Aldous Huxley's
POINT COUNTER POINT
������������������������������������������������������������������� Oh,
wearisome condition of humanity,
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Born
under one law, to another bound,
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Vainly
begot and yet forbidden vanity,
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Created
sick, commanded to be sound.
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ What
meaneth nature by these diverse laws,
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Passion
and reason, self-division's cause?
����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� FULKE GREVILLE
_____________________
CHAPTER I
'You won't be late?'� There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice, there was something like entreaty.
������ 'No, I won't be late,' said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be.� Her voice annoyed him.� It drawled a little, it was too refined - even in misery.
������ 'Not later than
������ 'Well, call it one.� You know what these parties are.'� But as a matter of fact, she didn't know, for the good reason that, not being his wife, she wasn't invited to them.� She had left her husband to live with Walter Bidlake; and Carling, who had Christian scruples, was feebly a sadist and wanted to take his revenge, refused to divorce her.� It was two years now since they had begun to live together.� Only two years; and now, already, he had ceased to love her, he had begun to love someone else.� The sin was losing its own excuse, the social discomfort its sole palliation.� And she was with child.
������ 'Half-past twelve,' she implored, though she knew that her importunity would only annoy him, only make him lover her the less.� But she could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous.� The words broke out in spite of her principles.� It would have been better for her, and perhaps for Walter too, if she had had fewer principles and given her feelings the violent expression they demanded.� But she had been well brought up in habits of the strictest self-control.� Only the uneducated, she knew, made 'scenes'.� An imploring 'Half-past twelve, Walter' was all that managed to break through her principles.� Too weak to move him, the feeble outburst would only annoy.� She knew it, and yet she could not hold her tongue.
������ 'If I can possibly manage it.'� (There; she had done it.� There was exasperation in his tone.)� 'But I can't guarantee it; don't expect me too certainly.'� For of course, he was thinking (with Lucy Tantamount's image unexorcizably haunting him), it certainly wouldn't be half-past twelve.
������ He gave the final touches to his white tie.� From the mirror her face looked out at him, close beside his own.� It was a pale face and so thin that the down-thrown light of the electric lamp hanging above them made a shadow in the hollows below the cheekbones.� Her eyes were darkly ringed.� Rather too long at the best of times, her straight nose protruded bleakly from the unfleshed face.� She looked ugly, tired and ill.� Six months from now her baby would be born.� Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man - a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining.� And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create and, having created, would become the battleground good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.� A thing would grow into a person, a tiny lump of stuff would become a human body, a human mind.� The astounding process of creation was going on within her; but Marjorie was conscious only of sickness and lassitude; the mystery for her meant nothing but fatigue and ugliness and a chronic anxiety about the future, pain of the mind as well as discomfort of the body.� She had been glad, or at least she had tried to be glad, in spite of her haunting fears of physical and social consequences, when she first recognized the symptoms of her pregnancy.� The child, she believed, would bring Walter closer; (he had begun to fade away from her even then).� It would arouse in him new feelings which would make up for whatever element it was that seemed to be lacking in his love for her.� She dreaded the pain, she dreaded the inevitable difficulties and embarrassments.� But the pains, the difficulties would have been worth while if they purchased a renewal, a strengthening of Walter's attachment.� In spite of everything, she was glad.� And at first her previsions had seemed to be justified.� The news that she was going to have a child had quickened his tenderness.� For two or three weeks she was happy, she was reconciled to the pains and discomforts.� Then, from one day to another, everything was changed; Walter had met that woman.� He still did his best, in the intervals of running after Lucy, to keep up a show of solicitude.� But she could feel that the solicitude was resentful, that he was tender and attentive out of a sense of duty, that he hated the child for compelling him to be so considerate to its mother.� And because he hated it, she too began to hate it.� No longer overlaid by happiness, her fears came to the surface, filled her mind.� Pain and discomfort - that was all the future held.� And meanwhile ugliness, sickness, fatigue.� How could she fight her battle when she was in this state?'
������ 'Do you love me, Walter?' she suddenly asked.
������ Walter turned his brown eyes for a moment from the reflected tie and looked into the image of her sad, intently gazing grey ones.� He smiled.� But if only, he was thinking, she would leave me in peace!� He pursed his lips and parted them again in the suggestion of a kiss.� But Marjorie did not return his smile.� Her face remained unmovingly sad, fixed in an intent anxiety.� Her eyes took on a tremulous brightness, and suddenly there were tears on her lashes.
������ 'Couldn't you stay here with me this evening?' she begged, in the teeth of all her heroic resolutions not to apply any sort of exasperating compulsion to his love, to leave him free to do what he wanted.
������ At the sight of those tears, at the sound of that tremulous and reproachful voice, Walter was filled with an emotion that was at once remorse and resentment; anger, pity, and shame.
������ 'But can't you understand,' that was what he would have liked to say, what he would have said if he had had the courage, 'can't you understand that it isn't the same as it was, that it can't be the same?� And perhaps, if the truth be told, it never was what you believed it was - our love, I mean - it never was what I tried to pretend it was.� Let's be friends, let's be companions.� I like you, I'm very fond of you.� But for goodness sake don't envelop me in love, like this; don't force love on me.� If you knew how dreadful love seems to somebody who doesn't love, what a violation, what an outrage ...'
