§ 5
His character began to unfold itself to her in spasms of intimate revelation. But with each passing glimpse of something new she caught sight also of dim vistas of his soul, which she knew she could never explore. The more she learned the more she felt she could never learn.
He was tremendously ambitious.
Once he said to her: “If you knew my ambitions, if you knew what I hope to do some day, you’d be amazed, absolutely amazed!”
“Should I?” she replied. “I don’t know.... I’m very ambitious myself.” She was pleased that she was incidentally speaking the truth.
He looked at her sceptically.
“My ambition is to be a great pianist,” she continued quietly.
“That,” he replied, “is a thoroughly selfish ambition. It is not as bad as some selfish ambitions, but it is selfish, for all that. Unless you have some other ambition in life besides that, your life will never be really worth while.... Now my ambition has nothing to do with my own greatness or fame. There is no fame—except of a secluded kind—to be got from economics and sociology.... But nevertheless my ambitions are bound up with those things. Quite impersonally.... I mean ...” he was searching for some method of explanation. “In fact,” he added with a trace of bitterness, “I mean something you can’t understand and never could.”
It was true: she knew it, but she said with real passion: “How do you know? I could, but you never give me a trial! I believe I could understand, anyway!”
He smiled, sceptically, but not contemptuously. “Then what do you imagine to be my ambitions?” he asked quietly.
And she was floored. In her deepest soul she told herself: I haven’t an idea. The man is an enigma to me. How do I know his ambitions?
“I suppose,” she faltered, “you want to benefit humanity and—and——”
“And all that sort of thing, eh?” he interrupted sardonically. “You certainly ought to finish up that way.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.... Am I right?”
“Of course you are right,” he replied whimsically, and left much to be implied.
“Then I knew what you didn’t think I knew?”
“Oh no, not at all.... My doubts were not of your knowledge.... It is a question of understanding....”
“And I am not capable of that, eh? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it is....”
There came a pause. An overmastering impulse made her say something which, if she had been wiser, she would have been content to think.
“But I read!” she cried passionately, “I ought to be able to understand I ... I sympathize with all those—things ... I read heaps of books—Shaw and Wells and—and——”
It was absurd. She knew that what she was saying was quite absurd. But she was not quite prepared for his reply.
He stroked his chin reflectively.
“And what the devil,” he said deliberately, “has that got to do with it?”
She bit her lip heroically. She was on the point of bursting into uncontrollable tears. Her eyes flashed wet and lustrous. And as she realized the pivotal significance of his reply, a great fragment of her universe tumbled to ruin....
They were strolling at a leisurely pace along the High Road. It was a late October afternoon, and Catherine was playing at a London concert in the evening. She was now well known: a poster depicting her red hair and a post-impressionist keyboard was a familiar sight in the district between Upper Regent Street and the Marble Arch. Also her name in spidery capitals was a common feature of that wonderful front page of the Saturday Telegraph. Undoubtedly she was “making a name for herself.” Also money. She was thinking of buying a car and learning to drive. And she began to regard it as inevitable that some day she would have to leave Mrs. Carbass. A tiny cottage near High Wood appealed to her. There was a large garden, and the Forest surrounded it almost completely. It would be idyllic to live there....
It piqued her that her rapid rise to fame made no difference at all to her relations with Verreker. He treated her exactly as he had always treated her—that is to say, rudely, disrespectfully, sometimes contemptuously, always as a master dealing with a pupil. She admired him for his absolute lack of sycophancy, yet there were times when she almost wished for an excuse for despising him. Especially since the very things that hurt her were among those that drew her admiration.
Now she was stormily resentful because she had not succeeded in imposing on him. She had desired to appear capable of sympathy and understanding: she had striven to guide their relations into the paths of “soul-affinity.” He had dealt a death-blow to that particular sphere of enterprise.
For several hundred yards they walked on in silence. Then he began to talk, as if recording impressions just as they crossed his vision.
“You know,” he started, “when you consider the thousands of millions that inhabit the world you must realize that the chance of anybody meeting the one person most ideally suited to him is so mathematically small as to be not worth considering.... We all have to put up with either nothing at all or the thousandth or the millionth best.... Somewhere in the world there is, no doubt, somebody who would fit in with me so exquisitely that every phase of my life and endeavour would be the better for the fusing of two into one.... Same with you.... But what earthly chance is there of either of us ever discovering that person? Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack! It’s worse than that: you do know the needle when you have found it, but if a man were to meet his ideal partner, the chances are he wouldn’t recognize her! ... I tell you, the quest of an ideal mate is hopeless from the start. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you may get somebody not many thousand places down on the list that is headed by that theoretical ideality who lives in the next street or the next continent....”
