The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [393]
But there is no place in all this for me. I cannot see these soldiers as Pombal does. He gloats on them like a child — as if they were bright lead soldiers — because he sees in them the only hope that France will be freed. I only feel ashamed for them, as one might to see friends in convict garb; out of shame and sympathy I feel like turning my face away. Oh, Darley, it isn’t very sensible, and I know I am doing them a grotesque injustice; possibly it is just selfishness. So I force myself to serve them teas at their various
canteens, roll bandages, arrange concerts. But inside myself I shrink smaller every day. Yet I always believed that a love of human beings would flower more strongly out of a common misfortune. It isn’t true. And now I am afraid that you too will begin to like me the less for these absurdities of thought, these re-vulsions of feeling. To be here, just the two of us, sitting by candle-light is almost a miracle in such a world. You can’t blame me for trying to hoard and protect it against the intrusive world outside, can you? Curiously, what I hate most about it all is the sentimen-tality which spells violence in the end!’
I understood what she meant, and what she feared; and yet from the depths of my own inner selfishness I was glad of these external pressures, for they circumscribed our world perfectly, penned us up more closely together, isolated us! In the old world I would have had to share Clea with a host of other friends and admirers. Not now.
Curiously, too, some of these external factors around us, in-volving us in its death-struggles — gave our newest passion a fulfilment not based on desperation yet nevertheless built just as certainly upon the sense of impermanence. It was of the same order, though different in kind to the dull orgiastic rut of the various armies; it was quite impossible to repudiate the truth, namely, that death (not even at hand, but in the air) sharpens kisses, adds unbearable poignance to every smile and handclasp. Even though I was no soldier the dark question mark hovered over our thoughts, for the real issues of the heart were influenced by something of which we were all, however reluctantly, part: a whole world. If the war did not mean a way of dying, it meant a way of ageing, of tasting the true staleness in human things, and of learning to confront change bravely. No-one could tell what lay beyond the closed chapter of every kiss. In those long quiet evenings before the bombardment began we would sit upon that small square of carpet by the light of candles, debating these matters, punctuating our silences with embraces which were the only inadequate answer we could offer to the human situation. Nor, lying in each other’s arms during those long nights of fitful sleep broken by the sirens, did we ever (as if by a silent convention) speak of love. To have uttered the word might acknowledge a more rare yet less perfect variety of the state which now bewitched us,
perfected in us this quite unpremeditated relationship. Somewhere in Moeurs there is a passionate denunciation of the word. I cannot remember into whose mouth the speech has been put — perhaps Justine