Now they were all piling into the car, to ride round the house to the stable. This was of a piece with the absurdity of everything else, George thought. People were always driving up in crowds to visit his secrets. Like sight-seeing busses loaded with excursionists. The world loves to trample over your private ecstasies and leave them littered with scraps of paper and banana peel. And this fellow Martin, with his cool mockery, was beginning to get on his nerves.
The engine leapt into life with the same eager alacrity as if they had been starting off for a long drive. Yes, the human objective means nothing to the routine of Nature. She looses her lightning indifferently, whether between the sooty termini of a spark plug or from charged cloud to earth. She squanders as much energy in a meadow of hallooing crickets as in a human spirit tormented by conflicting passions.
They made the circuit of the house. Down the drive from the front door to the main road, along the side of the house, then up the back lane by the kitchen and the circular bed of cannas. Only a hundred yards, but it seemed interminable because it was futile and meaningless. Something had gone wrong in his time sense. As the car passed the kitchen window he could see Phyllis talking to Lizzie, holding up a loaf of bread as she spoke. At the same moment Ruth was saying something about the moon coming up. His mind went off in a long curve. He felt a gush of anger at Phyllis because she had been so unaware of his feeling for Joyce. If she had been spiteful, or jealous, or suspicious, how much easier it would have been. Her pettiness would have driven him and Joyce blissfully into each other’s arms, without the faintest sense of remorse. But this strangely detached Phyllis who seemed to move in a dream, instead of the familiar Phyllis of tempers and reproaches, was a different problem. Even sin, he thought furiously, is to be made as difficult as possible for me. And I had always imagined it would be so easy. Will God ever forgive me if I don’t commit the sins I was intended to? God will get no praise from me, He’s packed the house with a claque of crickets to put the show over. Through the window Phyllis’s golden head shone in a haze of lamplight. As always, when angry at her he loved her most. When you love a woman, why make her life miserable by marrying her? Marriage demands too much....
From this speculation he came back to find Ruth just finishing her sentence, the car still opposite the window, the loaf of bread still lifted in Phyllis’s hand. It occurred to him that this evening was damnably like the slowed motion-pictures in which the stream of life is retarded into its component gestures. Now he was to have the embarrassment of witnessing the actual rhythm of living, the sluggish pattern that underlies gay human ritual, the grave airy dancing of creation treading softly its dark measure to unheard, undreamed music. The smallest alteration in the mind’s pace changes everything, as some trifling misprint turns a commonplace newspaper headline into obscenity.
They drove into the stable.
“I miss the nice old horsey smell,” said Ruth. “Too bad, it’s only a garage now.”
“Which was it you wanted to revive, the horsey smell or the embraces of Ben?” said George. “The loft hasn’t changed much, I think.”
He snapped on the light. While the others climbed the narrow little stair behind the old feed bins he filled the radiator with water and poured oil into the crank case. Morosely he heard their words overhead.
“Someone’s left a blanket up here.”
“Look, the bay’s all full of moonlight. I didn’t remember it was like that.”