Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (4 page)

It seemed that now he was ashamed of having married her, because he was not doing enough for her, not making their relation more
significant
—not
loving
her enough, he admitted finally, hardly daring to look at her as he spoke. She replied, just as she had replied in their childish days, that she realized he was not an ordinary man, and that he had strong outside interests and inside reserves, that she didn’t want him to be any different because those were the things she loved him for, and that what she might lose in delicate attention she found was made up for her in his character and intelligence and the confidence she drew from his honesty. He didn’t seem to be encouraged by this reply; she even thought he felt that she had failed to understand what he was talking about. Soon, this problem became the most important part of their lives, and it was not long before the old routine was re-established; he confessing to more and more shame, she avowing more and more respect. Mrs. Divver felt it was a cruel fate that the maturity and honesty which had turned their courtship into marriage should now possibly turn their marriage into divorce.

But the marriage continued for another long year. During that time, Divver’s conscience grew so bad that his only relief was to sit beside his wife in the evenings and tell her in the fullest detail how inadequately he loved her. To put him at his ease, his wife used to sew or knit while he talked, until one day he confessed that it drove him half out of his mind to watch the needle going in and out with such tiny, precise stitches. So from then on, she just sat, only getting up now and then to make them both a drink.

Divver talked in an unrepressed way, frowning, rolling his eyes, waving his arms, splaying his fingers and walking up and down. He would begin in a general way, talking of his egotism and his inability to lose himself totally in her, and as the hours
passed, he would go on to describe, say, the sudden, intense feeling for her that had come over him when he was in a bar yesterday or discussing a grave political turn with friends. This feeling, he would say, had encouraged him to think that love was really present—until he had taken it apart scrupulously and found it full of typical bourgeois deception and dishonesty. “I have only to think about it for twenty-four hours,” he would say, “and then it goes bad on me and I know it’s nothing to do with what I really feel about you.”

At first these confessions did the marriage good, because after the day’s last pin-head of dishonesty had been frankly exposed, discussed and painfully marked down for what it was worth as an obstruction to happiness, Divver became unquestioningly affectionate with his wife, as though love’s emptied batteries had been surreptitiously re-charged while he was driving the other way. In fact, there were enough such revivals to make him suspicious of them, and thereafter when one
occurred he would soon convict it
of fraud by contrasting it with the conclusions he had reached through objective analysis. He realized, he told his wife sadly, that these spurts of love were at bottom nothing but wish-fulfilment dreams, provoked by his subconscious desire to evade his undoubtable guilt.

Each of Divver’s confessions came from so deep inside him that when one had bloomed and Mrs. Divver had, as usual, plucked it by assuring him that his honesty was what she loved best in him, she was sure that he couldn’t possibly find one more thing to be ashamed of. But he always did, and, moreover, he was always passionately sure that his newest doubt was the most important doubt of all, beside which all the previous doubts he had told her about were trifles, a basic doubt fit to rank with the torments of the great religious philosophers. The worst of these came when he told her that for months he had been tortured by the need to tell her that
he considered her stupid (yes, stupid, that was the word, there was no evading it!) and that all the other confessions he had made to her were, he now saw clearly, simply excuses for not frankly admitting this. He had been so horrified to think of the pain he would give her by speaking out, and by fear of the shame he would feel having done so, that he had led her astray with chatter about trifles. But now he realized that if their relationship were to be an honourable one, he must be truthful even about this. Then he begged her miserably to tell him frankly if at heart she believed that he was nothing but a dirty little worm.

She answered that he was justified in speaking up, and that she was the last person to imagine that she was intelligent; she might well be stupid. As to her opinion of him, she said that she had stated it again and again and that it was no different now: she loved him as he was and felt sure that things would be all right if only he could believe that he was not a worm. At this, the most aggrieved look she had ever seen came into his face; he turned red, stammered, and at last said, with an incredulous groan: “Do you really know what it means for me to call you stupid? Can you really, honestly,
feel
it?”

