Point Counter Point (11 page)

Marjorie had opened the box in which she kept her private papers. All Walter’s letters. She untied the ribbon and looked them over one by one. ‘Dear Mrs. Carling, I enclose under separate cover that volume of Keats’s Letters I mentioned to-day. Please do not trouble to return it. I have another copy, which I shall re-read for the pleasure of accompanying you, even at a distance, through the same spiritual adventure.’

That was the first of them. She read it through and recaptured in memory something of the pleased surprise which that passage about the spiritual adventure had originally evoked in her. In conversation he had always seemed to shrink from the direct and personal approach, he was painfully shy. She hadn’t expected him to write like that. Later, when he had written to her often, she became accustomed to his peculiarities. She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face. All his love—all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent—was in his letters. The arrangement suited Marorie perfectly. She would have liked to go on indefinitely making cultured and verbally burning love by post. She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination. A correspondence course of passion was, for her, the perfect and ideal relationship with a man. Better still were personal relationships with women; for women had all the good qualities of men at a distance, with the added advantage of being actually there. They could be in the room with you and yet demand no more than a man at the other end of a system of post-offices. With his face-to-face shyness and his postal freedom and ardour, Walter had seemed in Marjorie’s eyes to combine the best points of both sexes. And then he was so deeply, so flatteringly interested in everything she did and thought and felt. Poor Marjorie was not much used to having people interested in her.

‘Sphinx,’ she read in the third of his letters. (He had called her that because of her enigmatic silences. Carling, for the same reason, had called her Turnip or Dumb-Bell.) ‘Shinx, why do you hide yourself inside such a shell of silence? One would think you were ashamed of your goodness and sweetness and intelligence. But they pop their heads out all the same and in spite of you.’

The tears came into her eyes. He had been so kind to her, so tender and gentle. And now…

‘Love,’ she read dimly, through the tears, in the next letter, ‘love can transform physical into spiritual desire; it has the magic power to turn the body into pure soul….’

Yes, he had had those desires too. Even he. All men had, she supposed. Rather dreadful. She shuddered, remembering Carling, remembering even Walter with something of the same horror. Yes, even Walter, though he had been so gentle and considerate. Walter had understood what she felt. That made it all the more extraordinary that he should be behaving as he was behaving now. It was as though he had suddenly become somebody else, become a kind of wild animal, with the animal’s cruelty as well as the animal’s lusts.

‘How can he be so cruel? ‘ she wondered.

‘How can he, deliberately? Walter?’ Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good. It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having ‘those’ desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live together. She had loved even the weak and unadmirable manifestations of his considerateness; had loved him even when he let himself be overcharged by cabmen and porters, when he gave handfuls of silver to tramps with obviously untrue stories about jobs at the other end of the country and no money to pay the fare. He was too sensitively quick to see the other person’s point of view. In his anxiety to be just to others he was often prepared to be unjust to himself. He was always ready to sacrifice his own rights rather than run any risk of infringing the rights of others. It was a considerateness, Marjorie realized, that had become a weakness, that was on the point of turning into a vice; a considerateness, moreover, that was due to his timidity, his squeamish and fastidious shrinking from every conflict, even every disagreeable contact. All the same, she loved him for it, loved him even when it led him to treat her with something less than justice. For having come to regard her as a being on the hither side of the boundary between himself and the rest of the world, he had sometimes in his excessive considerateness for the rights of others, sacrificed not only his own rights, but also hers. How often, for example, she had told him that he was being underpaid for his work on the Literary World! She thought of the latest of their conversations on what was to him the most odious of topics.

‘Burlap’s sweating you, Walter,’ she had said.

‘The paper’s very hard up.’ He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people towards himself.

‘But why should you let yourself be swindled?’

‘I’m not being swindled.’ There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong. ‘And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh. After all, it’s my business.’

‘And mine!’ She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began. ‘If you knew the price of vegetables!’

He had flushed up and left the room without answering. The conversation, the case were typical of many others. Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself. She had never resented these injustices. They proved how closely he associated her with himself. But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness. The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else—somebody ruthless and full of hate—was deliberately making her suffer.

Lady Edward laughed. ‘One wonders what he saw in her, if she’s so deplorable as you make out.’

‘What does one ever see in anyone?’ John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone. Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill. An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccough. It often happened now. Just after eating. Bicarbonate didn’t seem to do much good. ‘In these matters,’ he added, ‘we’re all equally insane.’

