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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 do 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
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. They were hers, she had had them; they couldn't be denied. '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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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