“No, Dick, I wasn’t insulting you. At least, I wasn’t doing so consciously.”
“But you were doing it unconsciously, is that it? That’s no excuse. You can’t plead that you have no control of that part of you. What your unconscious thinks is just as much you as the conscious is. It’s even worse. You can dismiss your conscious thoughts, but what you really believe is what that shadowy thing believes.”
He began pacing back and forth, his face looking like a demon’s in the faint light cast by the small fire on the stone hearth.
“Isabel worshipped me, yet she was not afraid to argue violently with me, to tell me when she thought I was doing something wrong. But you . . . you harbor resentment until it makes an absolute bitch of you, yet you won’t come out with it. And that makes things even worse.
“There’s nothing evil about a hammer-and-tongs, screaming, throwing argument. It’s like a thunderstorm, frightening when it happens; but it clears the air after it’s over.
“The trouble with you is that you were raised to be a lady. You must never lift your voice in anger, you must always be calm and cool and collected. But that shadowy entity, that hindbrain, that inheritance from your ape ancestors, is tearing at the bars of its cage. And, incidentally, tearing at you. But you, you won’t admit it.”
Alice lost her dreamy look, and she shouted at him.
“You’re a liar! And don’t throw up your wife to me! We agreed never to compare each other’s spouse, but you do it every time you wish to get me angry! It isn’t true that I lack passion. You of all people should know that, and I don’t just mean in bed.
“But I won’t go into a rage over every petty word and incident. When I get mad it’s because the situation demands it. It’s worth getting angry about. You … you’re in a perpetual state of rage.”
“That’s a lie!”
“I don’t lie!”
“Let us get back to the point,” he said. “What is there about my capacity as commander that you don’t like?”
She bit her lip, then said, “It’s not how you run the boat or how you treat your crew. That’s such an obvious matter, and you do fine at it. No, what troubles me is the command, or lack of it, over yourself.”
Burton sat down, saying, “Let’s have it. Just what are you talking about?”
She hitched forward on the chair and leaned over so that her face was close to his.
“For one thing, you can’t stand to stay in one place more than a week. Before three days are up, you get uneasy. By the seventh day you’re like a tiger pacing back and forth in his cage, a lion throwing himself against the bars.”
“Spare me the zoological analogies,” he said. “Besides, you know that I have stayed in one place for as much as a year.”
“Yes, when you were building a boat. When you had a project going, one which would enable you to travel even more swiftly. Even then, you took short trips, leaving the rest of us to work on the boat. You had to go see this and that, investigate rumors, study strange customs, track down a language you didn’t know. Never mind what the excuse was. You had to get away.
“You have a blight of the soul, Dick. That’s the only way I can describe it. You can’t endure to stay long in one place. But it’s not because of the place. Never! It’s you yourself that you can’t tolerate. You must run so you can get away from yourself!”
He stood up and began pacing again.
“You say then that I can’t endure myself! What a pitiable fellow! He doesn’t love himself, which means that no one else can love him!”
“Nonsense!”
“Yes, all you’re saying is pure rot!”
“The rot is in you, not in what I say.”
“If you can’t stand me, why don’t you leave?”
Tears slid down her cheeks, and she said, “I love you, Dick!”
“But not enough to put up with my trifling eccentricities, is that it?”