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What she had read had evidently made her impatient of the prime discrepancy between man as he might be, and as he was. She would impose her crude belief that there could be heroism, excellence on herself and others, until they, or she, gave in. Exceptions could arise, rare and implausible, to suggest she might be right. To those exceptions she would give her whole devotion. It was apparently for them she was reserving her humility.
When Sefton Thrale said the word "global" you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcroppings of this world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean, or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.
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He used outworn idiom: "Lombard Street to a china orange," "All round China to get to Charing Cross"; "The Old Lady"even"of Threadneedle Street": phrases outdated before his time, which he cultivated and kept going if not alive. Still spoke of Turkey as "the sick man of Europe," though the entire Continent was a casualty ward long since. His sympathies were with the manageable distances of the past rather than the extravagant reach of the future. The future had been something to talk about, one foot safely on the fender.
It was easy for youth to scent this out and condemn. Less easy to feel for what was human in it, let alone pitiful.
The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end. An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief which in Caro was to last her lifetime that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life--I have done this, how could I have done that--like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. There was Father, loudly angered; Mother, all untidy woe. Then there was his aptitude: a teacher coming round after school, "The boy has unusual aptitude." The boy, out of all the others. His name had been printed on a list, and the award covered everything, even the books except, that is, for a coat; and the university was near the North Sea.
Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.
As Ted Tice saw, it was not a matter of conquering her objections. She herself required a kind of conquering. And he had begun with devotion. Her demands would before long be tested by experience, as principle is tested by adversity, and it might be that she would temporize; but for the present imagined herself transcendant over what she had not encountered.
She wished to rise to some solitary height. From ignorance she had an unobstructed view of knowledge--which she saw, on its elevation, stately, pale, pure as the Acropolis. It could not be said that hers was a harmless vanity: like any human wish for distinction, it could easily be denounced or mocked; and, in its present elemental form, was clearly short on pity. Yet, as pretensions go, it was by no means the worst.
Ted Tice already understood his attachment to Caro as intensification of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and his foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping.
"I've thought that too. I've thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books. Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair, or convincing."
"I don't tell her a thing of that sort. It seems to recoil." Caroline Bell having discovered in childhood that achievements can be transformed to hostile weapons. ("Everything falls in your lap, why should you care about a life like mine?") A childish struggle between the wish to show, or tell, and the need to hoard silent strength had long since been resolved. She said, "I'm not sure I can explain that."
He had seen Caro from a distance and altered his course to intersect. Had observed, as he drew near, that her walk turned the progress of other women to a thump or shuffle. He would have said her delicate dark strength was virile--a sombre glow that might distinguish some young man. He remembered dark, vigorous young men who kept somewhat to themselves, yet retained this vibrancy of adventure. Then he thought how such youths often ended feebly, how quickly they grew sour or cautious, or became the foils of bitter women--their energies turned to blame or bluster, their pride morose. He had already seen that; and supposed that in the case of women such beings dwindled entirely, or at most passed some shred of their lost impetus to children.
Paul Ivory had also noted penalties of impulse. Had seen how men provide themselves, before their taste or character is formed, with wife and children--committed and condemned thereafter to the fixtures of an outgrown fancy. He was satisfied his own prospective marriage would preclude such dangers. An accusation of dispassion would not have troubled him. He was not convinced that passion was essential, or that the world had properly defined it.
There was one thing. In his jungle prison Rex Ivory had, as before, composed poetrywhich he memorized there, since any scrap of paper was conserved for the coded casualty lists. An eminent publisher stood ready to sacrifice a portion of hoarded postwar paper to the awaited volume. None of this was unpredictable. What had not been expected was that the verses from the Malayan death camp, when transcribed, would be found to celebrate, exclusively and inexorably, the streams and hedgerows of Derbyshire.
There were other heroes by then, and other manuscripts. Public interest in Rex Ivory was waning, the paper shortage intensifying. At a top-level meeting held on a wet Saturday morning at the publishing house, it was felt that certain of the poemsin particular, one concerning a lapwinginvited critical derision. Availing themselves of an Act-of-God clause, the publishers withdrew from the contract. And The Half-Reap'd Field appeared, like earlier volumes, under an obscure imprint at the author's expense.
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