The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [50]
Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly—through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Portia and Eddie, side by side at the table, her diary between them under one of her hands, turned on each other eyes in which two relentless looks held apart for a moment, then became one. To generate that one look, their eyes seemed for the first time to be using their full power. The look held a sort of superb mutual greeting rather than any softness of love. You would have said that two accomplices had for the first time spoken aloud to each other of their part in the same crime, or that two children had just discovered their common royal birth. On the subject of love, there was nothing to say: they seemed to have no projects and no desires. Their talk today had been round an understood pact: at this moment, they saluted its significance.
Portia's life, up to now, had been all subtle gentle compliance, but she had been compliant without pity. Now she saw with pity, but without reproaching herself, all the sacrificed people—Major Brutt, Lilian, Matchett, even Anna—that she had stepped over to meet Eddie. And she knew that there would be more of this, for sacrifice is not in a single act. Windsor Terrace would not do well at her hands, and in this there was no question of justice: no outside people deserve the bad deal they get from love. Even Anna had shown her a sort of immoral kindness, and, however much Matchett’s love had been Matchett's unburdening, it had been love: one must desert that too.
For Eddie, Portia's love seemed to refute the accusations that had been brought against him for years, and the accusations he had brought against himself. He had not yet told her of half the indignation he felt. Older than she was, he had for longer suffered the guilty plausibility of the world. He had felt, not so much that he was in the right as that he was inevitable. He had gone wrong through dealing with other people in terms that he found later were not their own. However kind seemed the bosom he chose to lean his head on, he had found himself subject to preposterous rulings even there—and this had soon made the bosom vile for him. With love, a sort of maiden virtue of spirit stood outside his calamitous love affairs—the automatic quick touches he gave people (endearments, smiles to match smiles, the meaning-unmeaning use of his eyes) were his offensive-defensive, in defence of something they must not touch. His pretty ways had almost lost correspondence with appetite; his body was losing its naiveté. His real naiveté stayed in the