������ But she was crying.� Through her closed eyelids the tears were welling out, drop after drop.� Her face was trembling into the grimace of agony.� And he was the tormentor.� He hated himself.� 'But why should I let myself be blackmailed by her tears?' he asked, and, asking, he hated her also.� A drop ran down her long nose.� 'She has no right to do this sort of thing, no right to be so unreasonable.� Why can't she be reasonable?'
������ 'Because she loves me.'
������ 'But I don't want her love, I don't want it.'� He felt the anger mounting up within him.� She had no business to love him like that; not now, at any rate.� 'It's a blackmail,' he repeated inwardly, 'a blackmail.� Why must I be blackmailed by her love and the fact that once I loved too - or did I ever love her, really?'
������ Marjorie took out a handkerchief and began to wipe her eyes.� He felt ashamed of his odious thoughts.� But she was the cause of his shame; it was her fault.� She ought to have stuck to her husband.� They could have had an affair.� Afternoons in a studio.� It would have been romantic.
������ 'But after all, it was I who insisted on her coming away with me.'
������ 'But she ought to have had the sense to refuse.� She ought to have known that it couldn't last for ever.'
������ But she had done what he had asked her; she had given up everything, accepted social discomfort for his sake.� Another piece of blackmail.� She blackmailed him with sacrifice.� He resented the appeal which her sacrifices made to his sense of decency and honour.
������ 'But if she had some decency and honour,' he thought, 'she wouldn't exploit mine.'
������ But there was the baby.
������ 'Why on earth did she ever allow it to come into existence?'
������ He hated it.� It increased his responsibility towards its mother, increased his guiltiness in making her suffer.� He looked at her wiping her tear-wet face.� Being with child had made her so ugly, so old.� How could a woman expect...?� But no, no no!� Walter shut his eyes, gave an almost imperceptible shuddering shake of the head.� The ignoble thought must be shut out, repudiated.
������ 'How can I think such things?' he asked himself.
������ 'Don't go,' he heard her repeating.� How that refined and drawling shrillness got on his nerves!� 'Please don't go, Walter.'
������ There was a sob in her voice.� More blackmail.� Ah, how could he be so base?� And yet, in spite of his shame and, in a sense, because of it, he continued to feel that shameful emotions with an intensity that seemed to increase rather than diminish.� His dislike of her grew because he was ashamed of it; the painful feelings of shame and self-hatred, which she caused him to feel, constituted for him yet another ground of dislike.� Resentment bred shame, and shame in its turn bred more resentment.
������ 'Oh, why can't she leave me in peace?'� He wished it furiously, intensely, with an exasperation that was all the more savage for being suppressed.� (For he lacked the brutal courage to give it utterance; he was sorry for her, he was fond of her in spite of everything; he was incapable of being openly and frankly cruel - he was cruelly only out of weakness, against his will.)
������ 'Why can't she leave me in peace?'� He would like her so much more if only she left him in peace; and she herself would be so much happier.� Ever so much happier.� It would be for her own good ... But suddenly he saw through his own hypocrisy.� 'But all the same, why the devil can't she let me do what I want?'
������ What he wanted?� But what he wanted was Lucy Tantamount.� And he wanted her against reason, against all his ideals and principles, madly, against his own wishes, even against his own feelings - for he didn't like Lucy; he really hated her.� A noble end may justify shameful means.� But when the end is shameful, what then?� It was for Lucy that he was making Marjorie suffer - Marjorie who loved him, who had made sacrifices for him, who was unhappy.� But her unhappiness was blackmailing him.
������ 'Stay with me this evening,' she implored once more.
������ There was a part of his mind that joined in her entreaties, that wanted him to give up the party and stay at home.� But the other part was stronger.� He answered her with lies - half lies, that were worse, for the hypocritically justifying element of truth in them, than frank whole lies.
������ He put his arm round her.� The gesture was in itself a falsehood.
������ 'But my darling,' he protested in the cajoling tone of one who implores a child to behave reasonably, 'I really must go.� You see, my father's going to be there.'� That was true.� Old Bidlake was always at the Tantamount's parties.� 'And I must have a talk with him.� About business,' he added vaguely and importantly, releasing with the magical word a kind of smoke-screen of masculine interests between himself and Marjorie.� But the lie, he reflected, must be transparently visible through the smoke.
������ 'Couldn't you see him some other time?'
������ 'It's important,' he answered, shaking
his head.� 'And besides,' he added,
forgetting that several excuses are always less convincing than one, 'Lady
Edward's inviting an American editor specially for my sake.� He might be useful; you know how enormously
they pay.'� Lady Edward had told him that
she would invite the man if he hadn't started back to
������ 'I'm not crying,' she answered.� But her cheek was wet and cold to his lips.
������ 'Marjorie, I won't go, if you don't want me to.'
������ 'But I do want you to,' she answered, still keeping her face averted.
������ 'You don't.� I'll stay.'
������ 'You mustn't.'� Marjorie looked at him and made an effort to smile.� 'It's only my silliness.� It would be stupid to miss your father and that American man.'� Returned to him like this, his excuses sounded peculiarly vain and improbable.� He winced with a kind of disgust.
������ 'They can wait,' he answered, and there was a note of anger in his voice.� He was angry with himself for having made such lying excuses (why couldn't he have told her the crude and brutal truth straight out? she knew it, after all); and he was angry with her for reminding him of them.� He would have liked them to fall directly into the pit of oblivion, to be as though they had never been uttered.
