apart.
CHAPTER 9
“THE chief requirement of the good life”, said James Tayper Pace, “is to live without any image of oneself. I speak, dear brothers and sisters, as one who is most conscious of being remote from this condition.” It was the next day, Sunday, and James was standing on the dais in the Long Room, one arm resting lightly on the music stand, delivering the weekly talk. He frowned nervously and swayed to and fro as he spoke, tilting the stand with him.
He went on. “The study of personality, indeed the whole conception of personality, is, as I see it, dangerous to goodness. We were told at school, at least I was told at school, to have ideals. This, it seems to me, is rot. Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection? Not in some imaginary concoction out of our idea of our own character -but in something so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a distant hint of it.
“Now you will say to me, dear James, you tell us to seek perfection and then you tell us it is so remote we can only guess at it – and where do we go from there? The fact is, God has not left us without guidance. How, otherwise, could our Lord have given us the high command ‘Be ye therefore perfect’? Matthew five forty-eight. We know in very simple ways, ways so simple that they seem dull to our subtle moral psychologists, what we ought to do and what avoid. Surely we know enough and more than enough rules to live by; and I confess I have very little time for the man who finds his life too complicated and special for the ordinary rules to fit. What are you up to, my friend, what are you hiding? I should say to that man: A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds or regard ourselves as unique and interesting sinners. As sinners we are much the same and our sin is essentially something tedious, something to be shunned and not something to be investigated. We should rather work, as it were, from outside inwards. We should think of our actions and look to God and to His Law. We should consider not what delights us or what disgusts us, morally speaking, but what is enjoined and what is forbidden. And this we know, more than we are often ready to admit. We know it from God’s Word and from his Church with a certainty as great as our belief. Truthfulness is enjoined, the relief of suffering is enjoined, adultery is forbidden, sodomy is forbidden. And I feel that we ought to think quite simply of these matters, thus: truth is not glorious, it is just enjoined; sodomy is not disgusting, it is just forbidden. These are rules by which we should freely judge ourselves and others too. All else is vanity and self-deception and flattering of passion. Those who hesitate to judge others are usually those who fear to put themselves under judgement. We may remember here the words of Saint Paul – Michael will correct my Latin –
Dora was beginning to lose interest. It was all too abstract. She had come to the little service out of curiosity and placed herself at the back where she could see all the congregation. Paul was sitting beside her, which was. unfortunate. She would have liked to be able to survey him too. He kept glancing at her, and at one point drew his foot up to hers till she could feel his highly polished shoe touching her instep through the sandal. She saw from the corner of her eye the soft blur of his moustaches, the bird-like movements of his head. She kept her gaze resolutely forward.
Dora felt restless and dejected. In spite of certain moments of satisfaction, when the warmth of the weather and the beauty of the scene lifted her above her anxieties, she had not been able to settle down at Imber. She still felt nervous and shy and as if she were acting a part. It was not that she disliked anyone, though she did find Michael and James, especially James, a bit alarming. Everyone was nice to her, she had an easy time, she didn’t even have to get up at what James called “shriekers”, which she discovered to mean crack, or shriek, of dawn. She ambled down a minute before breakfast. Sometimes she missed breakfast and scrounged a bite later on from the larder. She did nothing all day quite agreeably, without anyone looking askance. Even Mrs Mark seemed to have forgotten about her, and was quite surprised when Dora offered to help with this or that. Her only regular duty, besides doing her room, was washing up, and she could do this quite serenely in a dream. What nagged her however was a certain new sense of her inferiority; that, and the prospect of going home with Paul when all this, unnerving as it was, was over. Dora was not unused to feeling inferior. A vague sense of social inferiority, an uneasy lack of
On the other hand, the prospects of escape were not rosy either. Dora missed London. She was surprised to find that she felt no urge to smoke or drink at Imber. She had slunk down to the White Lion once or twice in the first days; but it was a long way and the weather was forbiddingly hot. She had drunk a little of her whisky from the tooth mug in her bedroom. But these little celebrations had a surreptitious and dreary quality which had her soon discouraged. She did not like drinking alone. She noted with pleasure, and it was her only solid consolation, that as a result of this abstention and because of the sobriety of her diet she was becoming a little thinner. The trouble was that the return to London would be so far from gay. Paul was within sight of the end of his work. He was speaking of going home; and he glowed with a palpable determination to take his wife back with him and instal her as one does an art treasure, clearing the scene, locking the door. His will arched over Dora like a canopy. It was not that she had any thought of not returning with Paul. After all, she had come back to him, and although their reunion was far from successful the calculations that had led to it remained solid. It was just that she could make no vision of herself back in London with Paul. She saw the flat in Knightsbridge, meticulous, exquisite, glowing with stripy wallpaper and
At this moment, however, Dora was not obsessed with thoughts such as these. She was studying the male members of the congregation to decide which were the most handsome. It was James, certainly, who bore the closest resemblance to a film star, so big, so curly-headed, and with that open powerful face. Toby had the best features and the most grace. Mark Strafford was rather striking, but men with beards had an unfair advantage. Michael had a very sweet face, like a worried dog, but was not dignified enough to be handsome. In the end, she concluded Paul was the best-looking of them all: distinguished, dignified, noble. His face lacked serenity, however, it lacked radiance. It often looked distinctly bad-tempered. But then, as she sadly reflected, her husband was not a happy man.
Dora turned her attention to the women and got as far as Catherine. Catherine was sitting at the side near the front, easy to survey. She wore a neat grey Sunday frock, rather smart it occurred to Dora. The sort of frock that might be worn with an expensive hat at a luncheon party. Only here, somehow, it just looked simple. She had combed her hair, which made a spectacular difference to her appearance. The bun was worn low, firmly knotted, and the hair, pulled smoothly behind the ears, was glossy, undulating, refusing to look demure. Catherine was looking down and drooping her eyelids in a customary pose which seemed at times modest and at times secretive. Dora could see the bulge of the brow, the high arch of the cheek, the gentle yet somehow strong upward tilt of the nose. The natural pallor of the skin looked today more ivory than sallow. Dora looked at her with an admiration and a pleasure which were not un-tempered by the knowledge that this splendid piece was so soon to be withdrawn definitively from circulation.
The unconscious part of Dora’s mind which was still listening to James advised her that this bit was getting
