you wouldn't mind driving it away,' she whispered.  Her face expressed her inward agony.  'You know how much I detest them.'

      Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda.  With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform.  It flopped down heavily into the garden below.  Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems.  The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky.  Not a leaf stirred.  It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced.  Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it.  But this stifling darkness ... Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.

      'You were saying, Mr Sita Ram?'

      But Mr Sita Ram's first fine careless rapture had evaporated.  'I was re-reading some of de works of Morley today,' he announced.

      'Golly!' said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang.  It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.

      But Mr Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that 'Golly'.  'What a tinker!' he pursued.  'What a great tinker!  And de style is so chaste.'

      'I suppose it is.'

      'Dere are some good phrases,' Mr Sita Ram went on.  'I wrote dem down.'  He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook.  'Never mind,' he said.  'But dey were good phrases.  Sometimes one reads a whole book without finding a single phrase one can remember or quote.  What's de good of such a book, I ask you?'

      'What indeed?'

      Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates.  A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance.  Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat.  Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom.  They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea.  The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats - large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.

      Under the influence of the champagne, Mr Sita Ram recovered his eloquence.  His latest oration re-uttered itself.

      'Dere is one law for de English,' he said, 'and another for de Indians, one for de oppressors and another for de oppressed.  De word justice as eider disappeared from your vocabulary, or else it has changed its meaning.'

      'I'm inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,' said Philip.

      Mr Sita Ram paid no attention.  He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent.  'Consider de case,' he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control) 'of de unfortunate stationmaster of Bhowanipore.'

      But Philip refused to consider it.  He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning.  Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country.  It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.

      The stationmaster of Bhoranipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.

      'But why don't you teach them birth control, Mr Sita Ram?' Elinor had asked.  These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince.  She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born.  And after all, and had had chloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet.  Whereas the wife of the stationmaster of Bhowanipore ... She had heard accounts of Indian midwives.  She shuddered.  'Isn't it the only hope for India?'

      Mr Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government.  He went on with the stationmaster's history.  The man had passed all his examinations with credit; his qualifications were the highest possible.  And yet he had been passed over for promotion no less than four times.  Four times, and always in favour of Europeans or Eurasians.  Mr Sita Ram's blood boiled when he thought of the five thousand years of Indian civilization, Indian spirituality, Indian moral superiority, cynically trampled, in the person of the stationmaster of Bhowanipore, under English feet ...

      'Is dat justice, I ask?'  He banged the table.

      Who knows?'  Philip wondered.  Perhaps it is.

      Elinor was still thinking of the nine children.  To obtain a quick delivery, the midwives, she had heard, stamp on their patients.  And, instead of ergot, they use a paste made of cow-dung and powdered glass.

      'Do you call dat justice?' Mr Sita Ram repeated.

      Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, 'No.'

      'You ought to write about it,' said Mr Sita Ram, 'you ought to show de scandal up.'

      Philip excused himself; he was only a writer of novels, not a politician, not a journalist. 'Do you know old Daulat Singh?' he added with apparent irrelevance.  'The one who lives at Ajmere?'

      'I have met de man,' said Mr Sita Ram, in a tone that made it quite clear that he didn't like Daulat Singh, or perhaps (more probably, thought Philip) hadn't been liked or approved by him.

      'A fine man, I thought,' said Philip.  For men like Daulat Singh justice would have to mean something very different from what it meant for Mr Sita Ram or the stationmaster of Bhowanipore.  He remembered the noble old face, the bright eyes, the restrained passion of his words.  If only he could have refrained from chewing pan ...

      The time came for them to go.  At last.  They said goodbye with an almost excessive cordiality, climbed into the waiting car and were driven away.  The ground beneath the palm trees of Joohoo was littered with a mintage of shining silver, splashed with puddles of mercury.  They rolled through a continuous flickering of light and dark - the cinema film of twenty years ago - until, emerging from under the palm trees, they found themselves in the full glare of the enormous moon.