������ 'No, no; I insist.� I was only being silly.� I'm sorry.'
������ He resisted her at first, refused to go, demanded to stay.� Now that there was no danger of his having to stay, he could afford to insist.� For Marjorie, it was clear, was serious in her determination that he should go.� It was an opportunity for him to be noble and self-sacrificing at a cheap rate, gratis even.� What an odious comedy!� But he played it.� In the end he consented to go, as though he were doing her a special favour by not staying.� Marjorie tied his scarf for him, brought him his silk hat and his gloves, kissed him goodbye lightly, with a brave show of gaiety.� She had her pride and her code of amorous honour; and in spite of unhappiness, in spite of jealousy, she stuck to her principles - he ought to be free; she had no right to interfere with him.� And besides it was the best policy not to interfere.� At least, she hoped it was the best policy.
������ Walter shut the door behind him and stepped out into the cool of the night.� A criminal escaping from the scene of his crime, escaping from the spectacle of the victim, escaping from compassion and remorse, could not have felt more profoundly relieved.� In the street he drew a deep breath.� He was free.� Free from recollection and anticipation.� Free, for an hour or two, to refuse to admit the existence of past or future.� Free to live only now and here, in the place where his body happened at each instant to be.� Free - but the boast was idle; he went on remembering.� Escape was not so easy a matter.� Her voice pursued him.� 'I insist on your going.'� His crime had been a fraud as well as a murder.� 'I insist.'� How nobly he had protested!� How magnanimously given in at last!� It was card-sharping on top of cruelty.
������ 'God!' he said almost aloud.� 'How could I?'� He was astonished at himself as well as disgusted.� 'But if only she'd leave me in peace!' he went on.� 'Why can't she be reasonable?'� The weak and futile anger exploded again within him.
������ He thought of the time when his wishes
had been different.� Not to be left in
peace by her had once been his whole ambition.�
He had encouraged her devotion.�
He remembered the cottage they had lived in, alone with one another,
month after month, among the bare downs.�
What a view over
������ 'One shouldn't take art too literally.'� He remembered what his brother-in-law, Philip Quarles, had said one evening, when they were talking about poetry.� 'Particularly where love is concerned.'
������ 'Not even if it's true?' Walter had asked.
������ 'It's apt to be too true.� Unadulterated, like distilled water.� When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.� In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth.� That's why art moves you - precisely because it's unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life.� Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books.� In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures.� Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure - chemically pure, I mean,' he had added with a laugh, 'not morally.'
������ 'But Epipsychidion isn't pornography,' Walter had objected.
������ 'No, but it's equally pure from the chemist's point of view.� How does that sonnet of Shakespeare's go?
��������������������������� 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
��������������������������� Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
��������������������������� If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
��������������������������� If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
��������������������������� I have seen roses demask'd, red and white,
��������������������������� But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
��������������������������� And in some perfumes is there more delight
��������������������������� Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
And so on.� He'd taken the poets too literally and was reacting.� Let him be a warning to you.'
������ Philip had been right, of course.� Those months in the cottage hadn't been at all like Epipsychidion or La Maison du Berger.� What with the well and the walk to the village ... But even if there hadn't been the well and the walk, even if he had had Marjorie unadulterated, would it have been any better?� It might even have been worse.� Marjorie unadulterated might have been worse than Marjorie tempered by irrelevancies.
������ That refinement of hers, for example, that rather cold virtuousness, so bloodless and spiritual - from a distance and theoretically he admired.� But in practice and close at hand?� It was with that virtue, that refined, cultured, bloodless spirituality that he had fallen in love - with that and with her unhappiness; for Carling was unspeakable.� Pity made him a knight errant.� Love, he had then believed (for he was only twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out, just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and the lucubrations of philosophers and mystics), love was talk, love was spiritual communion and companionship.� That was real love.� The sexual business was only an irrelevancy, unavoidable, because unfortunately human beings had bodies, but to be kept as far as possible in the background.� Ardently pure with the ardour of young desires taught artificially to burn on the side of the angels, he had admired that refined and quiet purity which, in Marjorie, was the product of a natural coldness, a congenitally low vitality.
������ 'You're so good,' he had said.� 'It seems to come to you so easily.� I wish I could be good, like you.'
������ It was the equivalent, but he did not realize it, of wishing himself half dead.� Under the shy, diffident, sensitive skin of him, he was ardently alive.� It was indeed hard for him to be good, as Marjorie was good.� But he tried.� And meanwhile, he admired her goodness and purity.� And he was touched - at least until it bored and exasperated him - by her devotion to him, he was flattered by her admiration.
