“But don’t you think perhaps you exaggerate? The agitation of seeing something quite unexpected often makes one think it worse than it is.”
“That diary could not be worse than it is. That is to say, it couldn’t be worse for me. At the time, it only made me superficially angry—but I’ve had time since then to think it over. And I haven’t quite finished yet—I keep remembering more things.”
“Was it very … unkind?”
“No, not meant to be that. No, she’d like to help us, I’m sure.”
“Then, mawkish, you mean?”
“I mean, more, completely distorted and distorting. As I read I thought, either this girl or I are mad. And I don’t think I am, do you?”
“Surely not. But why should you be so upset if it simply shows what is the matter with her? Was it affected?”
“Deeply hysterical.”
“You’ve got to allow for style, though. Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little—even if one did once know what one meant, which at her age seems unlikely. There are ways and ways of trumping a thing up: one gets more discriminating, not necessarily more honest.
I should know, after all.”
I should know, after all.”
“I am sure you do, St. Quentin. But this was not a bit like your beautiful books. In fact it was not likewritingat all.” She paused and added: “She was so odd about me.”
St. Quentin, looking frustrated, started feeling about for his handkerchief. He blew his nose and went on, with iron determination: “Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style. Look how much goes to addressing an envelope—for, after all, it’s a matter of set-out. And a diary, after all, is written to please oneself—therefore it’s bound to be enormously written up. The obligation to write it is all in one’s own eye, and look how one is when it’s almost always written—upstairs, late, overwrought, alone… All the same, Anna, it must have interested you.”
“It opened at my name.”
“So you read straight on from there?”
“No, it opened at the last entry; I read that, then went back and started from the beginning. The latest entry was about dinner the evening before.”
“Let’s see: had you a party?”
“No, no: much worse than that. It had been simply her and me and Thomas. She must have bolted upstairs and written everything down. Naturally, when I’d read that I went back to the beginning, to see what had got her into that state of mind. I still don’t see why she wrote the thing at all.”
“Perhaps,” said St. Quentin mildly, “she’s interested in experience for its own sake.”
“How could she be, yet? At her age, look how little she’s got. Experience isn’t interesting till it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardlyisexperience.”
“Tell me, do you remember the first sentence of all?”
“Indeed I do,” Anna said.
So I am with them, in London
“With a comma after the ‘them’? …The comma is good; that’s style. … I should like to have seen it, I must say.”
and
As Portia still did nothing, Miss Paullie pushed her own small table from in front of her chair, got up and came swiftly round to where Portia sat. All the girls stared.
Miss Paullie said: “Surely that is not a letter? This is not the place or the time to read your letters, is it? I think you must notice that the other girls don’t do that. And, wherever one is, one never does read a letter under the table: have you never been told? What else is that you have on your knee? Your bag? Why did you not leave your bag in the cloakroom? Nobody will take it here, you know. Now, put your letter away in your bag again, and leave them both in the cloakroom. To carry your bag about with you indoors is a hotel habit, you know.”
Miss Paullie may not have known what she was saying, but one or two of the girls, including Lilian, smiled. Portia got up, looking unsteady, went to the cloakroom and lodged her bag on a ledge under her coat—a ledge along which, as she saw now, all the other girls’ bags had been put. But Eddie’s letter, after a desperate moment, she slipped up inside her woollen directoire knickers. It stayed just inside the elastic band, under one knee.
and
and
“She’d made such a sacrifice.”
“Sacrificers,” said Matchett, “are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves what they’re able to do without. Yes, Mrs. Quayne would give the clothes off her back, but in the long run she would never lose a thing. The day we heard you’d been born out there in France, she went on like a lady who’d got her first grandchild. She came after me to the linen room to tell me. The sweet little thing,’ she said. ‘Oh, Matchett!’ she said, ‘he always wanted a girll’ Then she went down in the hall to telephone Mr. Thomas. ‘Oh Thomas, good news,’ I heard her say.”
and
The things that came to them here from Mrs. Quayne’s were accustomed to the best care; Mrs. Thomas knew they must have it. Oh, it is lovely furniture, and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas see the value of it. Valuables were the one thing Mrs. Quayne and Mrs. Thomas saw eye to eye about. You can see ten foot into my polish, and Mrs. Thomas likes the look of a thing.”
“But what made you come here?”
“It seemed to me proper. I hadn’t the heart, either, to let that furniture go: I wouldn’t have known myself. It was that that kept me at Mrs. Quayne’s. I was sorry to leave those marbles I’d got so nice, but those had to stop and I put them out of my mind.”
“The furniture would have missed you?”
