I walked in the park with Annabelle. She said;—
“I can’t answer questions. What happened last year happened as it did and now we are past it. We were together once and then we went apart, to be individuals, didn’t you say? and we found that we were not individuals, that it is impossible to be an individual, isn’t that what you found? I was unhappy, yes, did Peter say I was happy? then he is a fool, I wasn’t, were you? No, we were alone, I couldn’t bear it, and then Marius was there, and it didn’t work out like that, so we stopped it. You have got to have faith, do you know what that means? you have got to have faith in order not to be an individual, or to become an individual, it’s the same, and that is all I have done. You either have to have something which you wish very clearly to do, or else you have to have a faith which will tell you very clearly what to do. I did not marry Marius because that was the wrong thing to do, because marriage is not simply a matter of love or admiration or convenience, it is not even a matter of making the best of a situation that is irrevocable which is at least a stronger argument for it than admiration or love. It is something that one has to be dedicated to and Marius will never be dedicated to marriage again, and neither will I, I think, because I am past that now. The chance for these things happens just once and never again. And now I say what we must have is faith, that we have got beyond the stage when love like the love of children arises spontaneously without a faith and is held there by an instinct that is unconscious, that now we are all too conscious and nothing on our own is spontaneous any more, and for love to be held and maintained it needs a faith to keep it there. That is the only answer that I can give.”
“And have you got this faith?”
“No,” she said.
“Then why. .?” but the question ceased, hopeless, like a dream that is lost in waking memory.
“Because I am confronted by it,” she said. “Because I want to have it. Because I like people who have got it.”
“Yes,” I said.
The dream, caught in glimpses, was of Marius’s wife, in the hospital, in that tomb of unbearable summer, sitting up in bed and saying all the things that Annabelle was saying. Love as a triangle, with faith as the further corner: love in the presence of someone else, the eternal lover, God. I remembered the crucifix above her bed, the crucifix that Marius must have brought her. It was she who had converted Marius, who had told him that he was wrong, that it was only through the Church that he could find the love that he wanted. Just as he had once frightened her to death by his loneliness, so had she then frightened him to faith by the act of her dying.
“I know all this,” I said. “I remember it so well.”
“Do you?” she said.
And the waking memory was of Annabelle a year ago also saying the same things as she was saying now. But then she had said them as if they meant something, and now as if they did not. There was fear, too, with her. A fear of loneliness to death and a faith that denied the dying. I wondered if her calmness of yesterday was only the calmness of successful denial. I could find out.
“I remember all this going on and on just the same,” I said, “a year ago as it is now, we said the same things, acted not for ourselves but for others, loved not for ourselves but for others, why do you try to make out that then we were selfish children?”
“Because then it was spontaneous and now it is not, when we went away we found that it failed, it was then that we had to find something different.”
“Or to come back.”
“No, not to come back, you can never come back, you never have the choice again.”
“You can always come back.”
“That is not true,” she said wildly.
I walked beside her. I had never felt so dead or so destructive as on that grey carved day with the trees like rusty iron and the mud rolled smooth as marble. I felt that I was betraying more than the things that I had said to her father, and all in the name of a belief that I would not myself have dared to call a faith. “So what you have found is Father Jack,” I said.
“I am sorry about Father Jack,” she said.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I am afraid he talks rather a lot, I didn’t know if you’d like him.”
“Does it matter if I like him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then I like him,” I said.
She raised a hand to her forehead. She said miserably, “That is what we need, you see, a truth that is definite, that will tell us what to do.”
“That tells Peter he mustn’t be a puritan?”
“Yes, I think that is true.”
“Supposing Peter were not a puritan, do you know what he would be?”
“I think. . ”
“He would be a smooth lecherous man fumbling girls in the back of taxis, is that what you want?”
“He would not, that is not the point, the point is that Peter only hates and he should love.”
“Then why is that not mentioned? He does love, anyway, that is why it is not mentioned. He loves in such a way as makes you uncomfortable. He is not a puritan, he is a moralist. A puritan is someone who gets his moralizing wrong, and supposing Peter gets his right?”
“He doesn’t!”
“Why? Because Father Jack says so? Father Jack who would prefer to turn him into a lecher and who has turned you into someone who has not changed their belief or faith one atom but is now merely miserable and uncertain about it?”
“I am not, I am certain, I had no conception of it before, and why do you say I am miserable?”
“Because you look it.”
“At tea, yesterday, was I miserable?”
“No.”
“Then it is only you. . ”
“Only I who have made you miserable? Is that true?”
She made no answer. I could see her hand trembling against the edge of her coat. All she said was, “Anyway, you said you liked Father Jack.”
“I will explain. I like him at breakfast. I like him when I am not thinking about him. My instinct is to enjoy being with him and to escape from Peter, but when I think about him the feeling changes. And for this reason, that Father Jack doesn’t like a person who thinks.”
“Doesn’t he?”
“Tell me if I am wrong. The Christian ideal is a person who believes and who functions, it is not a person who thinks. Thinking is danger: curiosity is the devil. It says so, and I can see it, I can see it in Christian people. Why do you worry so much about Peter? Why do you worry more about him than about someone who sins in a state of believing? Because to you the only real sin is the sin of thought, and the sins of action don’t matter. And to me it is the other way round. Peter’s only sin is that he puts everything into question. He is lucky if he has no other.”