������ Walking now towards Chalk Farm station he suddenly remembered that story his father used to tell about an Italian chauffeur he had once talked to about love.� (The old man had a genius for getting people to talk; all sorts of people, even servants, even workmen.� Walter envied him the talent.)� Some women, according to the chauffeur, are like wardrobes.� Sono come cassettoni.� How richly old Bidlake used to tell the anecdote!� They may be as lovely as you like; but what's the point of a lovely wardrobe in your arms?� What on earth's the point?� (And Marjorie, Walter reflected, wasn't even really good looking.)� 'Give me,' said the chauffeur, 'the other kind, even if they're ugly.� My girl,' he had confided, 'is the other kind.� � un frullino, proprio un frullino - a regular egg-whisk.'� And the old man would twinkle like a jovial, wicked old satyr behind his monocle.� Stiff wardrobes or lively egg-whisks?� Walter had to admit that his preferences were the same as the chauffeur's.� At any rate, he knew by personal experience that (whenever 'real' love was being tempered by the sexual irrelevancies) he didn't much like the wardrobe kind of woman.� At a distance, theoretically, purity and goodness and refined spirituality were admirable.� But in practice and close to they were less appealing.� And from someone who does not appeal to one, even devotion, even the flattery of admiration are unbearable.� Confusedly and simultaneously he hated Marjorie for her patient, martyred coldness; he accused himself of swinish sensuality.� His love for Lucy was mad and shameful, but Marjorie was bloodless and half dead.� He was at once justified and without excuse.� But more without excuse, all the same; more without excuse.� They were low, those sensual feelings; they were ignoble.� Egg-whisk and chest of drawers - could anything be more base and ignoble than such a classification?� In imagination he heard his father's rich and fleshy laugh.� Horrible!� Walter's whole conscious life had been orientated in opposition to his father, in opposition to the old man's jolly, careless sensuality.� Consciously he had always been on the side of his mother, on the side of purity, refinement, the spirit.� But his blood was at least half his father's.� And now two years of Marjorie had made him consciously dislike cold virtue.� He consciously disliked it, even though at the same time he was still ashamed of his dislike, ashamed of what he regarded as his beastly sensual desires, ashamed of his love for Lucy.� But oh, if only Marjorie would leave him in peace!� If only she'd refrain from clamouring for a return to the unwelcome love she persisted in forcing on him!� If only she'd stop being so dreadfully devoted.� He'd be glad of her friendship in return.� But love - that was suffocating.� And when, imagining she was fighting the other woman with her own weapons, she did violence to her own virtuous coldness and tried to win him back by the ardour of her caresses - oh, it was terrible, really terrible.
������ And then, he went on to reflect, she was really rather a bore with her heavy, insensitive earnestness.� Really rather stupid in spite of her culture - because of it perhaps.� The culture was genuine all right; she had read the books, she remembered them.� But did she understand them?� Could she understand them?� The remarks with which she broke her long, long silences, the cultured, earnest remarks - how heavy they were, how humourless and without understanding!� She was wise to be so silent; silence is as full of potential wisdom and with as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.� The silent bear no witness against themselves.� Marjorie knew how to listen well and sympathetically.� And when she did break silence, her half utterances were quotations.� For Marjorie had a retentive memory and had formed the habit of learning the great thoughts and the purple passages by heart.� It had taken Walter some time to discover the heavy, pathetically uncomprehending stupidity that underlay the silence and the quotations.� And when he discovered, it was too late.
������ He thought of Carling.� A drunkard and religious.� Always chattering away about chasubles and saints and the Immaculate Conception, and at the same time a nasty drunken pervert.� If the man hadn't been quite so detestably disgusting, if he hadn't made Marjorie quite so wretched - what then?� Walter imagined his freedom.� He wouldn't have pitied, he wouldn't have loved.� He remembered Marjorie's red and swollen eyes after one of those disgusting scenes with Carling.� The dirty brute!
������ 'And what about me?' he suddenly thought.
������ He knew that the moment the door had shut behind him, Marjorie had started to cry.� Carling at least had the excuse of whiskey.� Forgive them, for they know not what they do.� He himself was never anything but sober.� At this moment, he knew, she was crying.
������ 'I ought to go back,' he said to himself.� But instead, he quickened his pace till he was almost running down the street.� If was a flight from his conscience and at the same time a hastening towards his desire.
������ 'I ought to go back, I ought.'
������ He hurried on, hating her because he had made her so unhappy.
������ A man looking into a tobacconist's window suddenly stepped backwards as he was passing.� Walter violently collided with him.
������ 'Sorry,' he said automatically, and hurried on without looking round.
������ 'Where yer going?' the man shouted after
him angrily.�� 'Wotcher think you're
doing?'� Being a bloody
������ Two loitering street boys whooped with ferociously derisive mirth.
������ 'You in yer top 'at,' the man pursued contemptuously, hating the uniformed gentleman.
������ The right thing would have been to turn round and give the fellow back better than he gave.� His father would have punctured him with a word.� But for Walter there was only flight.� He dreaded these encounters, he was frightened of the lower classes.� The noise of the man's abuse faded in his ears.
������ Odious!� He shuddered.� His thoughts returned to Marjorie.
������ 'Why can't she be reasonable?' he said to himself.� 'Just reasonable.� If only at least she had something to do, something to keep her occupied.'
������ She had too much time to think, that was the trouble with Marjorie.� Too much time to think about him.� Though after all it was his fault; it was he who had robbed her of her occupation and made her focus her mind exclusively on himself.� She had taken a partnership in a decorator's shop when he first knew her; one of those lady-like, artistic, amateurish decorating establishments in Kensington.� Lampshades and the companionship of the young women who painted them and above all devotion to Mrs Cole, the senior partner, were Marjorie's compensations for a wretched marriage.� She had created a little world of her own, apart from Carling; a feminine world, with something of the girls' school about it, where she could talk about clothes and shops, and listen to gossip, and indulge in what schoolgirls call a 'pash' for an elder woman, and imagine in the intervals that she was doing part of the world's work and helping on the cause of Art.
