‘I wish I could,’ Philip replied. ‘I can’t, though, because there is a catch, an enormous fly in the ointment. And to me, it’s this. It seems to me that life demands so much care to be lived at all decently that it’s hardly worth living. I’m talking about life as we see it, civilisation as it’s called, and not the life, say, of a Fiji Islander or a Zulu. With us the whole thing has got to be so careful, so ordered, has become so conscious, asks for so much planning and safeguarding, that we never arrive at any real enjoyment or ease, to say nothing of sheer rapture. We’re like people walking on a tightrope, and the only real pleasure we get is when we say to ourselves, “Well, that bit’s safely passed.” Do you see what I mean? If you decide to lean back and enjoy things, then you simply come a cropper and everything’s smashed for you; but if you’re careful to avoid the cropper, it takes so much out of you that you can’t really enjoy life at all. And it’s no use talking about the golden mean and compromise and so forth, because if you try to work on that principle, you only get bits of cropper, bits of anxiety and carefulness, bits of cropper again, a miserable alternation. If you let things go at all, disaster comes; if you don’t, if you look after them, then you’re simply working hard at it all the time. The trouble is that we can’t trust life, and in order to keep going with it at all, we have to be for ever watching it and patching it up. Therefore the only sort of happiness we can get out of it is like the weird pleasure that some people get from making and altering and fiddling about with wireless sets. So long as we continually turn the discs and change coils, we can congratulate ourselves on the fact that the set’s working, but that’s all we can do. We can’t sit back and listen to the music. There’s the great snag. You all see what I mean?’
‘Can’t say that I do exactly,’ said Sir William. ‘Give me an instance.’
‘Well, take a comparatively simple matter. Health, for example. Life’s hardly worth living without decent health, but according to the thousand and one experts of the body, we must look after this and that and the other in order to keep reasonably fit, and if we took the slightest notice of one-half of them we should be worrying about our bodies all day. Most of us don’t trouble, of course, but the fact remains that most of us are rapidly drifting further and further away from good health and we shall soon find ourselves crocked. I’d like to come to a life in which I could play the fool with my body without inevitable disaster. I must have been meant for such a life, for there’s something inside me that protests against these conditions we know. Or, take personal relations. They ought to be delightfully easy and careless, but they can’t be now that we’re so self-conscious. The best of them can’t be left to look after themselves a month, and to keep them going properly is only another anxiety. By the time our relations with the people close to us have been put in proper trim, we’re in no state to enjoy them but can only find a dim sort of pleasure in the thought that they are in proper trim. Again, take children. Being a parent is rapidly becoming a nightmare of worry. I’m not attacking mere crankiness now, for most of the worry is justified, and that’s the trouble. If you don’t worry, if you are grand and complacent, then life will make haste to see that they suffer for it. You can’t enjoy the children—you’ve no energy left for it—you can only enjoy repeating to yourself that you’re doing your best for them. We’ve no easy and rapturous contact with things themselves; we only watch their shadows, either anxiously or, at the best, with a dim sense of triumph. There’s the snag, the catch, then. We’ve either eaten too much or still too little from the Tree of Knowledge. As it is, we know just enough to give life a hair-trigger.’ Then he looked round apologetically. ‘Sorry. I seem to have made a speech.’
While the others were waving away his apology, Margaret was telling herself that she had never heard Philip reveal himself so clearly and fully, even though he did it unconsciously. That speech was dear old Phil all over: he didn’t trust life an inch. It was a silly grumble, she told herself, but only the very nicest kind of man could have made it. And now it was her turn. She looked at Philip speculatively. What would he ask her?
‘Your turn to ask now, Waverton,’ said Penderel. ‘And you’re lucky, having a wife for victim.’
Philip looked at her as if she were a strange person. It gave Margaret a little thrill, though she knew that it was because they were playing this game, for she had noticed that look before in company.
‘Your question is this,’ said Philip, still looking at her as if he had hardly ever seen her before. ‘What do you want? What are you getting at? What do you want, in your heart of hearts, to do, to be? What’s the core of the thing for you?’
‘That’s the sort of question a man would ask,’ Margaret exclaimed. ‘As if I had a definite object in life tucked away in a pigeonhole in my mind! Still, I’ll try to find an answer. Let me think.’ She glanced round at the eyes fixed upon her, and wished there was another woman of her own kind there, to whom she could address herself. That girl wouldn’t understand. ‘Well,’ she began, hesitatingly, ‘I’m not sure I can make myself clear or whether you’ll understand. The question is, what am I getting at, what do I really want to do or to be, isn’t it? All I can say is that I want to create a certain atmosphere, which I won’t attempt to define for you. It’s in my mind, just as the idea for a novel or a play is in an author’s mind, but I have to bring it outside, into life—do you see?—just as the author has. I want to bathe life itself in this atmosphere. I want to move in the centre of this atmosphere, really to be always creating it, and I want the people close to me, the ones I care for, to live in this atmosphere, and other people, friendly outsiders, to come and dip into it and recognise it and tell themselves that it’s my atmosphere and very good. This atmosphere contains all the good things of life, all those things that men put into separate compartments and somehow raise above life, and because it includes them, is served by them, it’s naturally more important than any of them.’ She warmed to the thought now and forgot her audience. ‘By doing this—or trying to do this—you’re creating in the most marvellous way because you’re using life itself as the raw material. And the women who’ve succeeded in doing it—there are bad atmospheres as well as good ones, of course—are really tremendous, like queens without the fuss and the show. Men only notice it in a dim sort of way, though they’re affected by it, of course, and you can see how the greatest of them have been enchanted by a certain woman’s atmosphere. They’ve not simply fallen in love, as people always think, but they’ve discovered a new country and have stayed there. That’s what I want then, to create my own little country.’ She stopped, breathless, and looked round at her listeners, feeling suddenly frightened. The next moment there would be a huge guffaw. But there wasn’t; everybody looked either puzzled or friendly or both; and she felt relieved and rather happy. She smiled at them: ‘I seem to have been guilty of a speech too. I apologise.’
They cried out at this. ‘No apologies necessary, Mrs. Waverton,’ Sir William’s voice came booming. ‘You’re too deep for me, though. Who’s next? Can’t we have a few facts?’
It was Margaret’s turn, and her neighbour was Mr. Femm. She looked at him in bewilderment. He ought not to have been included, she felt, as she stared at the long, lined yellow mask he turned to her. There were deep wrinkles all round his eyes and the thin high bridge of his nose gleamed white as if the bone had burst through the skin, but the eyes themselves were as vague as smoke. She couldn’t ask him anything. He was as strange as a mandarin. Then she suddenly remembered Rebecca Femm and the dead Rachel Femm and the women who came in silks and scents and the men who said ‘Go away and pray,’ and it all seemed like something from a crazy old story she had just laid aside, and yet this man was in it, a character come to life. No, not quite to life.