Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [41]
‘I do, as it happens,’ said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit, vainly as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination. ‘But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started. We began with evenings and now…’
But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic. ‘Oh, I know you don’t want to say you don’t love me,’ she interrupted. ‘Not in so many words. You don’t want to hurt my feelings. But it would really hurt them less if you did so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now. Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement. And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there’s suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain. So long as the words haven’t been definitely spoken, there’s always just a chance that they mayn’t have been tacitly implied. Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied. There’s still room for hope. And where there’s hope there’s disappointment. It isn’t really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it’s crueller.’
‘But I don’t evade the question,’ he retorted. ‘Why should I, seeing that I do love you?’
‘Yes, but how? How do you love me? Not in the way you used to, at the beginning. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten. You didn’t even remember the time when we were first married.’
‘But, my dear child,’ Philip protested,’do be accurate. You just said “those evenings” and expected me to guess which.’
‘Of course I expected,’ said Elinor. ‘You ought to have known. You would have known, if you took any interest. That’s what I complain of. You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you. Do you think I can forget those evenings?’
She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall, where they had sat together. She remembered what he had said and his kisses, the touch of his hands. She remembered everything—remembered with the minute precision of one who loves to explore and reconstruct the past, of one who is for ever turning over and affectionately verifying each precious detail of recollected happiness.
‘It’s all simply faded out of your mind,’ she added, mournfully reproachful. For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.
‘But of course I remember,’ said Philip impatiently. ‘Only one can’t readjust one’s mind instantaneously. At the moment, when you spoke, I happened to be thinking of something else; that was all.’
Elinor sighed. ‘I wish I had something else to think about,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble; I haven’t. Why should I love you so much? Why? It isn’t fair. You’re protected by an intellect and a talent. You have your work to retire into, your ideas to shield you. But I have nothing—no defence against my feelings, no alternative to you. And it’s I who need the defence and the alternative. For I’m the one who really cares. You’ve got nothing to be protected from. You don’t care. No, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.’
And after all, she was thinking, it had always been like this. He hadn’t ever really loved her, even at the beginning. Not profoundly and entirely, not with abandonment. For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her. On her side she had offered everything, everything. And he had taken, but without return. His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld. Always, even from the first, even when he had loved her most. She had been happy then—but only because she had not known better than to be happy, because she had not realized, in her inexperience, that love could be different and better. She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity, in laying waste her memories. The moon, the dark and perfumed garden,