‘He came to me where I was staying – I had a room in Camberwell then – he came and took me away with him. Straight away, the moment I could get my things packed up, and brought me here. I’ve kept house for him ever since. What do you think of that, Mr Beavis?’ she asked. Her voice trembled and she had to wipe her eyes; but she was still triumphant. ‘What do you think of that?’
Anthony really didn’t know what to think of it; but said, meanwhile, that it was wonderful.
‘Wonderful,’ the horse repeated, approvingly. ‘That’s exactly what it is. But you mustn’t tell him I told you. He’d be furious with me. He’s like that text in the Gospel about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing. That’s what he’s like.’ She gave her eyes a final wipe and blew her nose. ‘There, I hear him coming,’ she said, and, before Anthony could intervene, had jumped up, darted across the room in a storm of rustlings and rattlings, and opened the door. Mark entered, carrying a tray with the tea-things and a plate of mixed biscuits.
Miss Pendle poured out, said she oughtn’t to eat anything at this time of night, but, all the same, took a round biscuit with pink sugar icing on it.
‘Now, tell me what sort of a boy young Master Mark was at Bulstrode,’ she said in that playful way of hers. ‘Up to all kind of mischief, I’ll be bound!’ She took another bite at her biscuit.
‘He bullied me a good deal,’ said Anthony.
Miss Pendle interrupted her quick nibbling to laugh aloud. ‘You naughty boy!’ she said to Mark; then the jaws started to work again.
‘Being so good at football, he had a right to bully me.’
‘Yes, you were captain of the eleven, weren’t you?’
‘I forget,’ said Mark.
‘He forgets!’ Miss Pendle repeated, looking triumphantly at Anthony. ‘That’s typical of him. He forgets!’ She helped herself to a second biscuit, pushing aside the plain ones to select another with icing on it, and began to nibble once more with the intense and concentrated passion of those whose only sensual pleasures have been the pleasures of the palate.
When she had gone to bed, the two men sat down again by the fire. There was a long silence.
‘She’s rather touching,’ said Anthony at last.
For some time Mark made no comment. Then, ‘A bit too touching,’ he brought out.
Anthony looked into his face and saw there a demonstration of the anatomy of sardonic irony. There was another silence. The clock, which was supported by two draped nymphs in gilded bronze, ticked from its place among the imitation Dresden figures that thronged the shelves of the elaborate overmantel. Hideous on purpose, Anthony said to himself, as his eye took in the details of each separate outrage on good taste. And the poor old horse – was she merely the largest, the most monstrous of the knick-knacks? ‘I’m surprised,’ he said aloud, ‘that you don’t wear a hairshirt. Or perhaps you do?’ he added.
CHAPTER XXIII
June 1st 1934
TONIGHT, AT DINNER with Mark, saw Helen, for the first time since my return from America.
Consider the meaning of a face. A face can be a symbol, signifying matter which would require volumes for its exposition in successive detail. A vast sum, for the person on whom it acts as a symbol, of feelings and thoughts, of remembered sensations, impressions, judgments, experiences – all rendered synthetically and simultaneously, at a single glance. As she came into the restaurant, it was like the drowning man’s instantaneous vision of life.
A futile, bad, unsatisfactory life; and a vision, charged with regret. All those wrong choices, those opportunities irrevocably missed! And that sad face was not only a symbol, indirectly expressive of my history; it was also a directly expressive emblem of hers. A history for whose saddening and embittering quality I was at least in part responsible. If I had accepted the love she wanted to give me, if I had consented to love (for I could have loved) in return . . . But I preferred to be free, for the sake of my work – in other words, to remain enslaved in a world where there could be no question of freedom, for the sake of my amusements. I insisted on irresponsible sensuality, rather than love. Insisted, in other words, on her becoming a means to the end of my detached, physical satisfaction and, conversely, of course, on my becoming a means to hers.