������ Walter had persuaded her to give it all up.� Not without difficulty, however.� For her happiness in being devoted to Mrs Cole, in having a sentimental 'pash' for her, was almost a compensation for her misery with Carling.� But Carling turned out to be more than Mrs Cole could compensate for.� Walter offered what the lady perhaps could not, and certainly did not wish to, provide - a place of refuge, protection, financial support.� Besides, Walter was a man, and a man ought, by tradition, to be loved, even when, as Walter had finally concluded about Marjorie, one doesn't really like men and is only naturally attuned to the company of women.� (The effect of literature again!� He remembered Philip Quarles's comments on the disastrous influence which art can exercise on life.)� Yes, he was a man; but 'different', as she had never tired of telling him, from ordinary men.� He had accepted his 'difference' as a flattering distinction, then.� But was it?� He wondered.� Anyhow, 'different' she had then found him and so was able to get the best of both worlds - a man who yet wasn't a man.� Charmed by Walter's persuasions, driven by Carling's brutalities, she had consented to abandon the shop and with it Mrs Cole, whom Walter detested as a bullying, slave-driving, blood-sucking embodiment of female will.
������ 'You're too good to be an amateur upholsterer,' he had flattered her out of the depths of a then genuine belief in her intellectual capacities.
������ She should help him in some unspecified way with his literary work, she should write herself.� Under his influence she had taken to writing essays and short stories.� But they were obviously no good.� From having been encouraging, he became reticent; he said no more about her efforts.� In a little while Marjorie abandoned the unnatural and futile occupation.� She had nothing after that but Walter.� He became the reason for her existence, the foundation on which her whole life was established.� The foundation was moving away from under her.
������ 'If only,' thought Walter, 'she'd leave me in peace!'
������ He turned into the Underground
station.� At the entrance a man was
selling the evening papers.� SOCIALIST ROBBERY SCHEME.� FIRST
������ 'The ruffians,' thought Walter as he read it.� The article evoked in him a stimulating enthusiasm for all that it assailed, a delightful hatred for Capitalists and Reactionaries.� The barriers of his individuality were momentarily thrown down, the personal complexities were abolished.� Possessed by the joy of political battle, he overflowed his boundaries, he became, so to speak, larger than himself - larger and simpler.
������ 'The ruffians,' he repeated, thinking of the oppressors, the monopolizers.
������ At
������ 'One should be loyal to one's tastes and instincts,' Philip Quarles used to say.� 'What's the good of a philosophy with a major premiss that isn't the rationalzation of your feelings?� If you've never had a religious experience, it's folly to believe in God.� You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can't eat them without being sick.'
������ A whiff of state sweat came up with the nicotine fumes to Walter's nostrils.� 'The Socialists call it Nationalization,' he read in his paper; 'but the rest of us have a shorter and homelier name for what they propose to do.� That name is Theft.'� But at least it was theft from thieves and for the benefit of their victims.� The little old man leaned forward and spat, cautiously and perpendicularly, between his feet.� With the heel of his boot he spread the gob over the floor.� Walter looked away; he wished that he could personally liked the oppressed and personally hate the rich oppressors.� One should be loyal to one's tastes and instincts.� But one's tastes and instincts were accidents.� There were eternal principles.� But if the axiomatic principles didn't happen to be your personal major premiss ...?
������ And suddenly he was nine years old and walking with his mother in the fields near Gattenden.� Each of them carried a bunch of cowslips.� They must have been up to Batt's Corner; it was the only place where cowslips grew in the neighbourhood.
������ 'We'll stop for a minute and see poor Wetherington,' his mother said.� 'He's very ill.'� She knocked at a cottage door.
������ Wetherington had been the under-gardener at the Hall; but for the past month he had not been working.� Walter remembered him as a pale, thin man with a cough, not at all communicative.� He was not much interested in Wetherington.� A woman open the door.� 'Good afternoon, Mrs Wetherington.'� They were shown in.
������ Wetherington was lying in bed propped up with pillows.� His face was terrible.� A pair of enormous, large-pupilled eyes stared out of cavernous sockets.� Stretched over the starting bones, the skin was white and clammy with sweat.� But almost more appalling even than the face was the neck, the unbelievably thin neck.� And from the sleeves of his nightshirt projected two knobbed sticks, his arms, with a pair of immense skeleton hands fastened to the end of them, like rakes at the end of their slender hafts.� And then the smell in that sickroom!� The windows were tightly shut, a fire burned in the little grate.� The air was hot and heavy with a horrible odour of stale sick breath and the exhalations of a sick body - an old inveterate smell that seemed to have grown sickeningly sweetish with long ripening in the pent-up heat.� A new, fresh smell, however pungently disgusting, would have been less horrible.� It was the inveterateness, the sweet decaying over-ripeness of this sickroom smell that made it so peculiarly unbearable.� Walter shuddered even now to think of it.� He lit a cigarette to disinfect his memory.� He had been brought up on baths and open windows.� The first time that, as a child, he was taken to church, the stuffiness, the odour of humanity made him sick; he had to be hurried out.� His mother did not take him to church again.� Perhaps we're brought up too wholesomely and asceptically, he thought.� An education that results in one's feeling sick in the company of one's fellow-men, one's brothers - can it be good?� He would have liked to love them.� But love does not flourish in an atmosphere that nauseates the lover with an uncontrollable disgust.
