‘I wish you’d begin by looking at me in a new way,’ said Elinor with a little laugh. ‘A more human way.’
‘But seriously, Elinor…’
‘Seriously,’ she mocked. ‘Being human isn’t serious. Only being clever.’
‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘if you don’t want to listen, I’ll shut up.’
‘No, no, Phil. Please.’ She laid her hand on his. ‘Please.’
‘I don’t want to bore you.’ He was huffy and dignified.
‘I’m sorry, Phil. But you do look so comic when you’re more in sorrow than in anger. Do you remember those camels at Bikaner—what an extraordinarily superior expression? But do go on!’
‘This year,’ one female missionary was saying to the other, as they passed by, ‘ the Bishop of Kuala Lumpur ordained six Chinese deacons and two Malays. And the Bishop of British North Borneo…’ The quiet voices faded into inaudibility.
Philip forgot his dignity and burst out laughing. ‘Perhaps he ordained some Orang-utans.’
‘But do you remember the wife of the Bishop of Thursday Island?’ asked Elinor. ‘The woman we met on that awful Australian ship with the cockroaches.’
‘The one who would eat pickles at breakfast?’
‘Pickled onions at that,’ she qualified with a shudder. ‘But what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘ thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes…’
‘Loving eyes too.’
He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result…’ he hesitated.
‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked.
‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’
‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’
‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’
‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’
‘Or why not a detective novel?’ He laughed. But if, he reflected, he didn’t write that kind of story, perhaps it was because he couldn’t. In art there are simplicities more difficult than the most serried complications. He could manage the complications as well as anyone. But when it came to the simplicities, he lacked the talent—that talent which is of the heart, no less than of the head, of the feelings, the sympathies, the intuitions, no less than of the analytical understanding. The heart, the heart, he said to himself. ‘Perceive ye not, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened?’ No heart, no understanding.
‘…a terrible flirt!’ cried one of the four cavaliers, as the party rounded the corner into hearing.
‘I am not!’ the young lady indignantly retorted.
‘You are!’ they all shouted together. It was courtship in chorus and by teasing.
‘It’s a lie!’ But, one could hear, the ticklish impeachment really delighted her.
Like dogs, he thought. But the heart, the heart The heart was Burlap’s speciality. ‘You’ll never write a good book,’ he had said oracularly, ‘unless you write from the heart.’ It was true; Philip knew it. But was Burlap the man to say so, Burlap whose books were so heartfelt that they looked as though they had come from the stomach, after an emetic? If he went in for the grand simplicities, the results would be no less repulsive. Better to cultivate his own particular garden for all it was worth. Better to remain rigidly and loyally oneself. Oneself? But this question of identity was precisely one of Philip’s chronic problems. It was so easy for him to be almost anybody, theoretically and with his intelligence. He had such a power of assimilation, that he was often in danger of being unable to distinguish the assimilator from the assimilated, of not knowing among the multiplicity of his roles who was the actor. The amoeba, when it finds a prey, flows round it, incorporates it and oozes on. There was something amoeboid about Philip Quarles’s mind.
It was like a sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mould and, having engulfed, having filled, of flowing on towards other obstacles, other receptacles, leaving the first empty and dry. At different times in his life and even at the same moment he had filled the most various moulds. He had been a cynic and also a mystic, a humanitarian and also a contemptuous misanthrope; he had tried to live the life of detached and stoical reason and another time he had aspired to the unreasonableness of natural and uncivilized existence. The choice of moulds depended at any given moment on the books he was reading, the people he was associating with. Burlap, for example, had redirected the flow of his mind into those mystical channels which it had not filled since he discovered Boehme in his undergraduate days. Then he had seen through Burlap and flowed out again, ready however at any I time to let himself trickle back once more, whenever the circumstances seemed to require it. He was trickling back at this moment, the mould was heart-shaped. Where was the self to which he could be loyal?
The female missionaries passed in silence. Looking over Elinor’s shoulder he saw that she was reading the Arabian Nights in Mardrus’s translation. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science lay on his knees; he picked it up and began looking for his place. Or wasn’t there a self at all? he was wondering. No, no, that was untenable, that contradicted immediate experience. He looked over the top of his book at the enormous blue glare of the sea. The essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form, to take, and with an equal facility efface, impressions. To such moulds as his spirit might from time to time occupy, to such hard and burning obstacles as it might flow round, submerge, and, itself cold, penetrate to the fiery heart of, no permanent loyalty was owing. The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by.
But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity—that persisted and to that his loyalty was due. If there was any single way of life he could lastingly believe in, it was that mixture of pyrrhonism and stoicism which had struck him, an enquiring schoolboy among the philosophers, as the height of human wisdom and into whose mould of sceptical indifference he had poured his unimpassioned adolescence. Against the pyrrhonian suspense of judgment and the stoical imperturbability he had often rebelled. But had the rebellion ever been really serious? Pascal had made him a Catholic—but only so long as the volume of Pensees was open before him. There were moments when, in the company of Carlyle or Whitman or bouncing Browning, he had believed in strenuousness for strenuousness’ sake.
And then there was Mark Rampion. After a few hours in Mark Rampion’s company he really believed in noble savagery; he felt convinced that the proudly conscious intellect ought to humble itself a little and admit the claims of the heart, aye and the bowels, the loins, the bones and skin and muscles, to a fair share of life. The heart again! Burlap had been right, even though he was a charlatan, a sort of swindling thimble-rigger of the emotions. The heart! But always, whatever he might do, he knew quite
