The Heat of the Day (23 page)

Chapter 15

"And if I am?" he repeated. "If that is what I am doing?" Not a sign, not a sound, not a movement from where she at a distance from him lay, exhausted by having given birth to the question. Her room was bathed in a red appearance of heat from the electric fire; shadows jutted out sharply; a mirror panel reflected the end of the bed on which Robert sat. As though the sensation of this red half-dark of so many nights having within the moment become infernal communicated itself from her to him, he reached across and turned off the fire--the glow from the units died out slowly: the room, absolutely unseeable at last, might now have been any room of any size. Nothing but their two silences merging filled it, and she did not know to what part of silence he had withdrawn till he said: "Because it has been that, all the time." "Why?" "You wonder--yes, I suppose you must. We should have to understand each other all over again, and it's too late now." "Late in the night?" He did not answer. Raising herself in order to be more clearly heard, she said: "Only, why are you against this country?" "Country?" "This, where we are." "I don't see what you mean--what _do__ you mean? Country?--there are no more countries left; nothing but names. What country have you and I outside this room? Exhausted shadows, dragging themselves out again to fight--and how long are they going to drag the fight out? We have come out at the far side of that." "We?" "We who are ready for the next thing." "Can you be so arrogant?--why have I never felt it?" "Because it's not arrogance; it isn't something in me; it's on altogether another scale. Would you have loved me if I'd had nothing else? For the scale it is on, there's so far no measure that's any use, no word that isn't out of the true. If I said 'vision,' inevitably you would think me grandeur-mad: I'm not, but anyway vision is not what I mean. I mean sight in action: it's only now I act that I see.--What is repulsing you is the idea of 'betrayal,' I suppose, isn't it? In you the hangover from the word? Don't you understand that all that language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same: even you do. Words, words like that, yes--what a terrific dust they can still raise in a mind, yours even: I see that. Myself, even, I have needed to immunise myself against them; I tell you I have only at last done that by saying them to myself over and over again till it became absolutely certain they mean nothing. What they once meant is gone.--This is a shock to you, Stella? Or, is it a shock to you?" She did not answer. "Anyway, you're against me?" "You're the one who's against: I've known that without knowing against _what__. Not this country, you say: you say there is no country. Then what are you against?" "This racket. It's not I who am selling out this what you call a country; how could I?--it's sold itself out already." "What racket?" "Freedom. Freedom to be what?--the muddled, mediocre, damned. Good enough to die for, freedom, for the good reason that it's the very thing which has made it impossible to live, so there's no alternative. Look at your free people--mice let loose in the middle of the Sahara. It's insupportable--what is it but a vacuum? Tell a man he's free and what does that do to him but send him trying to dive back into the womb? Look at it happening: look at your mass of 'free' suckers, your democracy--kidded along from the cradle to the grave. 'From the cradle to the grave, save, oh, save!' Do you suppose there's a single man of mind who doesn't realise _he__ only begins where his freedom stops? One in a thousand may have what to be free takes--if so, he has what it takes to be something better, and he knows it: who could want to be free when he could be strong? Freedom--what a slaves' yammer! What do they think they are? I'd guarantee to guarantee to every man the exact degree of freedom of which he's capable--I think you'd see that wouldn't carry us very far. As it is, what? As far as what's nothing can be anything, freedom's inorganic: it's owed at least to the few of us to have a part in strength. We must have something to envisage, and we must act, and there must be law. We must have law--if necessary let it break us: to have been broken is to have been something." "But law--that's just what you break." "Nothing I _can__ break _is__ law!" "What a saying!" "You think, or really you hope, I'm mad?" She did not answer. "At least I am not besotted." In something more powerful than the darkness of the room the speaker had become blotted out: there occurred in the listener one of those arrestations of memory which made it impossible to conceive not only what the look on the face might now be but what the face had been, _as__ a face, ever. The direction from which the voice came seemed so set back in distance as to be polar; the voice itself was familiar only in more and more intermittent notes: it was as though some undercurrent in