������ In Wetherington's sickroom even pity found it hard to flourish.� He sat there, while his mother talked to the dying man and his wife, gazing, reluctant but compelled by the fascination of horror, at the ghastly skeleton in the bed and breathing through his bunch of cowslips the warm and sickening air.� Even through the fresh delicious scent of the cowslips he could smell the inveterate odours of the sickroom.� He felt almost no pity, only horror, fear and disgust.� And even when Mrs Wetherington began to cry, turning her face away so that the sick man should not see her tears, he felt not pitiful so much as uncomfortable, embarrassed.� The spectacle of her grief only made him more urgently long to escape, to get out of that horrible room into the pure enormous air and the sunshine.
������ He felt ashamed of these emotions as he remembered them.� But that was how he had felt, how he still felt.� 'One should be loyal to one's instincts.'� No, not at all, not to the bad ones; one should resist these.� But they were not so easily overcome.� The old man in the next seat relit his pipe.� He remembered that he had held every breath for as long as he possibly could, so as not to have to draw in and smell the tainted air too often.� A deep breath through the cowslips; then he counted forty before he let it out again and inhaled another.� The old man once more leaned forward and spat.� 'The idea that nationalization will increase the prosperity of the workers is entirely fallacious.� During the past years the tax-payer has learned to his cost the meaning of bureaucratic control. �If the workers imagine ...' He shut his eyes and saw the sickroom.� When the time came to say goodbye, he had shaken the skeleton hand.� It lay there, unmoving, on the bedclothes; he slipped his fingers underneath those dead and bony ones, lifted the hand a moment and let it fall again.
������ It was cold and wettish to the touch.� Turning away, he surreptitiously wiped his palm on his coat.� He let out his long-contained breath with an explosive sigh and inhaled another lungful of the sickening air.� It was the last he had to take; his mother was already moving towards the door.� Her little Pekingese frisked round her, barking.
������ 'Be quiet, T'ang!' she said in her clear, beautiful voice.� She was perhaps the only person in England, he now reflected, who regularly pronounced the apostrophe T'ang.
������ They walked home by the footpath across the fields.� Fantastic and improbable as a little Chinese dragon, T'ang ran on ahead of them bounding lightly over what were to him enormous obstacles.� His feathery tail fluttered in the wind.� Sometimes, when the grass was very long he sat up on his little flat rump as though he were begging for sugar, and looked out with his round bulgy eyes over the tussocks, taking his bearings.
������ Under the bright dappled sky Walter had felt like a reprieved prisoner.� He ran, he shouted.� His mother walked slowly, without speaking.� Every now and then she halted for a moment and shut her eyes.� It was a habit she had, when she felt pensive or perplexed.� She was often perplexed, Walter reflected, smiling tenderly to himself.� Poor Wetherington must have perplexed her a great deal.� He remembered how often she had halted on their way home.
������ 'Do hurry up, mother,' he had shouted impatiently.� 'We shall be late for tea.'
������ Cook had baked scones for tea and there was yesterday's plum cake and a newly opened pot of Tiptree's cherry jam.
������ 'One should be loyal to one's tastes and instincts.'� But an accident of birth had determined them for him.� Justice was eternal; charity and brotherly love were beautiful in spite of the old man's pipe and Wetherington's sickroom.� Beautiful precisely because of such things.� The train slowed down.� Leicester Square.� He stepped out on to the platform and made his way towards the lifts.� But the personal major premiss, he was thinking, is hard to deny; and the major premiss that isn't personal is hard, however excellent, to believe in.� Honour, fidelity - these were good things.� But the personal major premiss of his present philosophy was that Lucy Tantamount was the most beautiful, the most desirable ...
������ 'All tickets, please!'
������ The debate threatened to start again.� Deliberately he stifled it, the liftman slammed the gates.� The lift ascended.� In the street he hailed a taxi.
������ 'Tantamount House, Pall Mall.'
CHAPTER II
Three
Italian ghosts unobtrusively haunt the eastern end of Pall Mall.� The wealth of newly industrialized England
and the enthusiasm, the architectural genius, of Charles Barry called them up
out of the past and their native sunshine.�
Under the encrusting grime of the Reform Club the eye of faith
recognizes something agreeably reminiscent of the Farnese Palace.� A few yards further down the street, Sir
Charles's recollections of the house that Raphael designed for the Pandolfini
loom up through the filmy
������ Barry designed it in 1839.� A hundred workmen laboured for a year or
two.� And the third marquess paid the
bills.� They were heavy; but the suburbs
of
������ The corn was sown, grew and was
harvested, again and again.� The beasts
were born, fattened and went to the slaughter.�
The ploughmen, the shepherds, the cowherds laboured from before dawn
till sunset, year after year, until they died.�
Their children took their places.�
Tantamount succeeded Tantamount.�
������ The interior of Tantamount House is as nobly Roman as its fa�ade.� Round a central quadrangle run two tiers of open arcades with an attic, lit by small square windows, above.� But instead of being left open to the sky, the quadrangle is covered by a glass roof, which converts it into an immense hall rising the whole height of the building.� With its arcades and gallery it makes a very noble room - but too large, too public, too much like a swimming bath or a roller-skating rink to be much lived in.� Tonight, however, it was justifying its existence.� Lady Edward Tantamount was giving one of her musical parties.� The floor was crowded with seated guests and in the hollow architectural space above them the music intricately pulsed.