‘Thanks!’ said Lady Edward, laughing.

Making an essay to be gallant, ‘Present company excepted,’ he said with a smile and a little bow. He stifled another hiccough. How miserable he was feeling! ‘ Do you mind if I sit down? ‘ he asked. ‘All this standing about…’ He dropped heavily into a chair.

Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing. She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.

‘It must have been that caviar,’ he was thinking. ‘That beastly caviar.’ He violently hated caviar. Every sturgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy.

‘Poor Walter!’ said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped. ‘And he has such a talent.’

John Bidlake snorted contemptuously. Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing—by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time. She changed the subject.

‘And Elinor?’ she asked. ‘When’s your Elinor coming home? Elinor and Quarles?’

‘Leaving Bombay to-morrow,’ John Bidlake answered telegraphically. He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.

The Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India. One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose. It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments. There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it. At the word ‘fountain,’ it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr. Sita Ram’s plate.

‘Burke and Bacon,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on sonorously, ‘Milton and Macaulay…’

‘Oh, look!’ Elinor Quarles’s voice was shrill with alarm. She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backwards. Mr. Sita Ram turned towards her.

‘What’s de matter?’ he asked in a tone of annoyance. It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.

Elinor pointed. A very large grey toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda. In the silence its movements were audible—a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.

‘De toad can do no harm,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.

Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband. The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.

‘Really, my darling,’ he protested. He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals. But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically. It was the same with the food. There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish. But he had managed, none the less, to eat it. Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind driving it away,’ she whispered. Her face expressed her inward agony. ‘You know how much I detest them.’

Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr. Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda. With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform. It flopped down heavily into the garden below. Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems. The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky. Not a leaf stirred. It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced. Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it. But this stifling darkness…Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.

‘You were saying, Mr. Sita Ram?’

But Mr. Sita Ram’s first fine careless rapture had evaporated. ‘I was re-reading some of de works of Morley to-day,’ he announced

‘Golly! ‘ said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang. It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.

But Mr. Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that ‘ Golly.’ ‘What a tinker!’ he pursued. ‘What a great tinker! And de style is so chaste.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘Dere are some good phrases,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on ‘I wrote dem down.’ He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘But dey were good phrases. Sometimes one reads a whole book widout finding a single phrase one can remember or quote. What’s de good of such a book, I ask you?’

‘What indeed?’

Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates. A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance. Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr. Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat. Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom. They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea. The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats—large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.

Under the influence of the champagne, Mr. Sita Ram recovered his eloquence. His latest oration re-uttered itself.

‘Dere is one law for de English,’ he said, ‘and anoder for de Indians, one for de oppressors and anoder for de oppressed. De word justice has eider disappeared from your vocab’lary, or else it has changed its meaning.’

‘I’m inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,’ said Philip.

Mr. Sita Ram paid no attention. He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent. ‘Consider de case,’ he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control), ‘of de unfortunate station-master of Bhowanipore.’

But Philip refused to consider it. He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning. Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country. It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.

The station-master of Bhowanipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.

‘But why don’t you teach them birth control, Mr. Sita Ram? ‘ Elinor had asked. These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince. She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born. And after all, she had had chloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet. Whereas the wife of the station-master of Bhowanipore… She had heard accounts of Indian midwives. She shuddered. ‘Isn’t it the only hope for India?’

Mr. Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government. He went on with the station-master’s history. The man had passed all his examinations with credit; his qualifications were the highest possible. And yet he had been passed over for promotion no less than four times. Four times, and always in favour of Europeans or Eurasians. Mr. Sita Ram’s blood boiled when he thought of the five thousand years of Indian civilization, Indian spirituality, Indian moral superiority, cynically trampled, in the person of the station-master of Bhowanipore, under English feet…

‘Is dat justice, I ask? ‘ He banged the table.

Who knows? Philip wondered. Perhaps it is.

Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, ‘No.’

Elinor was still thinking of the nine children. To obtain a quick delivery, the midwives, she had heard, stamp on their patients. And, instead of ergot, they use a paste made of cow-dung and powdered glass

‘Do you call dat justice? ‘ Mr. Sita Ram repeated. Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, ‘No.’

‘You ought to write about it,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, ‘you ought to show de scandal up.’