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Informed of the situation by Grace, Christian said, "Vail was a fool ever to get mixed up in it." But Christian was in fact content that Adam should take on Dora. It seemed something--like Lend-Lease, or the Marshall Plan--that an American should do. He told Grace, "I carried the burden long enough."
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In his solitude he said, "I blame myself." An accusation that seldom rings entirely true. If Christian placed blame elsewhere, then it was, curiously enough, on literature. He blamed--but that was not the word--the promptings and colourings of language, that put sights in his eyes and sentiments in his heart. He felt himself importuned by echoes that preceded utterance, betrayed by metaphors and exaltations that, acquired young, could never be eradicated.
Literature was a good servant but a bad master.
She took up a parched sandwich whose lifting corners bared a scaled sardine. She left the tough crusts with the half-gherkin on her plate. When they went out the man at the bar looked at her openly, tenderly, ignoring Christian's claim or seeing through it.
In the street Christian said, "You had an admirer in there." He did not mean himself.
"Yes."
Having drawn the man to her attention, he was displeased to find she had seen him. In no time obviously she will take up with someone else. You iron your hair, you nickname God's creatures, go thy ways.
On the Old World, History lay like a paralysis. In France, the generals died. In Italy a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle.
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Caro sat beside this obscure man who had risked himself and lived to tell, offhandedly, the tale. She said, "There are those, too, who befriend the weak because they feel themselves unworthy of the strong. Because they cannot bring themselves to honour abilities greater than their own." But who are the weak, she was wondering; who are the strong? This man had actually displayed the heroism most people confine to their fantasies. He had left nothing, in his nature, to be resisted or exposed. Because of him, one could look on the green vega as a place where one man at least had earned a right to be.
His misery in that place had all been typical, a random sample. The city was cursed with sleazy inevitability--the most sombre thoughts acquired a picked-over character, and pleasure came ready-mixed for quick satiety. He had brought a girl to the hotel because the city expected it of him: loneliness had been industrialized. Yet fornication itself was very solitude. When he thought, here, of his wife and children and his own rooms, they seemed like health, and he could not feel that was banal. And when he invoked the presence of Caro it was to pit her strength against a city, or the world.
Grace told him how her parents had died in the wreck of an Australian ferry when she was a child. Next--so it seemed, as she came to relate it--there had been Christian. Recounting these things, she felt her story was undeveloped, without event. Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth. The accidental foundering of her parents had remained larger than any conscious exploit of her own, and was still her only way to cause a stir.
The bare facts of Grace Thrale's love, if enumerated, would have appeared familiar, pitiful, and--to some--even comical. Of this, she herself was conscious. It was the sweetness that was unaccountable.
Because the condition struck her as inborn, she raked her experience for precedent. She dwelt on a man she had known long ago in London, before her marriage--a moody schoolteacher who often broke appointments or came late, and over whom she had suffered throughout a cold summer. Only the year before, she had heard he was now a headmaster in Dorset, and had looked up his name in the telephone directory. He provided no prologue to Angus Dance. In contrast to the schoolteacher, on the other hand, Christian had appeared a model of consideration, a responsible lover whose punctuality had from the start prefigured matrimony. Angus Dance had no precursor.
She saw, or knew, that Angus Dance had come back into the room. Making sure about some cheese puffs, she found him close to her, talking to a black-haired, blue-eyed girl who had come with the Dalrymples.
And why on earth not? A man like that could not possibly be leading a celibate life, abstinent in tribute to her own romantic fancies.
When she left the place it was getting dark and there was sleet. She did not want to go home; it was as if her humiliation must be disclosed there. She shrank from home as from extra punishmentas a child, mauled by playmates, might fear parental scolding for torn clothes. But stumbled along with no other possibility. Pain rose up from her thorax, and descended like sleet behind her eyes. It was scarcely credible there should be no one to comfort her.
She thought, My mortification. And for the first time realized that the word meant death.