������ 'What a pantomime!' said old John Bidlake to his hostess.� 'My dear Hilda, you really must look.'
������ 'Sh-sh!' Lady Edward protested behind her feather fan.� 'You mustn't interrupt the music.� Besides I am looking.'
������ Her whisper was colonial and the r's of
'interrupt' were rolled far back in the throat; for Lady Edward came from
������ 'Believe me,' Hilda had once confided to a friend, 'I never took so much interest in osmosis before or since.'
������ The interest in osmosis roused Lord Edward's attention.� He became aware of a fact which he had not previously noticed; that Hilda was exceedingly pretty.� Hilda also knew her woman's business.� Her task was not difficult.� At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child.� In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself.� But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy.� Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed.� He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living.� Hilda helped him over his paralysing twelve-year-old shyness, and whenever terror prevented him from making the necessary advances, came half or nearly all the way to meet him.� His ardours were boyish - at once violent and timid, desperate and dumb.� Hilda talked for two and was discreetly bold.� Discreetly - for Lord Edward's notions of how young girls should behave were mainly derived from the Pickwick Papers.� Boldness undisguised would have alarmed him, would have driven him away.� Hilda kept up all the appearance of Dickensian young-girlishness, but contrived at the same time to make all the advances, create all the opportunities and lead the conversation into all the properly amorous channels.� She had her reward.� In the spring of 1898 she was Lady Edward Tantamount.
������ 'But I assure you,' she had once said to John Bidlake, quite angrily - for he had been making fun of poor Edward, 'I'm genuinely fond of him, genuinely.'
������ 'In your own way, no doubt,' mocked Bidlake.� 'In your own way.� But you must admit it's a good thing it isn't everybody's way.� Just look at yourself in that mirror.'
������ She looked and saw the reflection of her naked body lying, half sunk in deep cushions, on a divan.
������ 'Beast!' she said.� 'But it doesn't make any difference to my being fond of him.'
������ 'Oh, not to your particular way of being fond, I'm sure.'� He laughed.� 'But I repeat that it's perhaps a good thing that -'
She put her hand over his mouth.� That was a quarter of a century ago.� Hilda had been married five years and was thirty.� Lucy was a child of four.� John Bidlake was forty-seven, at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter; handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker and taker of virginities.
������ 'Painting's a branch of sensuality,' he retorted to those who reproved him for his way of life.� 'Nobody can paint a nude who hasn't learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body.� I take my art seriously.� I'm unremitting in my preliminary studies.'� And the skin would tighten in laughing wrinkles round his monocle, his eyes would twinkle like a genial satyr's.
������ To Hilda, John Bidlake brought the revelation of her own body, her physical potentialities.� Lord Edward was only a kind of child, a fossil boy preserved in the frame of a very large middle-aged man.� Intellectually, in the laboratory, he understood the phenomena of sex.� But in practice and emotionally he was a child, a fossil mid-Victorian child, preserved intact, with all the natural childish timidities and al the taboos acquired from the two beloved and very virtuous maiden aunts, who had taken the place of his dead mother, all the amazing principles and prejudices sucked in with the humours of Mr Pickwick and Micawber.� He loved his young wife, but loved her as a fossil child of the 'sixties might love - timidly and very apologetically; apologizing for his ardours, apologizing for his body, apologizing for hers.� Not in so many words, of course; for the fossil child was dumb with shyness; but by a silent ignoring, a silent pretending that the bodies weren't really involved in the ardours, which anyhow didn't really exist.� His love was one long tacit apology for itself; and being nothing more than an apology was therefore quite inexcusable.� Love must justify itself by its results in intimacy of mind and body, in warmth, in tender contact, in pleasure.� If it has to be justified from outside, it is thereby proved a thing without justification.� John Bidlake made no apologies for the kind of love he had to offer.� So far as it went, it entirely justified itself.� A healthy sensualist, he made his love straightforwardly, naturally, with the good animal gusto of a child of nature.
������ 'Don't expect me to talk about the stars and madonna lilies and the cosmos,' he said.� 'They're not my line.� I don't believe in them. I believe in -' And his language became what a mysterious convention had decreed to be unprintable.
������ It was a love without pretensions, but warm, natural, and, being natural, good so far as it went - a decent, good-humoured, happy sensuality.� To Hilda, who had never known anything but a fossil child's reticent apology for love, it was a revelation.� Things which had been dead in her came alive.� She discovered herself, rapturously.� But not too rapturously.� She never lost her head.� If she had lost her head, she might have lost Tantamount House and the Tantamount millions and the Tantamount title as well.� She had not intention of losing these things.� So she kept her head, coolly and deliberately; kept it high and secure above the tumultuous raptures, like a rock above the waves.� She enjoyed herself, but never to the detriment of her social position.� She could look on at her own enjoyment; her cool head, her will to retain her social position remained apart from and above the turmoil.� John Bidlake approved the way she made the best of both worlds.
������ 'Thank God, Hilda,' he had often said, 'you're a sensible woman.'