Mrs. Divver said no more at the time; but she must have been more hurt than she realized, because next time Divver begged her to state her honest opinion of him she found that she had collected a few complaints. Perhaps she also felt that mentioning them might be evidence of her not being so stupid after all. Divver seemed only too eager to hear them, but he was obviously disappointed when she told him that sometimes she felt he was lazy about the house and managed to be out of the way when there were chores to be done and people whom he disliked, to talk to. He explained, gently but a little contemptuously, as though she had convicted him of being a pickpocket when he was Jack-the-Ripper, that these defects were the least important symptoms of a character that was
basically degenerate, wilfully destructive, and hog-tied by an infantile narcissism. At this, Mrs. Divver really did feel she was stupid, and said so, quite resentfully, and burst into tears. Divver began to console her at once, and at the same time plunged into terrible shame; they ended the evening more miserable than they had ever been before. But at least Mrs. Divver had made a start on the road to objective analysis, and from there on she grew bolder and even a little more subtle in telling Divver what she disliked about him, going so far as to invent items when necessary. She would state them only vaguely and hesitantly—as though she were tossing over a few limp bits of rubber, which Divver spent the rest of the evening blowing up into large, coloured, explosive balloons. For a while it seemed that there was now more balance in their relations, due to her having realized that intimacy depends upon co-operation, and two minds work better than one.

At this time, in a sudden, helpless moment, Mrs. Divver made the silly mistake of telling a woman friend a little of what was wrong. The friend repeated it to her husband, who became indignant and passed it on to another couple, who also became indignant and felt it was their duty to tip off one or two other couples who liked Divver. At last it reached someone who felt angry and dutiful enough to reproach Divver for treating his wife like a slop-pail. Divver came home not only in the depths of shame but more torn in his vanity than ever before. He told his wife how terrible he had felt when he realized what he had been doing to her: “Yippy was dead right to tell me,” he said, “and I know he must have gone through hell wondering if he should or not: Yippy’s got guts. But why didn’t
you
tell me? Why did you just let me go on?” They both felt terribly ashamed, and Divver swore that he would never burden her in that way again, and made her swear that she would stop him instantly if he began.

Mrs. Divver took courage from the quiet that fell on the
apartment, until she found that her husband could speak as forbiddingly with his eyes, his neck, his shoulders, his leg muscles, as with his tongue: when he lay in bed asleep his joints cracked like the muskets of a firing squad. His rejection of normal speech soon became so nerve-racking that his wife told him that she didn’t expect him never to tell her anything at all. But at first he kept stubbornly to his promise, and Mrs. Divver had a hard time convincing him that his resolution was agony to her. When at last he returned to plain speaking, she found that he was no longer upset by her stupidity or his own mental degeneracy. On the contrary, he was now convinced, after weeks of silence which had given him a chance to sift things to the bottom, that he had ruined her mental equilibrium by not having given her proper physical satisfaction. From now on, he assured her, setting his jaw, their love-life would be different, and he would see to it that she lacked no attention that would help towards complete sexual fulfilment. Mrs. Divver turned white, and replied that she liked him as he was: but he was firm, and pushed the new project ahead with the same blunt integrity that he had given to their minds and psyches. At first he was contented by the simplest assurances on her part as to the extent of his success, but gradually his doubts returned and he was impelled to question her more and more scrupulously as to the degree and nature of her satisfaction. He also admitted that he had painful doubts as to whether he would ever really be able to do his sexual duty by her, and his efforts to prove that he could made her so uncomfortable that she began to have headaches, which she attributed to a family tendency to migraine. But although Divver was only twenty-five, he was already too well educated to be convinced by such a fairy-tale, and he soon began to say that he had failed as a bedmate just as he had failed as a helpmate. They began to sleep in separate rooms, but it was six months before he managed to tell her that it was now clear to him
that they couldn’t remain together and that he had already ruined the best years of her life and could not bear the thought of ruining any more. He added, a few days later, that he had known this for the past year, and that all the burdens he had laid on her and the efforts he had made to make her sexually well-rounded had been merely efforts to escape from admitting the truth. Mrs. Divver answered that he had always been honest with her, but that if he felt that even honesty had failed there was nothing left but to go their own ways. They agreed that the real tragedy of the matter was that it had taken them some years to realize the fruitlessness of their being together at all—to which Divver added, one day while he was packing, that it now seemed clear to him that subconsciously he had wanted their relationship to end in tragedy ever since he first knew her.

