two months ago. Exactly
as his mother had sat on the dingy whitequilted bed, with the child
clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and
drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the
darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening
her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable
position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said
indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story--'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep
again. He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not
suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual
woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of
nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from
outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is
ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved
him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When
the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her
arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate,
it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her
to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy
with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of
paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that
mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the