The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  How differently, two years later, did Pearl feel about the impossible being in whose hand their fates rested. She mistook, at first, her warmer feelings for protectiveness, even pity. She ran to fetch his coat, though she did not presume to help him on with it, an operation which his arthritis had rendered difficult. His stick was not only in view, but polished. She also cleaned his shoes. (He never commented.) Sometimes he told her to make telephone calls to hotels. Once he asked her to go out and buy him a hat. (‘What kind?’ ‘Any kind.’) That had caused Pearl a lot of joy and pain. She used to say to herself, though never to Hattie, ‘the poor old chap’. He was a shambling eccentric who needed to be looked after. Too late she realized that her heart was involved.

  If he had really just been a ‘poor old chap’ she would probably have loved him too, but differently. As it was, there was an extra spice of fear and admiration. Not that either Pearl or Hattie had ever read any of his books, but they took it for granted that he was ‘awfully distinguished’. Pearl actually got one of his books out of a library once, but could not understand it and hurriedly took it back for fear he should suddenly arrive and find her reading it: which she knew would displease him very much indeed. Also, she wanted to disguise her obsession from Hattie, and had so far succeeded. It was not Pearl’s ‘place’ to love John Robert. Meanwhile he walked in her dreams, surrounded by the joy and fear which had been dimly presaged in the adventure with the hat. She must do everything right, she must be perfect and not fail. Above all, she must not be discovered. It did not occur to her to console herself by taking a heroic stance; her situation was without choice, her course the only possible one. She lived inside a love so improper and so hopeless that she felt sometimes almost free to enjoy herself therein. Love, even without hope, was a joyful energy. When John Robert wrote to her she blushed under her dark complexion. Before he came she imagined his coming a hundred times. When he came she was scarlet, faint, but invisible, always efficient. As she stood at attention and awaited his instructions she longed to seize his hand and cover it with kisses. She loved his orders. That was all that he gave her, and it was much. She trembled and he looked through her with his preoccupied and distant eyes.

  I must give them up, thought Pearl, as she stood on the green mossy path and looked through the trees at the April sun on the lawn beyond. I must give them both up. I must cut off, cut away, and become another person.

  Quelconque une solitude

  Sans le cygne ni le quai

  Mire sa desuetude

  Au regard que j’abdiquai

  Ici de la gloriole

  Haute à ne le pas toucher

  Dont maint ciel se bariole

  Avec les ors de coucher

  Mais langoureusement longe

  Comme de blanc linge ôté

  Tel fugace oiseau si plonge

  Exultatrice a cote

  Dans l’onde toi devenue

  Ta jubilation nue.

  ‘What is the subject of longe?’ asked Father Bernard. By this time he was becoming rather confused himself.

  Hattie suggested ‘solitude’. This had not occurred to Father Bernard. He said, ‘Oh, not oiseau?’

  ‘Could be oiseau,’ Hattie said politely.

  He had reflected with interest, even with a little excitement, upon the prospect of meeting Miss Meynell and examining her to see what stuff she was made of, since thus he interpreted John Robert’s vague idea. He thought, the great man has no conception of the girl, doesn’t know what on earth to do with her. He can’t go on hiding her away in a boarding school, he has to make a decision but doesn’t know how to. All right, I’ll have a look at her at least. But I shall leave him in no doubt about his responsibilities! I’m not going to be saddled with her!

  Having accepted the idea that he was to ‘examine’ Miss Meynell, Father Bernard felt at a loss how to proceed. He decided to be frank, to explain that he was not in any sense her ‘tutor’, and that he simply wanted to explore with her, if he could, the subjects which she had found interesting at school, testing her in a friendly way so as to give a helpful report to her grandfather. ‘Not mathematics,’ he added, laughing, at which he had been a perfect dunce. Miss Meynell, not admitting to having been a dunce, agreed it was unnecessary to discuss this subject. She received him nervously and, when the ‘visitors’ had gone, ushered him into the sitting-room. The maid, a girl with an interesting head, looked in to ask if they wanted coffee, which they did not. When Father Bernard had explained his plan, Miss Meynell became quiet and business-like. He had already had a surprise. He had expected a big loutish ‘grown-up’ girl, ‘all over the place’, but this small, quiet creature was both more childish and more composed than his picture of an ‘American teenager’.

  He began by asking her to make a precis of the leading article in The Times, which, together with some books, he had brought with him. This she did creditably, saying that they often did précis at school. He then inquired whether she knew any foreign languages, and when she admitted to German asked if she could speak it at all, at which she uttered a fluent outburst of remarks which he could not altogether follow. Hastily leaving German, he inquired about her Italian. Yes, Miss Meynell knew some Italian. Father Bernard, leaving Clergy House in a hurry, had picked up his copy of Dante, and now turned, with new-found caution, to a passage which he knew well in the third Canto of the Inferno. ‘Per me si va nella città dolente, per me si va nell’eterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente.. .’ It was only when he had the book open that he realized with a curious pang, even with a sort of fright, that the passage he had chosen contained the terrible words which John Robert had uttered in condemnation of George McCaffrey: a condemnation now seen to be of such resonance and such finality, and against which, as Father Bernard had known at the time, and knew now with an added poignancy, he ought instantly to have protested. He asked Hattie to read the first fifty lines of the canto in Italian, which she did readily and with an expression which declared her understanding. She then proceeded to an occasionally hesitant but accurate translation. Dante and Virgil have passed the gate to hell but have not yet crossed Acheron. In this no man’s land, rejected both by heaven and hell, Dante gets his first glimpse of tormented people, and is duly horrified. (He was to see worse. Did he get used to it?) ‘Who are these people so overcome by pain?’ Virgil replies that ‘this is the miserable condition of wretched souls who lived without disgrace and without praise. Mixed with them are the vile angels who are neither rebels nor loyal to God, but were for themselves.’ ‘Master, what makes them cry out so terribly?’ ‘They have no hope of death, and their blind life is so abject that they envy every other lot. Mercy and justice alike despise them. Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. Do not let us speak of them; just look and pass by.’ How terrible, Father Bernard thought, that this ferocious judgement and those words should have come spontaneously into John Robert’s mind when Father Bernard wanted to talk about George; and the priest felt a sudden rage, almost a hatred, rising in him against the philosopher, and mingling with the lurid and exalted emotions aroused by the fierce words of the great poet.

  ‘Do you believe in hell, Miss Meynell?’

  ‘Please call me Hattie. I’m Harriet - but that’s what they call me - Hattie.’

  ‘Do you believe in hell, Hattie?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe in God and the after life. I’m sorry.’

  Father Bernard did not think it consistent with his tutelary role to say that he did not either. He said, ‘We are subject to time. We cannot conceive of eternity. All we can know of hell is what happens to us in the present. If there is hell it is now.’

  ‘You mean people live now in hell? You mean like - hungry people?’

  ‘I mean like evil people.’

  ‘But the people here weren’t evil, were they?’

  ‘No, but then they weren’t quite in hell, were they?’

  ‘It seemed awful enough,’ said Hattie. She added, ‘I feel so sorry for poor Virgi
l being drawn into that terrible world.’

  ‘You mean the Christian world?’

  ‘Well-yes— ’

  Father Bernard laughed and patted her hand as he took the book from her. They left the theological discussion at that point and proceeded to the French language, and it was here that Father Bernard found himself in really deep water. He had brought a few books of French poetry with him including Mallarmé, whom he now picked up and opened more or less at random. He had intended to choose a less difficult poem, but the book had opened automatically at one of his favourites, and he had laid it on the table between them. Looking at it now, he realized that although he could sort of understand the poem, and liked it very much, he could not construe it.

  Neither, of course, could Hattie, who had never seen the poem before.

  Hattie’s attempt at a literal translation began: ‘A sort of solitude without a, or the, swan or quay reflects its disuse in the look which I abdicated, or removed, from the glorious - no, the vanity - so high it can’t be touched, with which many skies streak themselves with the golds of sunset, but languidly wanders like white linen taken off a sort of fugitive bird if it plunges — ’ By the time Hattie had broken down here they were both laughing.

  ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘You read it aloud as if you understood!’

  ‘Well it’s beautiful - but whatever does it mean?’

  ‘What do you think it’s about, what sort of scene is the poet evoking?’

  Hattie looked silently at the text, while Father Bernard admired her smooth boyish neck over which tendrils of pale-fair hair from the complex bun were distractedly straying.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Since he says there is no swan and no quay, I suppose it might be a river?’

  ‘Good deduction. After all it’s a poem!’

  ‘And there’s a wave at the end.’

  ‘And - nue?’

  ‘Someone naked, perhaps someone swimming naked.’

  ‘Yes. It’s like a puzzle picture, isn’t it.’

  ‘He’s turning away from the gloriole that means sort of false showy something, doesn’t it, which is too high to touch compared with - no, well - and the bird can’t be the subject because then longe wouldn’t be right - I think - so I suppose regard is the subject - but— ’

  ‘Oh never mind about the subject — ’

  ‘But I do mind! The solitude, the uninteresting solitude, reflects its swanless desolation in the look which he had turned away from the false glory, too high to touch, with which many skies dapple themselves in sunset golds - perhaps he thinks sunsets are vulgar - then, or but why but? - something or other, either his look on a fugitive bird, no I see, his gaze coasts languidly, no, languorously, along like white linen taken off - that can’t be right - has longe got an object, could it be the bird? - perhaps the bird is like the linen, maybe it’s a white bird that plunges - like the - the clothes which - no, no, surely the jubilation plunges - and the languorous gaze coasts along the jubilation - I mean - then “but” would have sense - it’s all rather dull until my gaze languorously - no - if a (but why if?), if a bird plunges like white linen taken off, my gaze languorously follows, exulting beside me, or it, in the wave that you have become, your naked jubilation - oh dear! that can’t be right — ’

  Hattie had become quite excited. With one hand she absently pulled the hairpins out of her hair, gathered the mass of silky silver-yellow stuff together, and pushed it all down the back of her dress.

  Father Bernard was excited too, but not by the grammatical quest. He had never, he now realized, subjected the poem to the sort of scrutiny which even Hattie’s jumbled commentary comprised. What was the subject of what? Who cared? The general sense of the poem was perfectly clear to him, or rather he had made his own sense and hallowed it long ago.

  He said, ‘Let’s get the general picture. You said there was a river and someone swimming naked. How many people are there in the poem?’

  Hattie replied, ‘Two. The speaker and the swimmer.’

  ‘Good. And who are they?’

  ‘Who are they? Oh, well, I suppose the poet and some friend — ’

  Father Bernard’s imagination had, in taking charge of the poem, taken advantage of the fact that the sex of the swimmer was not specified. In the blessed free-for-all of fantasy he had pictured the charming companion, whose underwear slides off with the languid ease of a bird’s flight, as a boy. The final image was particularly precious to him of the young thing diving in and rising into the wave of his plunge, tossing back his wet hair and laughing. And all about, the green river bank, the sunshine, the warmth, the solitude … Do you think it’s a love poem?’ he asked her.

  ‘Well, it could be.’

  ‘How can it not be?’ he almost cried. He thought, she is unawakened. ‘The poet is with his — ’ he checked himself.

  ‘Girl friend, I suppose,’ said Hattie stiffly. She was feeling shocked at Father Bernard’s evident indifference to the pleasure of finding out main verbs and what agrees with what; and she had not failed to notice his dismay at her outburst of German.

  ‘Girl friend! What a phrase. He is with his mistress.’

  ‘Why not his wife?’ said Hattie. ‘Was he married?’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t matter. This is a poem. We don’t want wives in poems. He is with a lovely young woman — ’

  ‘How do you know she’s lovely?’

  ‘I know. Just see the picture.’

