A Passage to India - E. M. Forster [47]
“I shall not really be intimate with this fellow,” Fielding thought, and then “nor with anyone.” That was the corollary. And he had to confess that he really didn’t mind, that he was content to help people, and like them as long as they didn’t object, and if they objected pass on serenely. Experience can do much, and all that he had learnt in England and Europe was an assistance to him, and helped him towards clarity, but clarity prevented him from experiencing something else.
“How did you like the two ladies you met last Thursday?” he asked.
Aziz shook his head distastefully. The question reminded him of his rash remark about the Marabar Caves.
“How do you like Englishwomen generally?”
“Hamidullah liked them in England. Here we never look at them. Oh no, much too careful. Let’s talk of something else.”
“Hamidullah’s right: they are much nicer in England. There’s something that doesn’t suit them out here.”
Aziz after another silence said, “Why are you not married?”
Fielding was pleased that he had asked. “Because I have more or less come through without it,” he replied. “I was thinking of telling you a little about myself some day if I can make it interesting enough. The lady I liked wouldn’t marry me—that is the main point, but that’s fifteen years ago and now means nothing.”
“But you haven’t children.”
“None.”
“Excuse the following question: have you any illegitimate children?”
“No. I’d willingly tell you if I had.”
“Then your name will entirely die out.”
“It must.”
“Well.” He shook his head. “This indifference is what the Oriental will never understand.”
“I don’t care for children.”
“Caring has nothing to do with it,” he said impatiently.
“I don’t feel their absence, I don’t want them weeping around my death-bed and being polite about me afterwards, which I believe is the general notion. I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children. No obligation, with England getting so chock-a-block and overrunning India for jobs.”
“Why don’t you marry Miss Quested?”
“Good God! why, the girl’s a prig.”
“Prig, prig? Kindly explain. Isn’t that a bad word?”
“Oh, I don’t know her, but she struck me as one of the more pathetic products of Western education. She depresses me.”
“But prig, Mr. Fielding? How’s that?”
“She goes on and on as if she’s at a lecture—trying ever so hard to understand India and life, and occasionally taking a note.”
“I thought her so nice and sincere.”
“So she probably is,” said Fielding, ashamed of his roughness: any suggestion that he should marry always does produce overstatements on the part of the bachelor, and a mental breeze. “But I can’t marry her if I wanted to, for she has just become engaged to the City Magistrate.”
“Has she indeed? I am so glad! “he exclaimed with relief, for this exempted him from the Marabar expedition: he would scarcely be expected to entertain regular Anglo-Indians.
“It’s the old mother’s doing. She was afraid her dear boy would choose for himself, so she brought out the girl on purpose, and flung them together until it happened.”
“Mrs.