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his dragoman. Like her father, Elinor Bidlake had been born with a gift of intuitive
understanding and social ease. She was quickly at home with anybody. She knew,
instinctively, as well as old John himself, just what to say to every type of person--to
every type except, perhaps, her husband's. It is difficult to know what to say to someone
who does not say anything in return, who answers the personal word with the impersonal,
the particular and feeling word with an intellectual generalization. Still, being in love
with him, she persisted in her efforts to lure him into direct contact; and though the
process was rather discouraging--like singing to deaf-mutes or declaiming poetry to an
empty hall--she went on giving him her intimacies of thought and feeling. There were
occasions, when, making a great effort, he did his best, in exchange, to admit her into his
own personal privacies. But whether it was that the habit of secrecy had made it
impossible for him to give utterance to his inward feelings, or whether the very capacity
to feel had actually been atrophied by consistent silence and repression, Elinor found
these rare intimacies disappointing. The holy of holies into which he so painfully ushered
her was almost as naked and empty as that which astonished the Roman invaders, when
they violated the temple ofJerusalem. Still, she was grateful to Philip for his good
intentions in at least wanting to admit her to his emotional intimacy, even though there
mightn't be much of an emotional life to be intimate with. A kind of Pyrrhonian
indifference, tempered by a consistent gentleness and kindness, as well as by the more
violent intermittences of physical passion--this was the state of being which nature and
second nature had made normal for him. Elinor's reason told her that this was so; but her
feelings would not accept in practice what she was sure of in theory. What was living and
sensitive and irrational in her was hurt by his indifference, as though it were a personal
coldness directed only against herself. And yet, whatever she might feel, Elinor knew all
the time that his indifference wasn't personal, that he was like that with everybody, that
he loved her as much as it was possible for him to love, that his love for her hadn't
diminished, because it had never really been greater--more passionate once perhaps, but
never more emotionally rich in intimacies and self-giving, even at its most passionate,
than it was now. But all the same her feelings were outraged; he oughtn't to be like this.
He oughtn't to be; but there, he was. After an outburst, she would settle down and try to
love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached
and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and
finally his intelligence--that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could
understand everything, including the emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took
care not to be moved by.
Once, when he had been telling her about Koehler's book on the apes, 'You're like
a monkey on the superman side of humanity,' she said. 'Almost human, like those poor
chimpanzees. The only difference is that they're trying to think up with their feelings and
instincts, and you're trying to feel down with your intellect. Almost human. Trembling on
the verge, my poor Phil.'
He understood everything so perfectly. That was why it was such fun being his
dragoman and interpreting other people for him. (It was less amusing when one had to
interpret oneself.) All that the intelligence could seize upon he seized. She reported her
intercourse with the natives of the realm of emotion and he understood at once, he
generalized her experience for her, he related it with other experiences, classified it,
found analogies and parallels. From single and individual it became in his hands part of a
system. She was astonished to find that she and her friends had been, all unconsciously,
substantiating a theory, or exemplifying some interesting generalization. Her functions as
dragoman were not confined to mere scouting and reporting. She acted also directly as
personal interpreter between Philip and any third party he might wish to get into touch
with, creating the atmosphere in which alone the exchange of personalities is possible,
preserving the conversation from intellectual desiccation. Left to himself Philip would
never have been able to establish personal contact or preserve it when once established.
But when Elinor was there to make and keep the contact for him, he could understand, he
could sympathize, with his intelligence, in a way which Elinor assured him was all but
human. In his subsequent generalizations from the experience she had made possible for
him he became once more undisguisedly the overman.
Yes, it was fun to serve as dragoman to such an exceptionally intelligent tourist in
the realm of feeling. But it was more than fun; it was also, in Elinor's eyes, a duty. There
was his writing to consider.
'Ah, if you were a little less of an overman, Phil,' she used to say, 'what good
novels you'd write!'
Rather ruefully he agreed with her. He was intelligent enough to know his own
defects. Elinor did her best to supply them--gave him first-hand information about the
habits of the natives, acted as go-between when he wanted to come into personal contact
with one of them. Not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the novelist he might be,
she wished he could break his habit of impersonality and learn to live with the intuitions
and feelings and instincts as well as with the intellect. Heroically, she had even
encouraged him in his velleities of passion for other women. It might do him good to
have a few affairs. So anxious was she to do him good as a novelist, that on more than
one occasion, seeing him look admiringly at some young woman or other, she had gone
out of her way to establish for him the personal contact which he would never have been
able to establish for himself. It was risky, of course. He might really fall in love; he might
forget to be intellectual and become a reformed character, but for some other woman's
benefit. Elinor took the risk, partly because she thought that his writing ought to come
before everything else, even her own happiness, and partly because she was secretly
convinced that there was in reality no risk at all, that he would never lose his head so
wholly as to want to run off with another woman. The cure by affairs, if it worked at all,
would be gentle in its action; and if it did work, she was sure she would know how to
profit by its good effects on him. Anyhow, it hadn't worked so far. Philip's infidelities
amounted to very little and had had no appreciable effect on him. He remained
depressingly, even maddeningly the same--intelligent to the point of being almost human,
remotely kind, separately passionate and sensual, impersonally sweet. Maddening. Why
did she go on loving him? She wondered. One might almost as well go on loving a book-
case. One day she would really leave him. There was such a thing as being too unselfish
and devoted. One should think of one's own happiness sometimes. To be loved for a
change, instead of having to do all the loving oneself; to receive instead of perpetually
giving.... Yes, one day she really would leave him. She had herself to think about.
Besides, it would be a punishment for Phil. A punishment--for she was sure that, if she
left him, he would be genuinely unhappy, in his way, as much as it lay in him to be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]