‘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.
CHAPTER XLIV
September 21st 1934
REMARKS BY St Teresa. ‘Let us look at our own faults, and not at other people’s. We ought not to insist on everyone following our footsteps, nor to take upon ourselves to give instructions in spirituality when, perhaps, we do not even know what it is. Zeal for the good of souls, though given us by God, may often lead us astray.’ To which add this. ‘It is a great grace of God to practise self-examination, but too much is as bad as too little, as they say; believe me, by God’s help, we shall accomplish more by contemplating the divinity than by keeping our eyes fixed on ourselves.’ God may or may not exist. But there is the empirical fact that contemplation of the divinity – of goodness in its most unqualified form – is a method of realizing that goodness to some slight degree in one’s life, and results, often, in an experience as if of help towards that realization of goodness, help from some being other than one’s ordinary self and immensely superior to it. Christian God and the Buddhist’s primal Mind – interpretations of concrete experiences, the Buddhist being the rationalization of a state further removed from the normal than the Christian.
Christians, of course, have often experienced that state and found great difficulties in explaining it in orthodox terms. Both conceptions legitimate – just as both macroscopical and microscopical views of matter are legitimate. We look at the universe with a certain kind of physico-mental apparatus. That apparatus can respond only to certain stimuli. Within relatively narrow limits, it is adjustable. The nature of the facts which each of us perceives as primary and given depends on the nature of the individual instrument and on the adjustment we have been brought up, or deliberately chosen, to give it.
From these data one can draw inferences. Which may be logically sound or unsound. Any philosophy is intellectually legitimate if, one, it starts from facts which, for the philosopher, are data and if, two, the logical construction based on these facts is sound. But an intellectually is not the same as a morally legitimate philosophy. We can adjust our instrument deliberately, by an act of the will. This means that we can will modifications in the personal experiences which underlie our philosophy, the data from which we argue. Problem: to build really solid logical bridges between given facts and philosophical inferences.
All but insoluble. No bullet-proof arguments for any of the main cosmological theories. What, then, shall we do? Stick, so far as possible, to the empirical facts – always remembering that these are modifiable by anyone who chooses to modify the perceiving mechanism. So that one can see, for example, either irremediable senselessness and turpitude, or else actualizable potentialities for good – whichever one likes; it is a question of choice.
CHAPTER XLV
April 14th 1928
HAPPINESS INEXPRESSIBLE – that was what her letter should have brought him. Hugh’s face, as he walked – walked instead of having his lunch – up and down the long gallery of the Ethnographical Collection, was a mask of perplexity and distress. The words of Helen’s letter repeated themselves in his memory. ‘Nobody cares a pin whether I’m alive or dead.’
From the Mexican case the symbol of death in crystal and that other skull inlaid with turquoise stared out at him as he passed. ‘Nobody cares . . .’ It should have been his opportunity. He had dreamt of her unhappiness – in an agony of commiseration, but also with hope. Unhappy, she would turn to him. ‘Nobody cares . . .’
‘Nobody except you.’ His exultant pride and pleasure in those words had been tempered, as he read on, by the realization that she didn’t really understand how he cared, didn’t appreciate the exact quality of his feeling. ‘My mother?’ she had written. ‘But, after all, ever since she started taking that horrible stuff, she’s somebody else – always was somebody else really, even when she was well (though of course not so else). Just as I was always somebody else, if it comes to that. She expected a daughter; but I was always selfish and irresponsible. Just as she was. Somebody else. How could she care? You’re not selfish, Hugh. You’re . . .’ But it wasn’t a question merely of selfishness or unselfishness, he began to protest, with all the painted faces of the Peruvian vases staring down from the right with an unwinking intensity of frozen life. It was a question of something different, something deeper and more spiritual.
On his left the trophies of the Papuan head-hunters hung shrivelled, but fantastically painted, like the heads of decapitated clowns. The skulls from the Torres Straits had been given round shining eyes of mother-of-pearl. Yes, more spiritual, Hugh insisted, thinking of what he had written about her – lyrically, lyrically! – and of that subtle analysis of his own emotions. The unselfishness was there, but melted down, as it were, in contemplation, refined into something aesthetic. Unselfishness in a picture. Unselfishness by Watteau, by Cima da Conegliano. And she herself, the object of his contemplative and aesthetic unselfishness – she too, in his imaginings, in the accumulating pages of his manuscript, had possessed the quality of a picture or a piece of music; something that it would be sufficient happiness merely to look at for ever, to listen to; perhaps, occasionally, to touch, as though she were a statue, to caress with an almost imperceptible tenderness.
And sometimes in those imaginings she was cold, was unhappy – nobody cared a pin – and she asked to be comforted and made warm, she crept into his arms; into those unselfish, contemplative, impalpable arms of his, and lay there safely, but naked, lay there a picture, virginal, ideal, but melting, melting . . . Feathered like an ambassador in full dress uniform, with the beak of a bird, the teeth of a shark, this wooden mask had once made its wearer feel, as he danced, that he was more than human, akin to the gods. ‘You’ve said you’d like to be always with me. Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, and I believe that that’s what I’d like too. Dear Hugh, I’m not in love with you; but I like you more than anyone else. I think you’re nicer, kinder, gentler, less selfish. And surely that’s a good enough foundation to build on.’ The words, when he read them first, had filled him with a kind of panic; and it was with the same protesting agitation that he now walked between New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands. In the belly of a wooden bonito fish the Melanesian widow opened a little door, and there, like a chamber-pot, was her husband’s skull.
But it was always spiritually and aesthetically that he had wanted to be with her. Hadn’t she been able to understand that? Surely he had made it clear enough? ‘If you still want it, there I am – I want it too.’ It was terrible, he was thinking, terrible! She was forcing a decision on him, making it impossible for him to say no by assuming that he had already said yes. He felt himself hemmed in, driven into a corner. Marriage? But he would have to change his whole way of life. The flat wouldn’t be large enough. She’d want to eat meat at night. Mrs Barton would give notice. Of the spears on his left some were tipped with obsidian, some with the spines of sting-rays, some with human bone. ‘You probably think I’m a fool, and flighty and irresponsible; and it’s true, I have been up till now. I’m hopeless. But I wasn’t born hopeless – I was made it, because of the kind of life I’ve lived. Now I want to be something else, and I know I can be something else. Sérieuse. A good wife and all that, ridiculous and embarrassing as it sounds when one puts it down on paper.
But I refuse to be ashamed of goodness any longer. I absolutely refuse.’ That irresponsibility, he was thinking, was one of the loveliest and most moving things about her. It separated her from the common world, it promoted her out of vulgar humanity. He didn’t want her to be responsible and a good wife. He wanted her to be like Ariel, like the delicate creature in his own manuscript, a being of another order, beyond good and evil. Meanwhile he had walked into Africa. The image of a Negress holding her long pointed breasts in her two hands glistened darkly from behind the confining glass. Her belly was tattooed, her navel projected in a little cone. The spears in
