“It’s all simply faded out of your mind,” she added, mournfully reproachful. For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.
“But of course I remember,” said Philip impatiently. “Only one can’t readjust one’s mind instantaneously. At the moment, when you spoke, I happened to be thinking of something else; that was all.”
Elinor sighed. “I wish I had something else to think about,” she said. “That’s the trouble; I haven’t. Why should I love you so much? Why? It isn’t fair. You’re protected by an intellect and a talent. You have your work to retire into, your ideas to shield you. But I have nothing—no defence against my feelings, no alternative to you. And it’s I who need the defence and the alternative. For I’m the one who really cares. You’ve got nothing to be protected from. You don’t care. No, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.”
And after all, she was thinking, it had always been like this. He hadn’t ever really loved her, even at the beginning. Not profoundly and entirely, not with abandonment. For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her. On her side she had offered everything, everything. And he had taken, but without return. His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld. Always, even from the first, even when he had loved her most. She had been happy then—but only because she had not known better than to be happy, because she had not realized, in her inexperience, that love could be different and better. She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity, in laying waste to her memories. The moon, the dark and perfumed garden, the huge black tree and its velvet shadow on the lawn. … She denied them, she rejected the happiness which they symbolized in her memory.
Philip Quarles, meanwhile, said nothing. There was nothing, really, to say. He put his arm round her and drew her toward him; he kissed her forehead and her fluttering eyelids; they were wet with tears.
The sordid suburbs of Bombay slid past them—factories and little huts and huge tenements, ghastly and bone-white under the moon. Brown, thin-legged pedestrians appeared for a moment in the glare of the headlights, like truths apprehended intuitively and with immediate certainty, only to disappear again almost instantly into the void of outer darkness. Here and there, by the roadside, the light of a fire mysteriously hinted at dark limbs and faces. The inhabitants of a world of thought starrily remote from theirs peered at them, as the car flashed past, from creaking bullock carts.
“My darling,” he kept repeating, “my darling …”
Elinor permitted herself to be comforted. “You love me a little?”
“So much.”
She actually laughed; rather sobbishly, it is true, but still, it was a laugh. “You do your best to be nice to me.” And after all, she thought, those days at Gattenden had really been blissful. They were hers, she had had them; they couldn’t be denied. “You make such efforts. It’s sweet of you.”
“It’s silly to talk like that,” he protested. “You know I love you.”
“Yes, I know you do.” She smiled and stroked his cheek. “When you have time and then by wireless across the Atlantic.”
“No, that isn’t true.” But secretly he knew that it was. All his life long he had walked in a solitude, in a private void, into which nobody, not his mother, not his friends, not his lovers had ever been permitted to enter. Even when he held her thus, pressed close to him, it was by wireless, as she had said, and across an Atlantic that he communicated with her.
“It isn’t true,” she echoed, tenderly mocking. “But, my poor old Phil, you couldn’t even take in a child. You don’t know how to lie convincingly. You’re too honest. That’s one of the reasons why I love you. If you knew how transparent you were!”
Philip was silent. These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable. They threatened his solitude—that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone, nevertheless, his spirit could live in comfort, in which alone he felt himself free. At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives. But when it was menaced he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air. But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence. He entrenched himself now in silence, in that calm, remote, frigid silence, which he was sure that Elinor would not attempt, knowing the hopelessness of the venture, to break through. He was right; Elinor glanced at him for an instant, and then, turning away, looked out at the moonlit landscape. Their parallel silences flowed on through time, unmeeting.
They were driven on through the Indian darkness. Almost cool against their faces, the moving air smelt now of tropical flowers, now of sewage, or curry, or burning cow dung.
“And yet,” said Elinor suddenly, unable any longer to contain her resentful thoughts, “you couldn’t do without me. Where would you be if I left you, if I went to somebody who was prepared to give me something in return for what I give? Where would you be?”
The question dropped into the silence. Philip made no answer. But where would he be? He too wondered. For in the ordinary daily world of human contacts he was curiously like a foreigner, uneasily not at home among his fellows, finding