Curious how irrelevant appears the fact of having been, technically, ‘lovers’! It doesn’t qualify her indifference or my feeling. There’s a maxim of La Rochefoucauld’s about women forgetting the favours they have accorded to past lovers. I used to like it for being cynical; but really it’s just a bald statement of the fact that something that’s meant to be irrelevant, i.e. sensuality, is irrelevant. Into my present complex of thoughts, feelings and memories, physical desire, I find, enters hardly at all. In spite of the fact that my memories are of intense and complete satisfactions. Surprising, the extent to which eroticism is a matter of choice and focus.
I don’t think much in erotic terms now; but very easily could, if I wished to. Choose to consider individuals in their capacity as potential givers and receivers of pleasure, focus attention on sensual satisfactions: eroticism will become immensely important and great quantities of energy will be directed along erotic channels. Choose a different conception of the individual, another focal range: energy will flow elsewhere and eroticism seem relatively unimportant.
Spent a good part of the evening arguing about peace and social justice. Mark, as sarcastically disagreeable as he knew how to be about Miller and what he called my neo-Jesus avatar. ‘If the swine want to rip one another’s guts out, let them; anyhow, you can’t prevent them. Swine will be swine.’ But may become human, I insisted. Homo non nascitur, fit. Or rather makes himself out of the ready-made elements and potentialities of man with which he’s born.
Helen’s was the usual communist argument – no peace or social justice without a preliminary ‘liquidation’ of capitalists, liberals and so forth. As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve. Violence and war will produce a peace and a social organization having the potentialities of more violence and war.
The war to end war resulted, as usual, in a peace essentially like war; the revolution to achieve communism, in a hierarchical state where a minority rules by police methods á la Metternich-Hitler-Mussolini, and where the power to oppress in virtue of being rich is replaced by the power to oppress in virtue of being a member of the oligarchy. Peace and social justice, only obtainable by means that are just and pacific. And people will behave justly and pacifically only if they have trained themselves as individuals to do so, even in circumstances where it would be easier to behave violently and unjustly. And the training must be simultaneously physical and mental. Knowledge of how to use the self and of what the self should be used for. Neo-Ignatius and neo-Sandow was Mark’s verdict.
Put Mark into a cab and walked, as the night was beautiful, all the way from Soho to Chelsea. Theatres were closing. Helen brightened suddenly to a mood of malevolent high spirits. Commenting in a ringing voice on passers-by. As though we were at the Zoo. Embarrassing, but funny and acute, as when she pointed to the rich young men in top-hats trying to look like the De Reszke Aristocrat, or opening and shutting cigarette-cases in the style of Gerald du Maurier; to the women trying to look like Vogue, or expensive advertisements (for winter cruises or fur coats), head in air, eyelids dropped superciliously – or slouching like screen vamps, with their stomachs stuck out, as though expecting twins. The pitiable models on which people form themselves! Once it was the Imitation of Christ – now of Hollywood.
Were silent when we had left the crowds. Then Helen asked if I were happy. I said, yes – though didn’t know if happiness was the right word. More substantial, more complete, more interested, more aware. If not happy exactly, at any rate having greater potentialities for happiness. Another silence. Then, ‘I thought I could never see you again, because of that dog. Then Ekki came, and the dog was quite irrelevant. And now he’s gone, it’s still irrelevant. For another reason. Everything’s irrelevant, for that matter. Except Communism.’ But that was an afterthought – an expression of piety, uttered by force of habit. I said our ends were the same, the means adopted, different. For her, end justified means; for me, means the end. Perhaps, I said, one day she would see the importance of the means.
June 3rd 1934.
AT TODAY’S LESSON with Miller found myself suddenly step forward in my grasp of the theory and practice of the technique. To learn proper use one must first inhibit all improper uses of the self. Refuse to be hurried into gaining ends by the equivalent (in personal, psycho-physiological terms) of violent revolution; inhibit this tendency, concentrate on the means whereby the end is to be achieved; then act. This process entails knowing good and bad use – knowing them apart. By the ‘feel’. Increased awareness and increased power of control result. Awareness and control: trivialities take