it, hitherto barely to be detected, all the time forbidden and inadvertent, had come to the top. He did not speak fast, but the effect was of something travelling at the rate of light between word and word. Now he first drew in an audible breath, then moved: the sounds of physical movement came as a shock, reminding her that he after all was a presence here in the room--feet, their naked soles sucking at place after place across the thick neutral carpet, could be heard walking with a hallucinated precision towards the window. He pulled the curtains back. There was a star-filled two o'clock in the morning sky. Man in outline against the panes, his communication with the order of the stars became not human: she, turning where she lay, apprehensively not raising herself on the pillows, stared also, not in subjection but in a sort of dread of subjection, at the mathematical spaces between the burning bright points. "Yes, I know," she said, "but it is not all so vastly simple as all that." She thought or hoped she heard, somewhere between the stars and herself, the hum of a plane tracing its own course; but the sound, if it ever had been a sound, died: nothing intervened. "Come back to me at any rate for a moment," she cried out, "or come nearer." He came back, restlessly, to the end of the bed, where he sat down again. "I've given you any humanity that I had," he said. "Don't quarrel now, at the end, or it will undo everything from the beginning. You'll have to reread me backwards, figure me out--you will have years to do that in, if you want to. You will be the one who will have to see: things may go in a way which may show I was not wrong.--But you hate this too, you hate this most, because I've been apart from you in it, you feel? I have not been: there's been you and me in everything I have done.--You can't see that?" Tearless, she made a wailing movement of the arms above her head. He waited; she said at last: "Still, tell me. If you had told me more--!" "Think again: how could I have involved you? How could I? Was this a thing to put on anyone else?--It was quite a game." "Which you loved." He reflected, then said: "Yes.--What I mean, though, is that, as has been shown, it was not a safe game: you would have been anxious, I supposed. And again, which surely you ought to see, it was not only a question of myself. In a ring, once any one person begins to talk... No, how was I to tell you in so many words?" "You could have told me not in so many words." He again reflected. "Sometimes I thought I had." "When?" "When not? Not at any one moment--but there were times when it seemed impossible that being as we were you should not know. There's been no part of my dis-affectedness that I've hidden from you: did it never strike you I'd have been unendurable if I hadn't found some way, some way that didn't meet the eye, to endure myself? In accepting me, I thought, you must somehow be in your own way accepting this. Or I thought so sometimes--sometimes so much so that I found myself only waiting to speak till you spoke: when you didn't speak I thought you thought silence better. I thought, yes, silence _is__ better: why risk some silly unmeaning battle between two consciences? We've seen law in each other.... There were other times when I was less certain you knew. But I did not know you did not know till you asked me." "The night I came back from Ireland?" "The night you came back from Ireland." "_Then__, you said 'no' to everything point-blank." "You didn't want an answer you couldn't take. That was the night I realised you couldn't take it." "You were angry with me." "There's a difference between being suspected of being what one is and being accepted as being what one is." "That was the night you asked me to marry you." "I wanted to see if you were frightened." "_You__ were frightened." "Did I show that to you?" "You did next day, to Harrison.--Why did you always tell me you didn't know him?" "I didn't know him; I did begin to have some idea who he must be. There'd been always X.--who had always had to be _someone__. So it was that funny type.... You were trying him out on me, then, first, that night we were looking at my tie?" That small picture, with its concourse of others, made her unknot her hands above her head and begin to weep, the more desperately because of the desperate wastefulness of tears now in face of the end of all. Now it was a question of counting the last of the minutes as they ran out into hours, the last of the hours as they ran out into tomorrow, which was already today, as they never had. All love stood still in one single piercing illusion of its peace, now peace was no more. Unlived time was not more innocent than the time lived by them. Now, by calling him back to her from the window, she had broken the last exaltation of his she might ever feel. Now they had dropped into talking in lowered hurried voices, as though already something were at the door. "Oh, why did you?" she cried out. "What made