The Catalans: A Novel (11 page)

I cannot tell you how it shocked me to find that these were my feelings. It was a horrible shock. It could be said, in mitigation, that the marriage had not been a romantic one in the first place, not on my side, that is: the proposals were made by her father, as you know. And it could be said that on the physical side the marriage was not successful. But with every conceivable allowance it remained a horrible shock to look into my mind and find that it was so callous; so hideously callous. After all, nothing could change the fact that we had lived in the closest intimacy for years, that she had been a true and loving wife to me as far as she could, and that she was Dédé’s mother. That was the first time in my life that I pretended to an emotion that I did not feel, and the first time that I was ashamed of not feeling it. Before, I had plumed myself on my intellectual honesty; I had thought well of myself for not expressing the glib, insincere sentiments that flow on every occasion. When Dédé was born, for example, I was disappointed to find that I did not experience those raptures that are supposed to arise in a man seeing his wife with their first child. I did not find the child a sympathetic object, but indeed rather a disgusting one; and the sight of Georgette, radiant, worn and animal, suckling it, made my gorge rise. So then I made no pretense at conventional transports: but now, now I mimed the bereaved husband. It was not only that I felt the utter indecency of my indifference: it was that the indifference frightened, terrified me, and by a mechanical, superstitious mourning I tried to avert the omen.

It was a terrible shock. I keep repeating that, because every day the shock was repeated in me: I would wake up in the morning, alone in my room, remember that Georgette was not there, and realize once again that I did not care at all.

It was then that I began to look forward and back with a new eye. The detachment that I had been proud of was terribly suspect now. Before, I had seen nothing wrong in not professing emotions that I did not feel; and, to speak candidly, I had supposed that a great proportion of the professions made in the world were false: now, it suddenly came upon me that I had been wrong in not feeling that somewhere back along the line was the beginning of death, and that it was the world that was right and not myself—that it was not the world that was hypocritical but I who was unfeeling. That ‘unfeeling’ is a small enough word, God knows: but what an infinity there is in it.

It was in this careful, horrified looking back that I tried to trace out the progression of this—what? emotional paralysis, spiritual palsy? Creeping leprosy of the soul, deadening.

Bombast, bombast, you say: but sitting by that dead pale body it did not seem bombast to me. Nor did it ever seem bombast to me afterward. Perhaps it is wrong to say that nothing has so much importance to a man as the deliberate saving of his soul: but I am certain, my God I am certain, that nothing is so important as the knowing loss of it.

—Xavier stopped, and scraped miserably about the table for the cigars. Alain guided the box to his hand, and in a minute the unhappy voice began again.

X
AVIER
: I began by asking myself what proof I had that the emotions that one sees all round one had any real existence. If they did not exist in me, did they in anybody else? It was difficult to bring much concrete evidence for the existence of affection and loving-kindness: they express themselves so much more in the general air of men and women—looks, intonation—rather than in isolated, distinct actions. And then with actions, the possibility of misinterpretation is so .
. . but I need not elaborate. It was clear that these feelings did exist: I could see them most plainly in the writing that I admired and in the actions of men I respected—not the emotions themselves, but the continual reflection of them. It was obvious that not all these people were lying: a man accustomed to weighing evidence is quick at detecting a lie. And if I needed corroboration I had only to look back far enough to find them known and proved in myself. When I was a really small boy I loved my stepmother, you know, and when they quarrelled I hated my father. I loved her, and I thought about things for her and how when I grew up I would do this, that, and the other to give her pleasure: and when they took her away I was so desolate—desolate. But even then, at its tenderest, my power of affection must have been of a feeble growth, for when they told me that she had died there, I was more concerned with acting, tasting the importance of tragedy, than with genuine regret. Yet it is unfair to say that: I was only a very little boy, and she had been in that place a year—a year is such a long period in a child’s life.

But when I looked to find the beginning, I could find nothing clear or distinct. Somehow between that time and this I had turned from a normal affectionate child, or at least a child loving enough to hate fiercely for another’s sake, into a man so abnormal that he had not the power to feel any sorrow for his wife’s death. And not only that: terribly startled by what was, in all conscience, a striking instance of hardness, I looked into the rest of my feelings: there was no affection there, none at all. And as a consequence there was no true charity. That indeed was the crux: no charity. Since I had been a man I had never performed one solitary act of charity.

Some time after the funeral I went to see the curé: it was Father Sabatier then. I was still in a very agitated frame of mind, and I did not succeed in making myself clear to him. I do not think I could have made him understand at any time: he was a good man, a very good man indeed, as you know, but he did not have a clear intelligence and he had always been in awe of us—of Aunt Margot and me. He was more concerned to reassure and comfort me than to show me any spiritual remedy: he spent himself in proving that I was
not
halfway down a gulf, or worse; he did not attempt to show me a way out. To set my mind at rest he catalogued my virtues, abstemiousness, chastity, justice, prudence, fortitude, almsgiving. I tried to show him that what good actions he could mention were insignificant because they had no real kindness in them—mere good works, acknowledgments of an exterior virtue, done from a sense of what was due, what was right. He swam into the deep water of good works, floundered—he was never strong in doctrine—but came out to assure me that if I continued in my duties and prayed for grace I should be quite all right. He was quite exhausted, poor good old man, and in the end I left him alone.

—There was a long, reflective pause, then Xavier’s deep voice continued, more equably now, more equably, and still the cicadas thrummed in all the trees.

The Pleiades had risen now: Alain could see them all, all but the last, a cluster above the fig tree. In the beginning he had listened closely to Xavier, closely, anxiously, sitting upright and with his mind stretched to hear and understand everything: the urgency of Xavier’s voice had required that reaction, the closeness, the assenting grunt, the head nodded in the darkness. But for a long while now he had been sitting back, lying back, in his chair: Xavier’s voice had settled into a steady, even flow that made no demands; and Alain was no longer listening with the top of his mind. All that was said he heard and understood. But he was not listening, listening to catch each word; now the sense flowed in at his ears—he could reconstruct the whole—but now his easier mind could also run to and fro, combining what Xavier had said with what he knew, assessing the knowledge he had and the continual stream of addition to it; and now his half-conscious observing faculty was free again. It had been so since his cousin had begun on works without faith, a long and intricate subject that had nothing to say to Dr. Roig. He recorded the fact that points of fine theology were of strong and immediate importance to Xavier, and that Xavier seemed to feel that religion and the law could both be logically discussed and reasoned upon with the same reference to precedent. But in this chain of reasoning Alain took no part, not even that of a silent follower: he formed from it a picture of Xavier’s mind—a picture made up of small impressions, the repetition of “Jansenists,” the approving tone in which Pascal’s name was mentioned, the citation of many, many writers unknown to Alain, but which reflected a wide and anxious reading. With that part of his attention which was at liberty he watched the progress of the stars.

It had been the great ball of Jupiter first: when they had sat down the star was already high, so brilliant that it had a halo and so large that it was not a point in the sky but a disk. When they had sat down—it was after they had put out the lamp—Alain had half-consciously fixed the star in his mind: “There is Jupiter: how huge and brilliant.” But unnoticed in the first spate of talk Jupiter had climbed to the zenith, still in front of the Dog Star, whose light it eclipsed, and had traveled down the sky, far down to the right. It was when Xavier was talking of his father that Alain realized that the planet was gone, hidden behind the straight trunk of the palm tree on the declining west, lighting it from behind with a last gentle refulgence, and that the Dog Star, brilliant now, was halfway down to setting.

Betelgeuse and Aldebaran: he watched them pass through the motionless, penetrable eucalyptus, branch by branch, lost and reappearing through the leaves; the continual curving sweep of stars. The progress of the stars and the run of his cousin’s voice: the time came when Alain, lying right back, deep in his chair, seemed hardly to possess a body, to be no more than a mind in a place, absorbing these two processions, relating and enfolding them.

And then something was wrong, something was out of joint, as if the cicadas had stopped, or the night had suddenly grown cold. Sunk, or rather floating there, he had constructed the sense of what he heard with a lag of perhaps two or three sentences—a lag made longer sometimes when his own glosses on the unfolding text, footnotes, references, grew long and complex. He heard all that the steady voice said, but not what it was saying; so now, uncomfortably aware of a pause, an expectant pause, a question that had been repeated, something that demanded his participation, he forced himself to the surface, trying to hasten his mind’s process, catch up, understand. What was it? Xavier had been developing an idea about literal unbelief, figurative acceptance—necessity for the rejection of Heaven by the unbeliever but complete acceptance of Hell. Yes: but the last sentences, the immediate question?

“What do you believe, Alain?” he said again.

Alain was furious. Not only had be been wrenched brutally out of a wonderfully comfortable state, but he was being attacked with a question that should never have been asked. No no, he said (but not aloud), that will not do: I am not going to take off my clothes just because you have done so: there was no compact. You have not bought the right to a truthful answer: your truth has not bought it. Sincerity is not to be bought: it is given, if it comes at all—given or inflicted. And really, you cannot invade a man’s privacy like that.

“Well, it is difficult to say,” he replied at last, uncomfortably, but with sufficient earnestness (a half-hypocrisy licensed by the unwarranted question) not to appear evasive—not to repel. “Credo in unum Deum . . .” his voice trailed away.

In the long pause that followed Alain thought that it was finished now, that this unfortunate question and answer had been the stone that puts the birds to flight: but when Xavier spoke again it was obvious that he had hardly listened to the reply, that the argument had continued in his own silence. Now he took it up again, several stages along in the development, in almost the same voice, as if there had been no break at all.

But the break had been long and painful for Alain: the abrupt, violent change from audience to performer could not be quickly reversed. It was not until Sirius touched the first of the western palm fronds that he had sunk back to something near his former depth. Now Xavier was returning toward an account of his progress: he had almost finished with his more general, imprecise way of speaking, but some fragments of what he had been saying floated in Alain’s head, waiting to be fixed if they were significant. “I am not a Communist (God forbid), but nothing I have ever heard of them has made me respect them half so much as their belief that it is indecent for a man to live to himself alone, to direct most of his energies to the acquisition of a comfortable home for himself and a safe future. I understand that this is a universal conviction, a basic social convention in Russia, so penetrating that even discontented, anti-Communist refugees reaching our world are shocked by the open avowal of selfishness here, as if by indecent exposure. However corrupt their practice may be, and however wicked their designs, a society that has that teaching surpasses ours, as a true
society
, as much as the living, every-day-of-the-week faith of the Middle Ages surpassed our moribund Sundays-only half-belief.” “Love your neighbor as yourself is not enough, nothing like enough, if you have a deep, well-founded dislike of yourself.” “Even if I did flatter myself into believing that I had half these virtues, or even all of them, it would make no difference: they are the Stoic virtues, the natural virtues, not the Christian virtues. Valuable, perhaps, in a general way—at least you despise a man
without
them—valuable perhaps, but not valid for me. Not valid, not relevant.” (With the former pain and urgency renewed.) “Not valid, any more than giving away money without good will—alms without kindness.”

But those were things that had been said. Now Alain, while he still kept them on one side for arrangement, was thinking “He is a clear-sighted man: has he never realized how much he has indulged his superiority and his irritable nature?” And at once, as if it were Alain who was guiding the run of words, Xavier branched off and said, “How can you ever tell if another man is suffering more pain than you, or less? So that in the one case it is heroic in him not to cry out, and in the second cowardly even to wince? You cannot tell: you can only suppose. In the same way I cannot tell whether in fact I have a more irascible nature than others, really feel a higher degree of irritation, or merely yield more easily to the temptation, grow hot and angry when other men exercise more self-control. But I have always supposed that that was the case, and that those who behaved better were only more phlegmatic: it was a comfortable doctrine; it diminished the fault, and I must say that even now I believe it to be more true than false.