      'Three-formed Hecate,' he thought, blinking at the round brilliance.  'But what about Sita Ram and Daulat Singh and the stationmaster, what about old appalling India, what about justice and liberty, what about progress and the future?  The fact is, I don't care.  Not a pin.  It's disgraceful.  But I don't.  And the forms of Hecate aren't three.  They're a thousand, they're millions.  The tides.  The Nemorensian goddess, the Tifatinian.  Varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distances.  A florin at arm's length, but as big as the Russian Empire.  Bigger than India.  What a comfort it will be to be back in Europe again!  And to think there was a time when I read books about yoga and did breathing exercises and tried to persuade myself that I didn't really exist!  What a fool!  It was a result of talking with that idiot Burlap.  But luckily people don't leave much trace on me.  They make an impression easily, like a ship in water.  But the water closes up again.  I wonder what this Italian ship will be like tomorrow?  The Lloyd Triestino boats are always supposed to be good.  "Luckily," I said; but oughtn't one to be ashamed of one's indifference?  That parable of the sower.  The seed that fell in shallow ground.  And yet, obviously, it's no use pretending to be what one isn't.  One sees that results of that in Burlap.  What a comedian!  But he takes in a lot of people.  Including himself, I suppose.  I don't believe there's such a thing as a conscious hypocrite, except for special occasions.  You can't keep it up all the time.  All the same, it would be good to know what it's like to believe in something to the point of being prepared to kill people or get yourself killed.  It would be an experience ...'

      Elinor had lifted her face towards the same bright disc.  Moon, full moon ... And instantly she had changed her position in space and time.  She dropped her eyes and turned towards her husband; she took his hand and leaned tenderly against him.

      'Do you remember those evenings?' she asked.  'In the garden, at Gattenden.  Do you remember, Phil?'

      Elinor's words came to his ears from a great distance and from a world in which, for the moment, he felt no interest.  He roused himself with reluctance.  'Which evenings?' he asked, speaking across gulfs, and in the rather flat and colourless voice of one who answers an importunate telephone.

      At the sound of that telephone voice Elinor quickly drew away from him.  To press yourself against someone who turns out simply not to be there is not only disappointing; it is also rather humiliating. Which evenings, indeed!

      'Why don't you love me any more?' she asked despairingly.  As if she could have been talking about any other evenings than those of that wonderful summer they had spent, just after their marriage, at her mother's house.  'You don't even take any interest in me now - less than you would in a piece of furniture, much less than in a book.'

      'But, Elinor, what are you talking about?'  Philip put more astonishment into his voice than he really felt.  After the first moment, when he had had time to come to the surface, so to speak, from the depths of his reverie, he had understood what she meant, he had connected this Indian moon with that which had shone, eight years ago, on the Hertfordshire garden.  He might have said so, of course.  It would have made things easier.  But he was annoyed at having been interrupted, he didn't like to be reproached, and the temptation to score a debater's point against his wife was strong.  'I ask a simple question,' he went on, 'merely wanting to know what you mean.  And you retort by complaining that I don't love you.  I fail to see the logical connection.'

      'But you know quite well what I was talking about,' said Elinor.  'And besides, it is true - you don't love me any more.'

      'I do, as it happens,' said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit vainly, as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination.  'But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started.  We began with evenings and now ...'

      But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic.  'Oh, I know you don't want to say you don't love me,' she interrupted.  'Not in so many words.  You don't want to hurt my feelings.  But it would really hurt them less if you did so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now.  Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement.  And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there's suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain.  So long as the words haven't been definitely spoken, there's always just a chance that they mayn't have been tacitly implied.  Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied.  There's still room for hope.  And where there's hope there's disappointment.  It isn't really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it's crueller.'

      'But I don't evade the question,' he retorted.  'Why should I, seeing that I love you?'

      'Yes, but how?  How do you love me?  Not in the way you used to, at the beginning.  Or perhaps you've forgotten.  You didn't even remember the time when we were first married.'

      'But, my dear child,' Philip protested, 'do be accurate.  You just said "those evenings" and expected me to guess which.'

      'Of course I expected,' said Elinor.  'You ought to have known.  You would have known, if you took any interest.  That's what I complain of.  You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you.  Do you think I can forget those evenings?'