Mrs. Divver only saw Max once more. Five months after they had separated, he came around and rang her bell. From his look she knew that he had something on his mind. After a few preliminaries he came to the point: he had met another woman whom he liked very much, but he simply could not, he said, see the last of Mrs. Divver without admitting something that had been preying on his mind ever since the marriage ended. It had to do with his conscience—or rather, and this was the whole trouble, it had
not
to do with his conscience. During the last weeks of their marriage, he explained, he had given the impression that he suffered from a bad conscience at the thought of leaving her. But on analysing this feeling in the past weeks he had realized that at heart he didn’t really care about how painful she found their separation; he didn’t really suffer at all on her account. What he had thought was a bad conscience had been really a cowardly fear of what people might say when they knew he had left her.

She answered that the distinction between conscience and cowardice didn’t seem to make much difference, since the
marriage was over anyway. But he insisted—perhaps she hadn’t understood exactly, he said—that there was all the difference in the world: he was trying to tell her that he left her without an atom of regret, and, in fact, at this very moment felt no regret, although he did still feel scared when he met their friends. At this point she vaguely suspected that the object of his visit was to make himself so despicable a character in relation to her that he could feel like a reformed character in relation to the other woman. This was more than she could bear, so she merely said, with a hint of spite, that she was afraid she was too stupid to understand what he was talking about. She then asked him to leave, pretending that she was expecting a lover in a few minutes. Her next husband was an affable man who worked for a firm of distillers and took only normal interest in honesty; the firmness of their marriage was due to the respect he had for his wife, which was based on the fact that her first husband had been an intellectual.

*

Once free of his first marriage, Divver was ready to make a start in life. Science and marriage, he felt, had combined to teach him the nature of mental and physical responsibility: the lessons had been painful, but so was all growth into maturity. What remained now was to broaden his scope, to learn to apply his experience in a wider field, to stop being dependent on an allowance from his provincial father. The following summer he took a vacation-cruise to Italy. It was his first professional venture, because although he paid his own way, the kindly liberal editor of Mrs. Morgan’s weekly had promised to try and use any reports on Fascism that Divver might write. “Of course you’re untrained,” said the editor honestly, “but often that kind of freshness receives impressions that we old-timers can’t register any more.” When the boat left New York harbour, for the first time in his life Divver
experienced that piercing sense of freedom that penetrates Americans when they watch the Statue of Liberty fade from sight. In Divver’s case it also seemed like a sign from Heaven that his maturity must be devoted to foreign affairs—the kind of feeling St. Boniface had when he left his native Devonshire to Christianize the Germans.

During his first week abroad Divver never ceased to be astonished by the conjunction of himself and Italy. The first time he entered a café and observed two men chatting over coffee, he was swept by a sense of the miraculous. It seemed astonishing, when he came to think of it, that these men actually should be Italians, natives of this land; that the
language
they were speaking was their natural mother-tongue; that they knew no way to behave, to be, other than their way; that they found it absolutely natural to be Italians, and never found it surprising that there should be a country named Italy. After wondering over this for a day or so, Divver went to work in a determined way. First, he did something that seemed a little ridiculous even to himself: he wrote a dignified note to Mussolini, requesting an interview. Then he walked the streets of Rome with a notebook in which he put down any unusual forms that caught his eye; there were a great many. He was shocked by the immoral libretto of the opera he saw, for instance; partly, no doubt, because he was going through the stage of rigid puritanism common to men who have just abandoned their wives. But he knew that these jottings were not enough to make articles, and he also had a shrewd idea that if he were to justify his freshness he must be receptive to more significant things. Soon his notes reflected his deeper penetration: