THE CROSSROADS
Bad habit it might start to become, yet the beginning of 2007 sees me post words that are not my own. A new year is always the time for resolutions and turning points; I hope to be permitted to nourish the wish that the following excerpt from Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” would find its way into the heads and the hearts of as many blogwalkers as possible. Nice stuff to contemplate, and what not.
‘When are you coming back to Chicago?’
‘Chicago? I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it.’
‘You said that if you hadn’t got what you wanted after two years you’d give it up as a bad job.’
‘I couldn’t go back now. I’m on the threshold. I see vast lands of the spirit stretching out before me, beckoning, and I’m eager to travel them.’
‘What do you expect to find in them?’
‘The answers to my questions.’ He gave her a glance that was almost playful, so that except that she knew him so well, she might have thought he was speaking in jest. ‘I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.’
Isabel gave a little gasp. It made her uncomfortable to hear Larry say such things, and she was thankful that he spoke so lightly, in the tone of ordinary conversation, that it was possible for her to overcome her embarrassment.
‘But Larry,’ she smiled. ‘People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d been answered by now.’
Larry chuckled.
‘Don’t laugh as if I’d said something idiotic,’ she said sharply.
‘On the contrary I think you’ve said something shrewd. But on the other hand you might say that if men have been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them. Besides, it’s not true that no one has found the answers. There are more answers than questions, and lots of people have found answers that were perfectly satisfactory for them. Old Ruysbroek for instance.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Oh, just a guy I didn’t know at college,’ Larry answered flippantly.
Isabel didn’t know what he meant, but passed on.
‘It all sounds so adolescent to me. Those are the sort of things sophomores get excited about and then when they leave college they forget about them. They have to earn a living.’
‘I don’t blame them. You see, I’m in a happy disposition that I have enough to live on. If I hadn’t I’d have had to do like everybody else and make money.’
‘But doesn’t money mean anything to you?’
‘Not a thing,’ he grinned.
‘How long d’you think all this is going to take you?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Five years. Ten years.’
‘And after that? What are you going to do with all this wisdom?’
‘If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.’
Isabel clasped her hands passionately and leant forwards in her chair.
‘You’re so wrong, Larry. You’re an American. Your place isn’t here. Your place is in America.’
‘I shall come back when I’m ready.’
‘But you’re missing so much. How can you bear to sit here in a backwater just when we’re living through the most wonderful adventure the world has ever known? Europe’s finished. We’re the greatest, the most powerful people in the world. We’re going forward by leaps and bounds. We’ve got everything. It’s your duty to take part in the development of your country. You’ve forgotten, you don’t know how thrilling life is in America today. Are you sure you’re not doing this because you haven’t the courage to stand up to the work that’s before every American now? Oh, I know you’re working in a way, but isn’t it just an escape from your responsibilities? Is it more than just a sort of laborious idleness? What would happen to America if everyone shirk as you’re shirking?’
‘You’re very severe, honey,’ he smiled. ‘The answer to that is that everyone doesn’t feel like me. Fortunately for themselves, perhaps, most people are prepared to follow the normal course; what you forget is that I want to learn as passionately as – Gray, for instance, wants to make pots of money. Am I really a traitor to my country because I want to spend a few years educating myself? It may be that when I’m through I shall have something to give that people will be glad to take. It’s only a chance, of course, but if I fail I shall be no worse off than a man who’s gone into business and hasn’t made a go of it.’
‘And what about me? Am I of no importance to you at all?’
‘You’re of very great importance. I want you to marry me.’
‘When? In ten years?’
‘No. Now. As soon as possible.’
‘On what? Mamma can’t afford to give me anything. Besides, she wouldn’t if she could. She’d think it wrong to help you to live without doing anything.’
‘I wouldn’t want to take anything from your mother,’ said Larry. ‘I’ve got three thousand a year. That’s plenty in Paris. We could have a little apartment and a bonne a tout faire. We’d have such a lark, darling.’
‘But, Larry, one can’t live on three thousand a year.’
‘Of course one can. Lots of people live on much less.’
