He thought of the time when his wishes had been different. Not to be left in peace by her had once been his whole ambition. He had encouraged her devotion. He remembered the cottage they had lived in, alone with one another, month after month, among the bare downs. What a view over Berkshire! But it was a mile and a half to the nearest village. Oh, the weight of that knapsack full of provisions! The mud when it rained! And that bucket you had to wind up from the well. The well was more than a hundred feet deep. But even when he wasn’t doing something tiresome, like winding up the bucket, had it really been very satisfactory? Had he ever really been happy with Marjorie—as happy, at any rate, as he had imagined he was going to be, as he ought to have been in the circumstances? It should have been like “Epipsychidion”; but it wasn’t—perhaps because he had too consciously wanted it to be, because he had deliberately tried to model his feelings and their life together on Shelley’s poetry.
“One shouldn’t take art too literally.” He remembered what his brother-in-law, Philip Quarles, had said one evening, when they were talking about poetry. “Particularly where love is concerned.”
“Not even if it’s true?” Walter had asked.
“It’s apt to be too true. Unadulterated, like distilled water. When truth is nothing but the truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth. That’s why art moves you—precisely because it’s unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life. Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there’s no hiccuping or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure—chemically pure, I mean,” he had added with a laugh, “not morally.”
“But ‘Epipsychidion’ isn’t pornography,” Walter had objected.
“No, but it’s equally pure from the chemist’s point of view. How does that sonnet of Shakespeare’s go?
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. …
“And so on. He’d taken the poets too literally and was reacting. Let him be a warning to you.”
Philip had been right, of course. Those months in the cottage hadn’t been at all like “Epipsychidion” or La Maison du Berger. What with the well and the walk to the village. … But even if there hadn’t been the well and the walk, even if he had had Marjorie unadulterated, would it have been any better? It might even have been worse. Marjorie unadulterated might have been worse than Marjorie tempered by irrelevancies.
That refinement of hers, for example, that rather cold virtuousness, so bloodless and spiritual—from a distance and theoretically he admired. But in practice and close at hand? It was with that virtue, that refined, cultured, bloodless spirituality that he had fallen in love—with that and with her unhappiness; for Carling was unspeakable. Pity made him a knight errant. Love, he had then believed (for he was only twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out, just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and the lucubrations of philosophers and mystics), love was talk, love was spiritual communion and companionship. That was real love. The sexual business was only an irrelevancy—unavoidable, because unfortunately human beings had bodies, but to be kept as far as possible in the background. Ardently pure with the ardour of young desires taught artificially to burn on the side of the angels, he had admired that refined and quiet purity which, in Marjorie, was the product of a natural coldness, a congenitally low vitality.
“You’re so good,” he had said. “It seems to come to you so easily. I wish I could be good, like you.”
It was the equivalent, but he did not realize it, of wishing himself half dead. Under the shy, diffident, sensitive skin of him, he was ardently alive. It was indeed hard for him to be good, as Marjorie was good. But he tried. And meanwhile, he admired her goodness and purity. And he was touched—at least until it bored and exasperated him—by her devotion to him, he was flattered by her admiration.
Walking now toward Chalk Farm station, he suddenly remembered that story his father used to tell about an Italian chauffeur he had once talked to about love. (The old man had a genius for getting people to talk; all sorts of people, even servants, even workmen. Walter envied him the talent.) Some women, according to the chauffeur, are like wardrobes. Sono come cassetoni. How richly old Bidlake used to tell the anecdote! They may be as lovely as you like; but what’s the point of a lovely wardrobe in your arms? What on earth’s the point? (And Marjorie, Walter reflected, wasn’t even really good-looking.) “Give me,” said the chauffeur, “the other kind, even if they’re ugly. My girl,” he had confided, “is the other kind. E un frullino, proprio un frullino—a regular egg-whisk.” And the old man would twinkle like a jovial, wicked old satyr behind his monocle. Stiff wardrobes or lively egg-whisks? Walter had to admit that his preferences were the same as the chauffeur’s. At any rate, he knew by personal experience that (whenever “real” love was being tempered by the sexual irrelevancies) he didn’t much like the wardrobe kind of woman. At a distance, theoretically, purity