“Furniture’s knowing all right. Not much gets past the things in a room, I daresay, and chairs and tables don’t go to the grave so soon. Every time I take the soft cloth to that stuff in the drawingroom, I could say, ‘Well, you know a bit more.’ My goodness, when I got here and saw all Mrs. Quayne’s stuff where Mrs. Thomas had put it—if I’d have been a silly, I should have said it gave me quite a look. Well, it didn’t speak, and I didn’t. If Mr. and Mrs. Thomas are what you say, nervous, no doubt they are nervous of what’s not said. I would not be the one to blame them: they live the best way they can. Unnatural living runs in a family, and the furniture knows it, you be sure. Good furniture knows what’s what. It knows it’s made for a purpose, and it respects itself—when I say you’re made for a purpose you start off crying. Oh, furniture like we’ve got is too much for some that would rather not have the past. If I just had to look at it and have it looking at me, I’d go jumpy, I daresay. But when it’s your work it can’t do anything to you. Why, that furniture—I’ve been at it years and years with the soft cloth: I know it like my own face… . Oh yes, I notice them, all right. But I’m not the one to speak: I’ve got no time. When they made a place for it, they made a place for me, and they soon saw nothing would come of that.
and
What help she did not find in the picture she found in its oak frame and the mantelpiece underneath. After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things.Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centres of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilisation: they remind us how exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life. Appalling as the talk with Daphne had been, it had not been so finally fatal, when you looked back at it, as an earthquake or a dropped bomb. Had the gas stove blown up when Portia lit it, blowing this nice room into smithereens, it would have been worse than Portia’s being called spying common. Though what she had said had apparently been dreadful, it had done less harm than a bombardment from the sea. Only outside disaster is irreparable. At least, there would be dinner at any minute; at least she could wash her hands in Vinolia soap.
and
“You don’taskwhat made me do that—you don’t even ask yourself.”
She said, “You were very kind.”
“The most unlikely things one does, the most utterly out of character, arouse no curiosity, even in one’s friends. One can suffer a convulsion of one’s entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences. Even you, with that loving nature you have—In a small way I have just ratted on Anna, I have done something she’d never forgive me for, and you, Portia, you don’t even ask why. Consciously, and as far as I can see quite gratuitously, I have started what may make a frightful breach. In me, this is utterly out of character: I’m not a mischievous man; I haven’t got time; I’m not interested enough. You’re not even listening, are you?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I’ve no doubt you’re upset. So you and I might be at different ends of the world. Stop thinking about your diary and your Anna and listen to me—and don’t flinch at me, Portia, as though I were an electric drill. You ought to want some key to why people do what they do. You think us all wicked—”
“I don’t, I—”
“It’s not so simple as that. What makes you think us wicked is simply our little way of keeping ourselves going. We must live, though you may not see the necessity. In the long run, we may not work out well. We attempt, however, to be more civil and kindly than we feel. The fact is, we have no great wish for each other—no spontaneous wish for each other, that is to say. This lack of gout makes us have to behave with a certain amount of policy. Because I quite like Anna, I overlook much in her, and because she quite likes me she overlooks much in me. We laugh at each other’s jokes and we save each other’s faces—When I give her away to you, I break an accepted rule. This is not often done. It takes people in a lasting state of hysteria, like your friend Eddie, for instance, or people who feel they have some higher authority (as I’ve no doubt Eddie feels he has) to break every rule every time. To keep any rule would be an event for him: when he breaks one more rule it is hardly interesting—at least, not to me. I simply cannot account for his fascination for Anna—”
“Does he fascinate Anna?”
“Oh, palpably, don’t you think? I suppose the deduc-tion is that she really must have a conventional mind. And of course he has some pretty ways—No, with me there has to be quite a brainstorm before I break any rule, before speaking the truth. Love, drink, anger— something crumbles the whole scene: at once one is in a fantastic universe. Its unseemliness and its glory are indescribable, really. One becomes a Colossus. … I still don’t know, all the same, what made that happen just now. It must be this close spring weather. It’s religious weather, I think.”
and
“I’m afraid,” St. Quentin said, “in this case we may have to. That is, if you are anxious to get her home. Her ‘right thing’ is an absolute of some sort, and absolutes only exist in feeling. There they both are, waiting in Kensington. Really you will have to do something soon.”
“Even supposing one wanted to for a moment, how is one to know how anyone else feels?”
“Oh, come,” said St. Quentin. “In this case, none of us are so badly placed. I am a novelist; you, Anna, have read her diary; Thomas is her brother—they can’t bequiteunlike. However much we may hate to, there’s no reason, now we have got to face it, why we should not see more or less what her position is—or, I mean more, see things from her position… . May I go on, Anna?”
“Yes, do. But really we must decide. What are you doing, Thomas?”
“Drawing the curtains. People are looking in… . Are we not to have any coffee?”
“St. Quentin, wait till the coffees come.”
The coffee was brought. St. Quentin, one elbow each side of his cup of coffee, continued slowly to rub his forehead. At last he said: “I think you’re jealous of her.”
“Does she know that? If not, it can’t be called her position.”
“No, she’s not properly conscious of enjoying everything you are so jealous of. She may not enjoy it herself. Her extraordinary wish to love—”
“—Oh, I’d never want that back—”
No comments:
Post a Comment