‘But I don’t want to live on three thousand a year. There’s no reason why I should.’
‘I’ve been living on half that.’
‘But how!’
She looked at the dingy little room with a shudder of distaste.
‘It means I’ve got a bit saved up. We could go down on Capri for our honeymoon and then in the fall we’d go to Greece. I’m crazy to go there. Don’t you remember how we used to talk about traveling all over the world together?’
‘Of course I want to travel. But not like that. I don’t to travel second-class on steamships and put up at third-rate hotels, without a bathroom, and eat at cheap restaurants.’
‘I went all through Italy last October like that. I had a wonderful time. We could travel all over the world on three thousand a year.’
‘But I want to have babies, Larry.’
‘That’s all right. We’ll take them along with us.’
‘You’re so silly,’ she laughed. ‘D’you know what it costs to have a baby? Violet Tomlinson had one last year and she did it as cheaply as she could and it cost her twelve hundred and fifty. And what d’you think a nurse costs?’ She grew more vehement as one idea after another occurred to her. ‘You’re so impractical. You don’t know what you’re asking me to do. I’m young, I want to have fun. I want to do all the things that people do. I want to go to parties, I want to go to dances. I want to play golf and ride horseback. I want to wear nice clothes. Can’t you imagine what it means to a girl not to be as well dressed as the rest of her crowd? D’you know what it means, Larry, to buy your friends’ old dresses when they’re sick of them and be thankful when someone out of pity makes you a present of a new one? I couldn’t even afford to do to a decent hairdresser to have my hair properly done. I don’t want to go about in street-cars and omnibuses; I want to have my own car. And what d’you suppose I’d find to do with myself all day long while you were reading at the Library? Walk about the streets window-shopping or sit in the Luxembourg Garden seeing that my children didn’t get into mischief? We couldn’t have any friends.’
‘Oh, Isabel,’ he interrupted.
‘Not the sort of friends I’m used to. Oh yes, Uncle Elliott’s friends would asks us now and then for his sake, but we couldn’t go because I wouldn’t have the clothes to go in, and we wouldn’t go because we couldn’t afford to return their hospitality. I don’t want to know a lot of scrubby, unwashed people; I’ve got nothing to say to them and they’ve got nothing to say to me. I want to live, Larry.’ She grew suddenly conscious of the look in his eyes, tender as it always was when fixed on her, but gently amused. ‘You think I’m silly, don’t you? You think I’m being trivial and horrid.’
‘No, I don’t. I think what you say is very natural.’
He was standing with his back to the fireplace, and she got up and went up to him so that they were face to face.
‘Larry, if you hadn’t a cent to your name and got a job that brought you in three thousand a year I’d marry you without a minute’s hesitation. I’d cook for you, I’d make the beds, I wouldn’t care what I wore, I’d go without anything, I’d look upon it as wonderful fun, because I’d know that it was only a question of time and you’d make good. But this means living in a sordid beastly way all our lives with nothing to look forward to. It means that I should be a drudge to the day of my death. And for what? So that you can spend years trying to find answers to questions that you say yourself are insoluble. It’s so wrong.’
To put it briefly, the couple then broke up their engagement.
Now don’t get me wrong. Lovey-dovey stuffs (interesting as they are) should not be spotted as the highlight here. Frankly I don’t know why I was so much drawn to this piece of two lovers’ conversation. It just got me thinking. Of passions and decisions, of dreams and the pursue, of sacrifice and selfishness. Of social construction and upbringing. Of idealisms; of practicality. Of honesty, of being normal, of responsibilities. Of money. Of going off the beaten track. Of choices. Of crossroads. Of compromise. Or the lack of it.
Perhaps I’ll pour ‘em down into words in my next post. Perhaps not.
At any rate, happy new year.
While writing this somehow I remember Tiessa and Pristi. The ‘marrying for money’ thing we talked about, Tiesz, and all your globetrotting plans, Sup. I wonder if you princesses will be Isabels.
About W.Somerset Maugham: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Somerset_Maugham
posted by eloque @ 2:54 AM
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