      She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall, where they had sat together.  She remembered what he had said and his kisses, the touch of his hands.  She remembered everything - remembered with the minute precision of one who loves to explore and reconstruct the past, of one who is for ever turning over and affectionately verifying each precious detail of recollected happiness.

      'It's all simply faded out of your mind,' she added, mournfully reproachful.  For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.

      'But of course I remember,' said Philip impatiently.  'Only one can't readjust one's mind instantaneously.  At the moment, when you spoke, I happened to be thinking of something else; that was all.'

      Elinor sighed.  'I wish I had something else to think about,' she said.  'That's the trouble; I haven't.  Why should I love you so much?  Why?  It isn't fair.  You're protected by an intellect and a talent.  You have your work to retire into, your ideas to shield you.  But I have nothing - no defence against my feelings, no alternative to you.  And it's I who need the defence and the alternative.  For I'm the one who really cares.  You've got nothing to be protected from.  You don't care.  No, it isn't fair, it isn't fair.'

      And after all, she was thinking, it had always been like this.  He hadn't ever really loved her, even at the beginning.  Not profoundly and entirely, not with abandonment.  For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her.  On her side she had offered everything, everything.  And he had taken, but without return.  His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld.  Always, even from the first, even when he had loved her most.  She had been happy then - but only because she had not known better than to be happy, because she had not realized, in her inexperience, that love could be different and better.  She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity, in laying waste her memories.  The moon, the dark and perfumed garden, the huge black tree and its velvet shadow on the lawn ... She denied them, she rejected the happiness which they symbolized in her memory.

      Philip Quarles, meanwhile, said nothing.  There was nothing, really, to say.  He put his arm round her and drew her towards him; he kissed her forehead and her fluttering eyelids; they were wet with tears.

      The sordid suburbs of Bombay slid past them - factories and little huts and huge tenements, ghastly and bone-white under the moon.  Brown, thin-legged pedestrians appeared for a moment in the glare of the headlights, like truths apprehended intuitively and with immediate certainty, only to disappear again almost instantly into the void of the outer darkness.  Here and there, by the roadside, the light of a fire mysteriously hinted at dark limbs and faces.  The inhabitants of a world of thought starrily remote from theirs peered at them, as the car flashed past, from creaking bullock carts.

      'My darling,' he kept repeating, 'my darling ...'

      Elinor permitted herself to be comforted.  'You love me a little?'

      'So much.'

      She actually laughed, rather sobbingly, it is true; but still, it was a laugh.  'You do your best to be nice to me.'  And after all, she thought, those days at Gattenden had really been blissful.  'You make such efforts.  It's sweet of you.'

      'It's silly to talk like that,' he protested.  'You know I love you.'

      'Yes, I know you do.'  She smiled and stroked his cheek.  'When you have time and then by wireless across the Atlantic.'

      'No, that isn't true.'  But secretly he knew that it was.  All his life long he had walked in a solitude, in a private void, into which nobody, not his mother, not his friends, not his lovers had ever been permitted to enter.  Even when he held her thus, pressed close to him, it was by wireless, as she had said, and across an Atlantic that he communicated with her.

      'It isn't true,' she echoed, tenderly mocking.  'But, my poor old Phil, you couldn't even take in a child.  You don't know how to lie convincingly.  You're too honest.  That's one of the reasons why I love you.  If you knew how transparent you were!'

      Philip was silent.  These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable.  They threatened his solitude - that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone, nevertheless, his spirit could live in comfort, in which alone he felt himself free.  At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives.  But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air.  But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence.  He entrenched himself now in silence, in that calm, remote, frigid silence, which he was sure that Elinor would not attempt, knowing the hopelessness of the venture, to break through.  He was right; Elinor glanced at him for an instant, and then, turning away, looked out at the moonlit landscape.  Their parallel silences flowed on through time, unmeeting.

      They were driven on through the Indian darkness.  Almost cool against their faces, the moving air smelt now of tropical flowers, now of sewage, or curry, or burning cow-dung.

