The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [295]
going on for months now. How would it end — with victory or defeat?
He remembered Clea saying: ‘Such creatures are not human beings at all, I think. If they live, it is only inasmuch as they represent themselves in human form. But then, anyone possessed by a single ruling passion presents the same picture. For most of us, life is a hobby. But she seems like a tense and exhaustive pictorial representation of nature at its most superficial, its most powerful. She is possessed — and the possessed can neither learn nor be taught. It doesn’t make her less lovely for all that it is death-propelled ; but my dear Nessim — from what angle are you to accept her?’
He did not as yet know; they were sparring still, talking in different languages. This might go on forever, he thought despairingly.
They had met more than once, formally, almost like business partners to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detach-ment of Alexandrian brokers plann ing a cotton merger. But this is the way of the city.
With a gesture which he himself thought of as characteristic he had offered her a large sum of money saying: ‘Lest an in-equality of fortune may make your decision difficult, I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anyt hing.’
But this had not answered; or rather had provoked only the insulting, uncomprehending question : ‘Is it that you really want to sleep with me? You may. Oh, I would do anything for you, Nessim.’ This disgusted and angered him. He had lost himself. There seemed no way forward along this line. Then suddenly, after a long moment of thought, he saw the truth like a flashing light. He whispered to himself with surprise: ‘But that is why I am not understood; I am not being really honest.’ He recognized that though he might have initially been swayed by his passion, he could think of no way to stake a claim on her attention, except, first, by the gift of money (ostensibly to ‘free’ her but in fact only to try and bind her to him) — and then, as his desperation in-
creased, he realized that there was nothing to be done except to place himself entirely at her mercy. In one sense it was madness
— but he could think of no other way to create in her the sense of obligation on which every other tie could be built. In this way a child may sometimes endanger itself in order to canvass a mother’s love and attention which it feels is denied to it.
‘Look’ he said in a new voice, full of new vibrations, and now he had turned very pale. ‘I want to be frank. I have no interest in real life. ’ His lips trembled with his voice. ‘I am visualizing a relationship far closer in a way than anything passion could invent
— a bond of a common belief.’ She wondered for a moment whether he had some strange new religion, whether this was what was meant. She waited with interest, amused yet disturbed to see how deeply moved he was. ‘I wish to make you a confidence now which, if betrayed, might mean irreparable harm to myself and my family; and indeed to the cause I am serving. I wish to put myself utterly in your power. Let us suppose we are both dead to love …
I want to ask you to become part of a dangerous….’
The strange thing was that as he began to talk thus, about what was nearest to his thoughts, she began to care, to really notice him as a man for the first time. For the first time he struck a responsive chord in her by a confession which was paradoxically very far from a confession of the heart. To her surprise, to her chagrin and to her delight, she realized that she was not being asked merely to share his bed — but his whole life, the monomania upon which it was built. Normally, it is only the artist who can offer this strange and selfless contract — but it is one which no woman worth the name can ever refuse. He was asking, not for her hand in marriage (here his lies had created the misunderstanding) but for her partnership in allegiance to his ruling daimon. It was in the strictest sense, the only meaning he could put upon the word