She scarcely heeded him. The sparks were like seeds, she thought, like a sperm of fire that died in the air. The people were dressed in white, and they were singing or chanting as they moved. The voices seemed to pulse in time to the flames, so that they were the same thing, voices and fire. It was like nothing she had ever seen before, a living thing, frightening and beautiful, with a shape that was constant yet endlessly blurred with change. She saw how it softened as it fused with the surrounding air, rose and fell back, ended in a zone that was neither fire nor sky, a corona of light.
“Fire worshipers, thrown in free of charge,” Elliott said in low tones. “It is an escape of gas, you know.”
His face was very close to her own; she felt the warm breath of his words on her cheek. The daring of it all, the dangers of the escapade, the shock of the fire, came to her now in a wave of reaction, made her tremulous, loosened her limbs. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful,” she said. “How would it start? I mean, what would make it start to burn like that?”
“Anything could do it, any accidental spark. It comes out as a mixture of oil and gas—very inflammable. Or perhaps a flash of lightning. This one is quite recent, they tell me. They can go on forever, once they start. I thought you might like to see it.” He paused a moment, then said, “Perhaps we’d better go, we are not so very safe here.”
But she did not move and did not draw away from him and after a moment he kissed her cheek and the side of her neck and she turned her face to him so as to be kissed on the mouth. She saw him move back to unsling the rifle and take off the cartridge belt. Then his arms were around her and she still saw the fire through closed eyes, and the beauty of the fire was in everything she felt and did.
11.
“To tell you the truth, I am rather worried about Somerville,” Palmer said. “He is behaving strangely, I can’t make him out.”
He and Patricia were sitting in the common room at opposite sides of the fireplace, where a fire of wood scraps and dried camel dung was burning. They were grateful for it—the evenings were cold still—and they were glad to be sitting here together, talking companionably, with the house quiet around them and no one else about. Also conducive to talk was the fact that they were sitting at some distance apart; if too close together—and alone—they would fall to embracing and kissing, and this was good but also frustrating, as it could go no further for the time being. Palmer, whose studies had not left him much time for girlfriends in the past, had believed at first that this ache of unsatisfied desire was entirely his, entirely male, and he had admired Patricia even more than before when she, in her capacity of modern young woman who did not mince words, had informed him that the symptoms might be different in women but were no less physiological. Now, as he looked across at her, at the mobile features that changed with her thoughts, the generous mouth, the eyes full of life and intelligence, he thought once again how lucky he was. “It’s very unsettling,” he said, and for a moment or two he was not sure whether he meant his worries about Somerville or the desire to lay hands on Patricia.
“Why is that?”
“Well, his mind seems to be somewhere else half the time—he looks as if he is watching or listening to something. He is secretive too, in a way. I mean, take tonight for example. He comes back late from collecting the money for the wages. He’s been riding all day and he is completely fagged out. Then he tells me he wants me to go with him to the mound at crack of dawn tomorrow morning because he wants me to look at something. He doesn’t tell me what it is. All he will say is that he wants me to be up there, already standing up there at sunrise.” He glanced at his watch. “That’s about six hours’ time,” he said. “Hardly worth going to bed.”
Patricia smiled at him. He didn’t like early hours, she knew that, but it didn’t matter because she didn’t mind them. Once she was awake she wanted to be up and about. When they were living together, she would get up, she would start things moving… “I don’t think he is very well,” she said. “In his state of mind, I mean. He looks feverish to me, quite done up. He needs looking after, and Edith doesn’t exactly excel in that department, does she?”
“Then there is this business of the line. He doesn’t talk about it anymore, but he is convinced that the line is going to go smack through the dig. I mean, the Germans are not fools, are they? Why should they take on a gradient like that when they can stay on the flat? I think he honestly believes that they are intending to use dynamite on it and flatten it out that way. Why should they? What is to stop them going round the other side of the village? It’s a matter of half a mile, if that. I just can’t understand why he is so pessimistic about it.”
Patricia was silent for some moments. She was in love with Harold, and she admired him too: his steadiness, his kindness of heart, his brand of vigilant skepticism, a sort of critical acuteness in which there was no malice, the lightness with which he bore his very considerable learning. But pessimism, at a time when Freud and his circle in Vienna were publishing papers on pathological states both individual and collective! No, she couldn’t let it pass. She wanted him to be a success, and she was ready to help him. But she also wanted to be a success herself, and success began at home, like charity: It lay in the freedom to differ, even to reprove and correct, and this was something that had to be established early.
“I know you are fond of John,” she said. “You got on well from the start, didn’t you? I think your concern for him is making you take a rather superficial view.” She saw some startlement come into his eyes; it could not be often that he was accused of this. “It’s natural enough,” she said quickly. “It makes you reluctant to think that there might be something more seriously amiss with him. I mean, when you talk about pessimism, you are implying it is a sort of mood, something he can be jollied out of. But this is something more than that: He has convinced himself without much in the way of evidence. That’s another way of describing obsession. You can’t be so easily jollied out of an obsession, can you?”
“You mean he believes he is a victim preordained, that the bomb is aimed at him?”
“Something like that. I don’t know how people get into that state, it’s a mystery of the psyche.”
Palmer reflected for a while. “I think you are probably right,” he said, much to her relief without animosity. “Right about me and about John. I hadn’t wanted to think along those lines because it amounts to saying that in his heart he actually wants to be wiped out, and that is slightly mad.”
“Not so much that he wants it, but he feels that it is certain to happen, that something has been set in motion that can only end in destruction, that it gathers pace whatever anyone can do and it’s coming straight for him. I don’t know if you would call it mad. A lot of people in Europe must be feeling like that these days.”
There was a look on her face now that Palmer recognized, combative, ready to deal with hecklers—her speechy look, as he called it to himself. He didn’t dislike it, it belonged to her, but it brought out a spirit of contradiction in him; he had a constitutional distrust of large statements. Patricia saw him screw up his mouth and narrow his eyes in an expression she was destined to see quite often. “I think you are piling it on a bit,” he said. “John Somerville as the soul of Europe?”
“You think it is far-fetched? Perhaps you are right. But John is a sensitive man, and it must be distressing to be living at a time when people like him—and like you too—people trying to put things together, make sense of things, add to the sense of human community, are facing a contrary spirit of dismemberment and destructiveness that is terribly strong and pervasive. It is a kind of brutality that goes under the name of realism, and it is alive and well in Britain. You can call it the spirit of commerce, or the spirit of empire, or the élan vital. At Cambridge I made a special study of the Whig administrations of the mid-nineteenth century and their dealings with Belgium and Russia, and what Lord Palmerston said during his time as Foreign Secretary has always stayed in my mind. I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff but not that. ‘There are no longer permanent principles, only permanent interests, and we pursue these to the exclusion of all else.’ That’s more than half a century ago, but nothing has changed.”