“Poor Marjorie! But why can’t she keep her face better powdered? And those artistic beads and earrings she always wears …”
“And who then goes down like a ninepin,” Philip continued, “at the mere sight of a siren. It’s the situation that appealed to me. Not the individuals. After all, there are plenty of other nice young men besides Walter. And Marjorie isn’t the only bore. Nor Lucy the only man-eater.”
“Well, if it’s only the situation,” Elinor grudgingly allowed.
“And besides,” he went on, “it isn’t written and probably never will be. So there’s nothing to get upset about, I assure you.”
“All right. I won’t say anything more till I see the book.”
There was another pause.
“… such a wonderful time at Gulmerg last summer,” the young lady was saying to her four attentive cavaliers. “There was golf, and dancing every evening, and …”
“And in any case,” Philip began again in a meditative tone, “the situation would only be a kind of …”
“Mais je lui ai dit, les hommes sont comme ça. Une jeune fille bien élevée doit …”
“… a kind of excuse,” bawled Philip. “It’s like trying to talk in the parrot house at the zoo,” he added with parenthetic irritation. “A kind of excuse, as I was saying, for a new way of looking at things that I want to experiment with.”
“I wish you’d begin by looking at me in a new way,” said Elinor with a little laugh. “A more human way.”
“But seriously, Elinor …”
“Seriously,” she mocked. “Being human isn’t serious. Only being clever.”
“Oh, well,” he shrugged his shoulders, “if you don’t want to listen, I’ll shut up.”
“No, no, Phil. Please.” She laid her hand on his. “Please.”
“I don’t want to bore you.” He was huffy and dignified.
“I’m sorry, Phil. But you do look so comic when you’re more in sorrow than in anger. Do you remember those camels at Bikaner—what an extraordinarily superior expression? But do go on!”
“This year,” one female missionary was saying to the other, as they passed by, “the Bishop of Kuala Lumpur ordained six Chinese deacons and two Malays. And the Bishop of British North Borneo …” The quiet voices faded into inaudibility.
Philip forgot his dignity and burst out laughing. “Perhaps he ordained some orangutans.”
“But do you remember the wife of the Bishop of Thursday Island?” asked Elinor. “The woman we met on that awful Australian ship with the cockroaches.”
“The one who would eat pickles at breakfast?”
“Pickled onions at that,” she qualified with a shudder. “But what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Philip, “we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,” he nodded after the retreating group, “thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes …”
“Loving eyes too.”
He smiled at her and stroked her hand. “The result …” he hesitated.
“Yes, what would the result be?” she asked.
“Queer,” he answered. “A very queer picture indeed.”
“Rather too queer, I should have thought.”
“But it can’t be too queer,” said Philip. “However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really, any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organization that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit, and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.”
“All the same,” said Elinor after a long silence, “I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.”
“Or why not a detective novel?” He laughed. But if, he reflected, he didn’t write that kind of story, perhaps it was because he couldn’t. In art there are simplicities more difficult than the most serried complications. He could manage the complications as well as anyone. But when it came to the simplicities, he lacked the talent—that talent which is of the heart, no less than of the head, of the feelings, the sympathies, the intuitions, no less than of the analytical understanding. The heart, the heart, he said to himself. “Perceive ye not, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened?” No heart, no understanding.
“… a terrible flirt!” cried one of the four cavaliers, as the party rounded the corner into hearing.
“I am not!” the young lady indignantly retorted.
“You are!” they all shouted together.