      'And yet,' said Elinor suddenly, unable any longer to contain her resentful thoughts, 'you couldn't do without me.  Where would you be if I left you, if I went to somebody who was prepared to give me something in return for what I give?  Where would you be?'

      The question dropped into the silence.  Philip made no answer.  But where would he be?  He too wondered.  For in the ordinary daily world of human contacts he was curiously like a foreigner, uneasily not at home among his fellows, finding it difficult or impossible to enter into communication with any but those who could speak his native intellectual language of ideas.  Emotionally, he was a foreigner.  Elinor was his interpreter, his dragoman.  Like her father, Elinor Bidlake had been born with a gift of intuitive understanding and social ease.  She was quickly at home with anybody.  She knew, instinctively, as well as old John himself, just what to say to every type of person - to every type except, perhaps, her husband's.  It is difficult to know what to say to someone who does not say anything in return, who answers the impersonal world with the personal, the particular and feeling word with an intellectual generalization.  Still, being in love with him, she persisted in her efforts to lure him into direct contact; and though the process was rather discouraging - like singing to deaf-mutes or declaiming poetry to an empty hall - she went on giving him her intimacies of thought and feeling.  There were occasions when, making a great effort, he did his best, in exchange, to admit her into his own personal privacies.  But whether it was that the habit of secrecy had made it impossible for him to give utterance to his inward feelings, or whether the very capacity to feel had actually been atrophied by consistent silence and repression, Elinor found these rare intimacies disappointing.  The holy of holies into which he so painfully ushered her was almost as naked and empty as that which astonished the Roman invaders, when they violated the temple of Jerusalem.  Still, she was grateful to Philip for his good intentions in at least wanting to admit her to his emotional intimacy, even though there mightn't be much of an emotional life to be intimate with.  A kind of Pyrrhonian indifference, tempered by a consistent gentleness and kindness, as well as by the more violent intermittences of physical passion - this was the state of being which nature and second nature had made normal for him.  Elinor's reason told her that this was so; but her feelings would not accept in practice what she was sure of in theory.  What was living and sensitive and irrational in her was hurt by his indifference, as though it were a personal coldness directed only against herself.  And yet, whatever she might feel, Elinor knew all the time that his indifference wasn't personal, that he was like that with everybody, that he loved her as much as it was possible for him to love, that his love for her hadn't diminished, because it had never really been greater - more passionate once perhaps, but never more emotionally rich in intimacies and self-giving, even at its most passionate, than it was now.  But all the same her feelings were outraged; he oughtn't to be like this.  He oughtn't to be; but there, he was.  After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence - that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including the emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.

      Once, when he had been telling her about Koehler's book on the apes, 'You're like a monkey on the superman side of humanity,' she said.  'Almost human, like those poor chimpanzees.  The only difference is that they're trying to think up with their feelings and instincts, and you're trying to feel down with your intellect.  Almost human.  Trembling on the verge, my poor Phil.'

      He understood everything so perfectly.  That was why it was such fun being his dragoman and interpreting other people for him.  (It was less amusing when one had to interpret oneself.)  All that the intelligence could seize upon he seized.  She reported her intercourse with the natives of the realm of emotion and he understood at once, he generalized her experience for her, he related it with other experiences, classified it, found analogies and parallels.  From single and individual it became in his hands part of a system.  She was astonished to find that she and her friends had been, all unconsciously, substantiating a theory, or exemplifying some interesting generalization.  Her functions as dragoman were not confined to mere scouting and reporting.  She acted also directly as personal interpreter between Philip and any third party he might wish to get into touch with, creating the atmosphere in which alone the exchange of personalities is possible, preserving the conversation from intellectual desiccation.  Left to himself Philip would never have been able to establish personal contact or preserve it when once established.  But when Elinor was there to make and keep the contact for him, he could understand, he could sympathize, with his intelligence, in a way which Elinor assured him was all but human.  In his subsequent generalizations from the experience she had made possible for him he became once more undisguisedly the overman.

      Yes, it was fun to serve as dragoman to such an exceptionally intelligent tourist in the realm of feeling.  But it was more than fun; it was also, in Elinor's eyes, a duty.  There was his writing to consider.