“And what if you’re not extraordinarily lucky?” she put in.
“Providence, or whatever you choose to call it,” he replied, “has realized that the vast majority of people cannot in the nature of things be extraordinarily lucky. But providence has wisely contrived that if a man is unable to get the woman he wants, there is at least one method by which he can be made to want the woman he gets.”
“And what is the method?”
“Very simple.... Falling in love with her.”
“I suppose you don’t agree with falling in love?”
He laughed.
“You might as well ask me if I agreed with eating and drinking. Certainly a good deal of time and labour would be saved if we didn’t have to perform these functions.... What I object to in falling in love (and it’s a purely personal objection: I mean it applies to me and not necessarily to anybody else) is simply that it’s such a monopolizer of energy.... I’m one of those people who’re used to doing many things at once. There are heaps of important things in my life that love has never had anything to do with and never could have ... and yet love, if it were violent enough, and if I were weak enough, might completely paralyse them for a time” ... He began searching for a simile—“like,” he added, “like a perfectly loyal and orderly body of workpeople compelled to take a rest because of a strike hundreds of miles away that has really no connection with them at all....”
She nodded.
“There is, or ought to be, in every man and woman some divine sense of purposefulness, some subtle foretaste of greater things that would make life worth living if everything else were taken away. And it ought to be completely independent of and separate from every other living creature in the world. Call it personality, or ‘ego,’ or anything you like. It is above jealousy and envy. It gives every man a sunken indestructible pride in being himself and no one else. That’s where novelists, sentimental folk and such like make their mistake. They give love far too prominent a place in the scheme of things.... Love is only one phase of life. At critical moments no doubt it does take precedence of everything else, but think of the heaps of other things that go to make up life! Ambition, for instance. And ideals.... A man may have ideals so utterly removed from all connection with love that if they were blurred by any act of his, love would be a worthless recompense.... Oh yes, falling in love may be a passably pleasant means of frittering away a dull seaside holiday, but for a busy ambitious spirit it spells—usually—ruination—unless—unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless,” he resumed, “the fates were so miraculously thoughtful as to provide such a man with somebody whose dreams and hopes and ambitions were in mystic harmony with his own.... And that, of course, is a miracle not to be expected once in a hundred years....”
Pause.
“And it is such a confoundedly casual business too,” he went on. “Falling in love, I mean. It’s about as sudden and spontaneous and unreasonable and unthought-out as walking down a railway platform beside a train of empty carriages and selecting one compartment in preference to all the others.... And think of the horror of falling in love, not merely with somebody you don’t like, but with somebody you actively dislike. Oh, I assure you, it’s quite possible. Some wretched creature with whom fate had capriciously made you infatuated! Someone who would monopolize selfishly everything in you that was free and open to all; someone who would divert everything high and noble in you to swell that tragic outflow of wasted ambitions, warped enthusiasms, cramped souls and stunted ideals! And someone, moreover, who would make it hard for you to value the people you liked but did not love! Think of it—all your life thrown out of perspective by something as casual and involuntary as a hundred unremembered things one does every day of one’s life!”
They had entered the station-yard. It was beginning to rain in big, cold drops.
“I suppose you think intellectual attachments are all right?” she remarked.
He grunted.
“If you want to know my candid opinion,” he replied gruffly, “intellectual attachments, so called, are all bosh. If you like a clever woman (or a clever man, for that matter), the feeling is not, properly speaking, intellectual. And if you merely feel æsthetic admiration for somebody’s nimble intellect, then I should say there was no real attachment.”
“But I presume you prefer a woman should not be too intensely sexual?”
“If you mean do I prefer a woman who is half a man as well as not quite half a woman, I certainly do not. The best women, let me tell you”—(he began fishing out money from his pocket and advanced to the ticket office. Their conversation went spasmodically)—“are all sex.” (He took the tickets and rejoined her slowly, counting his change as he did so.) “Let me see, what was I saying? Oh yes, I remember.... Well, the best women, as I say, are all sex—but—but”—(interruption while the man punched their tickets at the top of the steps)—“but not always.... All sex, but not always.... That’s how it appears to me.... There’s the train just coming in. Hurry along, or we shall have to get in anywhere....”