  Hattie said more kindly, ‘Yes, I think I can - it’s like that picture by Renoir - La baigneuse au griffon - only there - well, there are two girls, not a man and a girl.’

  This did not interest Father Bernard, at any rate he did not pursue it, but the evocation of the lush greenery and the Impressionist painter accorded with his racing mood. ‘Yes, yes, it’s sunny and green and the river is glittering and the sunshine is coming through the leaves and dappling, that was a good word you used, the naked form of the — ’

  ‘The sun doesn’t dapple the girl, it’s the gloriole, no it’s the sky or skies that dapple themselves with — ’

  ‘Never mind, you must get the sense of the whole - the linen, white like the bird, slips away — ’ The image which had now, with magisterial charm, risen up in the priest’s mind, lily-pale and glowing with youth, was that of Tom McCaffrey.

  At about the same time that Father Bernard was taking liberties (and they went rather far) with the shade of Tom McCaffrey, the real Tom, standing in Greg and Ju’s sitting-room in the house in Travancore Avenue, was gazing with puzzlement and alarm at a letter which he had just found lying upon the door mat. It had been sent by post to Belmont, whence it had evidently been redelivered by hand. It read as follows:

  16 Hare Lane

  Burkestown

  Ennistone

  Dear Mr McCaffrey,

  I wonder if you would be so good as to come round and see me, as soon as is convenient, at this address? There is something which I want to ask you. During the next few days, I shall be at home until midday.

  Yours sincerely

  J. R. Rozanov

  P.S. I would be grateful if you would treat this request as a matter of confidence.

  Tom’s first thought, when he saw the startling signature, was that, of course, the letter was intended for George. He inspected the envelope again, where John Robert had certainly and clearly written ‘Thomas McCaffrey’, to which he had ridiculously added ‘Esquire’.

  Scarlett-Taylor came in. Tom handed him the letter. ‘What do you think of this?’

  Emma read the letter, frowned, and returned it to Tom. ‘You’ve let him down already.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He asked you to treat it as a matter of confidence. Now you’ve shown it to me.’

  ‘Oh well - yes - but — ’

  ‘Fortunately for you, I shall observe perfect discretion about your lapse.’

  ‘He asked me to treat it as a matter of confidence, but I didn’t
say I would — ’

  ‘Any gentleman would respond — ’

  ‘Damn it, I only got it a minute ago.’

  ‘I fail to see what difference that makes.’

  ‘I didn’t have time to think!’

  ‘That shows that you are instinctively irresponsible, you cannot even be trusted for a minute.’

  ‘You’re romantic about him, you wish he wanted to see you.’

  ‘Don’t be a perfect fool.’

  ‘You’re jealous!’

  ‘You’re childish!’

  ‘You’re sulky.’

  ‘Do you want a punch?’

  ‘You wouldn’t punch anybody.’

  ‘Couldn’t I — ’

  ‘I said you wouldn’t, not couldn’t. Emma, don’t be cross with me - you aren’t cross, are you? We can’t quarrel, we can’t quarrel, we can’t — ’

  Since the occasion of Tom’s momentous visit to Emma’s room, an uneasy odd relationship had existed between them. That, the visit, had been something noumenal, as if they had slipped out of time, out of ordinary individual being. They had not made love in any of the rather mechanical senses in which Tom had hitherto understood a making of love. It was rather that, instantly, they had become love. For Tom it was like being embraced by an angel, being inescapably held between the wings of an angel who was and was not Emma. This enfolding was perfect happiness, perfect bliss, perfect unproblematic, undramatic sexual joy. Tom could not remember having, after Emma took him in his arms, moved at all. As he recalled it, they had both lain, gripped together, absolutely motionless, in a spellbound ecstatic trance, perfectly relaxed yet also in extreme tension, in a holdingness of immense urgent power. In this entranced state Tom had fallen asleep. He had awakened near dawn and was at once aware of where he was and that Emma, still utterly close to him but no longer holding, was awake too. As soon as Emma felt Tom awakening he murmured to him, ‘Go, Tom, go.’