      'Ah, if you were a little less of an overman, Phil,' she used to say, 'what good novels you'd write!'

      Rather ruefully he agreed with her.  He was intelligent enough to know his own defects.  Elinor did her best to supply them - gave him first-hand information about the habits of the natives, acted as go-between when he wanted to come into personal contact with one of them.  Not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the novelist he might be, she wished he could break his habit of impersonality and learn to live with the intuitions and feelings and instincts as well as with the intellect.  Heroically, she had even encouraged him in his velleities of passion for other women.  It might do him good to have a few affairs.  So anxious was she to do him good as a novelist, that on more than one occasion, seeing him look admiringly at some young woman or other, she had gone out of her way to establish for him the personal contact which he would never have been able to establish for himself.  It was risky, of course.  He might really fall in love; he might forget to be intellectual and become a reformed character, but for some other woman's benefit.  Elinor took the risk, partly because she thought that his writing ought to come before everything else, even her own happiness, and partly because she was secretly convinced that there was in reality no risk at all, that he would never lose his head so wholly as to want to run off with another woman.  The cure by affairs, if it worked at all, would be gentle in its action; and if it did not work, she was sure she would know how to profit by its good effects on him.  Anyhow, it hadn't worked so far.  Philip's infidelities amounted to very little and had had no appreciable effect on him.  He remained depressingly, even maddeningly the same - intelligent to the point of being almost human, remotely kind, separately passionate and sensual, impersonally sweet.  Maddening.  Why did she go on loving him?  She wondered.  One might almost as well go on loving a bookcase.  One day she would really leave him.  There was such a thing as being too unselfish and devoted.  One should think of one's own happiness sometimes.  To be loved for a change, instead of having to do all the loving oneself; to receive instead of perpetually giving ... Yes, one day she really would leave him.  She had herself to think about.  Besides, it would be a punishment for Phil.  A punishment - for she was sure that, if she left him, he would be genuinely unhappy, in his way, as much as it lay in him to be unhappy.  And perhaps the unhappiness might achieve the miracle she had been longing and working for all these years; perhaps it would sensitize him, personalize him.  Perhaps it might be the making of him as a writer.  Perhaps it was even her duty to make him unhappy, the most sacred of her duties ...

      The sight of a dog running across the road just in front of the car aroused her from her reverie.  How suddenly, how startlingly it had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps!  It existed for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world.  Another dog was suddenly in its place, pursuing.

      'Oh!' cried Elinor.  'It'll be ...'  The headlights swerved and swung straight again, there was a padded jolt, as though one of the wheels had passed over a stone; but the stone yelped. '...run over,' she concluded.

      'It has been run over.'

      The Indian chauffeur looked round at them, grinning.  They could see the flash of his teeth.  'Dog!' he said.  He was proud of his English.

      'Poor beast!'  Elinor shuddered.

      'It was his fault,' said Philip.  'He wasn't looking.  That's what comes of running after the females of one's species.'

      There was a silence.  It was Philip who broke it.

      'Morality'd be very queer,' he reflected aloud, 'if we loved seasonally, not all the year round.  Moral and immoral would change from one month to another.  Primitive societies are apt to be more seasonal than cultivated ones.  Even in Sicily there are twice as many births in January as in August.  Which proves conclusively that in the spring the young man's fancy ... But nowhere only in the spring.  There's nothing human quite analogous to heat in mares or she-dogs.  Except,' he added, 'except perhaps in the moral sphere.  A bad reputation in a woman allures like the signs of heat in a bitch. Ill-fame announces accessibility.  Absence of heat is the animal's equivalent of the chaste woman's habits and principles ...'

      Elinor listened with interest and at the same time a kind of horror.  Even the squashing of a wretched animal was enough to set that quick untiring intelligence to work.  A poor starved pariah dog had its back broken under the wheels and the incident evoked from Philip a selection from the vital statistics of Sicily, a speculation about the relativity of morals, a brilliant psychological generalization.  It was amusing, it was unexpected, it was wonderfully interesting; but oh! she almost wanted to scream.