“Thanks so much,” said Philip when he was safely in the launch.
“Awkward, this sort of thing,” said the other. “Particularly if one’s short of a leg, what?”
“Very.”
“Damaged in the war?”
Philip shook his head. “Accident when I was a boy,” he explained telegraphically, and the blood mounted to his cheeks. “There’s my wife,” he mumbled, glad of an excuse to get away. Elinor jumped, steadied herself against him; they picked their way to seats at the other end of the launch.
“Why didn’t you let me go first and help you over?” she asked.
“I was all right,” he answered curtly and in a tone that decided her to say no more. She wondered what was the matter. Something to do with his lameness? Why was he so queer about it?
Philip himself would have found it hard to explain what there was in the military gentleman’s question to distress him. After all, there was nothing in the least discreditable in having been run over by a cart. And to have been rejected as totally unfit for military service was not in the least unpatriotic. And yet, quite unreasonably, the question had disturbed him, as all such questions, as any too overt reference to his lameness, unless deliberately prepared for by himself, invariably did.
Discussing him with Elinor, “Philip was the last person,” his mother had once said, “the very last person such an accident ought to have happened to. He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world. It meant no games, to begin with; and no games meant fewer contacts with other boys, more solitude, more leisure for books. And then (poor Phil!) it meant fresh causes for shyness. A sense of inferiority. Children can be so horribly ruthless; they used to laugh at him sometimes at school. And later, when girls began to matter, how I wish he’d been able to go to dances and tennis parties! But he couldn’t waltz or play. And of course he didn’t want to go as an onlooker and an outsider. His poor smashed leg began by keeping him at a physical distance from girls of his own age. And it kept him at a psychological distance, too. For I believe he was always afraid (secretly, of course, and without admitting it) that they might laugh at him, as some of the boys did; and he didn’t want to run the risk of being rejected in favour of someone who wasn’t handicapped as he was. Not that he’d ever have taken very much interest in girls,” Mrs. Quarles had added.
And Elinor had laughed. “I shouldn’t imagine so.”
“But he wouldn’t have got into such a habit of deliberately avoiding them. He wouldn’t have so systematically retired from all personal contacts—and not with girls only; with men, too. Intellectual contacts—those are the only ones he admits.”
“It’s as though he only felt safe among ideas,” Elinor had said.
“Because he can hold his own there; because he can be certain of superiority. He’s got into the habit of feeling afraid and suspicious outside that intellectual world. He needn’t have. And I’ve always tried to reassure him and tempt him out; but he won’t let himself be tempted, he creeps back into his shell.” And after a silence: “It’s had only one good result,” she had added; “the accident, I mean. It saved him from going to the war, from being killed, probably. Like his brother.”
The launch began to move toward the shore. From being an impending wall of black iron, the liner, as they receded, became a great ship, seen in its entirety. Fixed motionless between the sea and the blue glare of the sky, it looked like the advertisement of tropical cruises in the window of a Cockspur Street shipping office.
“It was an impertinence to ask,” Philip was thinking. “What business was it of his whether I’d been damaged in the war? How they go on gloating over their war, those professional soldiers! Well, I can be thankful I kept out of the bloody business. Poor Geoffrey!” He thought of his dead brother.
“And yet,” Mrs. Quarles had concluded after a pause, “in a certain sense I wish he had gone to the war. Oh, not for fire-eating, patriotic reasons. But because, if one could have guaranteed that he wouldn’t have been killed or mangled, it would have been so good for him—violently good, perhaps; painfully good; but still good. It might have smashed his shell for him and set him free from his own prison. Emotionally free; for his intellect’s free enough already. Too free, perhaps, for my old-fashioned taste.” And she had smiled rather sadly. “Free to come and go in the human world, instead of being boxed up in that indifference of his.”
“But isn’t the indifference natural to him?” Elinor had objected.
“Partly. But in part it’s a habit. If he could break the habit, he’d be so much happier. And I think he knows it, but can’t break it himself. If it could be broken for him … But the war was the last chance. And circumstances didn’t allow it to be taken.”
“Thank heaven!”
“Well, perhaps you’re right.”
The launch had arrived; they stepped ashore. The heat was terrific, the pavements glared, the air was full of dust. With much display of teeth, much flashing of black and liquid eyes, much choreographic gesticulation, an olive-coloured gentleman in a tarboosh tried to sell them carpets. Elinor was for driving him away. But, “Don’t waste energy,” said Philip. “Too hot. Passive resistance, and pretend not to understand.”
They walked on like martyrs across an arena; and like a hungry lion, the gentleman in the tarboosh frisked round them. If not carpets, then