you have to?" "Stella, don't," he said sharply, "don't: you unnerve me!" "Such ideas to have to have--why?" "I didn't choose them: they marked me down. They are not mine, anyhow; I am theirs. Would you want me simply to be their prey? Would you want me simply to be a case? Would you have wanted me not to fight this war?" "No. No, but..." "Then haven't I a right to my own side?" Suddenly stretching across the bed he could be felt feeling about, beside her body, for her hand. She gave it, to have its tensile fingers, the jump of nerves in it or whatever the quality was that it had of life, explored by his cold foreign fingers retrospectively: then he put it away from him. "It was enough," he said, "to have been in action once on the wrong side. Step after step to Dunkirk: the extremity--I could forget it if I had not known what it meant? That was the end of _that__ war--army of freedom queueing up to be taken off by pleasure boats. Days and nights to think in: does nobody ever wonder what became of the thoughts thought then, or what's still to come to them? The extremity--can they not conceive that's a thing you never do come back from? How many of us do they imagine ever have come back? We're to be avoided--Dunkirk wounded men." "I never knew you before you were a wounded man." "In one way that would have been impossible--I was born wounded; my father's son. Dunkirk was waiting there in us--what a race! A class without a middle, a race without a country. Unwhole. Never earthed in--and there are thousands of thousands of us, and we're still breeding--breeding what? You may ask: I ask. Not only nothing to hold, nothing to touch. No source of anything in anything. I could have loved a country, but to love you must have--you have been my country. But you've been too much because you are not enough--are you and I to be what we've known we are for nothing, nothing outside this room?" No answer. Robert had moved again: now he leaned on his elbow across her feet, unmovingly. All she at last said was: "You've been doing just what Harrison said?" "Yes.--So you can't get away from that?" "_We__ can't get away from that.... Were you never frightened?" "Of getting caught?" "I meant, of what you've been doing?" "I?--no, the opposite: it utterly undid fear. It bred my father out of me, gave me a new heredity. I went slow at first--it was stupefying to be beginning to know what confidence could be. To know what I knew, to keep my knowing unknown, unknown all the time to be acting on it--I tell you, everything fell into place round me. Something of my own?--No, no, much better than that: any neurotic can make himself his corner. The way out?--no, better than that: the way on! _You__ think, in me this was simply wanting to get my hand on the controls?" "I don't think I think." "Well, it's not; it's not a question of that. Who wants to monkey about? To feel control is enough. It's a very much bigger thing to be under orders." "We are all under orders; what is there new in that?" "Yes, can you wonder they love war? But I don't mean orders, I mean order." "So you are with the enemy." "Naturally they're the enemy: they're facing us with what has got to be the conclusion. They won't last, but it will." "I can't believe you." "You could." "It's not just that they're the enemy, but that they're horrible--specious, unthinkable, grotesque." "Oh, _they__--evidently! But you judge it by them. And in birth, remember, anything is grotesque." "They're afraid, too." "Of course: they have started something." He raised himself eagerly on his elbow, as though a thought were renewing in him its whole original power. "You may not like it, but it's the beginning of a day. A day on our scale." Instinctively she glanced first at the window, then at the window's reflection in the mirror: both were paler, it seemed to her eyes of dread. All fears shrank to this cold bare irrefutable moment: she shivered indifferently between the sheets. It had been terror of the alien, then, had it, all the tune?--and here it was, breathing its expiring minutes, _his__ expiring minutes, along the foot of her bed. He might have been right in saying she could not have loved him had there been in him no capacity other than for love, but his denials of everything instinctive seemed now to seal up love at the source. Rolled round with rocks and stones and trees--what else is one?--was this not felt most strongly in the quietus of the embrace? "No, but you cannot say there is not a country!" she cried aloud, starting up. She had trodden every inch of a country with him, not perhaps least when she was alone. Of that country, she did not know how much was place, how much was time. She thought of leaves of autumn crisply being swept up, that crystal ruined London morning when she had woken to his face; she saw street after street fading into evening after evening, the sheen of spring light running on the water towards the bridges on which one stood, the vulnerable eyes of Louie stupidly