������ Women who believed the world well lost for love were apt to be a terrible nuisance, as he knew only too well by personal experience.� He liked women; love was an indispensable enjoyment.� But nobody was worth involving oneself in tiresome complications for, nothing was worth messing up one's life for.� With the women who hadn't been ruthlessly cruel.� It was the battle of 'all for love' against 'anything for a quiet life.'� John Bidlake always won.� Fighting for his quiet life, he drew the line at no sort of frightfulness.
������ Hilda Tantamount was as much attached to the quiet life as John himself.� Their affair had lasted, pleasantly enough, for a space of years and slowly faded out of existence.� They had been good lovers, they remained good friends - conspirators, even, people called them, mischievous conspirators leagued together to amuse themselves at the world's expense.� They were laughing now.� Or rather old John, who hated music, was laughing alone.� Lady Edward was trying to preserve the decorums.
������ 'You simply must be quiet,' she whispered.
������ 'But you're not realizing how incredibly comic it is,' Bidlake insisted.
������ 'Sh-sh.'
������ 'But I'm whispering.'� This continual slushing annoyed him.
������ 'Like a lion.'
������ 'I can't help that,' he answered crossly.� When he took the trouble to whisper, he assumed that his voice was inaudible to all but the person to whom his remarks were addressed.� He did not like to be told that what he chose to assume as true was not true.� 'Lion, indeed!' he muttered indignantly.� But his face suddenly brightened again.� 'Look!' he said.� 'Here's another late arrival.� What's the betting she'll do the same as all the others?'
������ 'Sh-sh,' Lady Edward repeated.
������ But John Bidlake paid no attention to her.� He was looking in the direction of the door, where the latest of the late-comers was still standing, torn between the desire to disappear unobtrusively into the silent crowd and the social duty of making her arrival known to her hostess.� She looked about her in embarrassment.� Lady Edward hailed her over the heads of the intervening crowd with a wave of her long feather and a smile.� The late arrival smiled back, blew a kiss, laid a finger to her lips, pointed to an empty chair at the other side of the room, threw out both hands in a little gesture that was meant to express apologies for being late and despairing regret at being unable in the circumstances to come and speak to Lady Edward, then shrugging up her shoulders and shrinking into herself so as to occupy the smallest possible amount of space, tiptoed with extraordinary precautions down the gangway towards the vacant seat.
������ Bidlake was in ecstasies of
merriment!� He had echoed the poor lady's
every gesture as she made it.� Her blown
kiss he had returned with extravagant interest, and when she laid a finger to
her lips, he had covered his mouth with a whole hand.� He had repeated her gesture of regret, grotesquely
magnifying it until it expressed a ludicrous despair.� And when she tiptoed away, he began to count
on his fingers, to make the gestures that, in
������ 'I told you so,' he whispered, and his
whole face was wrinkled with suppressed laughter.� 'It's like being in a dead and dumb
asylum.� Or talking to
pygmies in
������ Lady Edward flapped her ostrich at him.
������ Meanwhile the music played on - Bach's Suite in B minor, for flute and strings.� Young Tolley conducted with his usual inimitable grace, bending in swan-like undulations from the loins, and tracing luscious arabesques on the air with his waving arms, as though he were dancing to the music.� A dozen anonymous fiddlers and 'cellists scraped at his bidding.� And the great Pongileoni glueily kissed his flute.� He blew across the mouth hole and a cylindrical air column vibrated; Bach's meditation filled the Roman quadrangle.� In the opening largo John Sebastian had, with the help of Pongileoni's snout and air column, made a statement: There are grand things in the world, noble things; there are men born kingly; there are real conquerors, intrinsic lords of the earth.� But of an earth that is, oh! complex and multitudinous, he had gone on to reflect in the fugal allegro.� You seem to have found the truth; clear, definite, unmistakable, it is announced by the violins; you have it, you triumphantly hold it.� But it slips out of your grasp to present itself in a new aspect among the 'cellos and yet again in terms of Pongileoni's vibrating air column.� The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment, only to break apart again.� Each is always alone and separate and individual.� 'I am I,' asserts the violin; 'the world revolves round me.'� 'Round me,' calls the 'cello.� 'Round me,' the flute insists.� And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.
������ In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts.� The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist.� It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything.� Here, for example, is one particular part; and John Sebastian puts the case.� The Rondeau begins exquisitely and simply melodious, almost a folk-song.� It is a young girl singing to herself of love, in solitude, tenderly mournful.� A young girl singing among the hills, with the clouds drifting overhead.� But solitary as one of the floating clouds, a poet had been listening to her song.� The thoughts that it provoked in him are the Sarabande that follows the Rondeau.� His is a slow and lovely meditation on the beauty (in spite of squalor and stupidity), the profound goodness (in spite of all the evil) of the world.� It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to tome suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced.� A girl singing to herself under the clouds suffices to create the certitude.� Even a fine morning is enough.� Is it illusion or the revelation of profoundest truth?� Who knows?� Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers drew their rosined horsehair across the stretched intestines of lambs; through the long Sarabande the poet slowly meditated his lovely and consoling certitude.
������ 'This music is beginning to get rather tedious,' John Bidlake whispered to his hostess.� 'Is it going to last much longer?'
������ Old Bidlake had no taste or talent for music, and he had the frankness to say so.� He could afford to be frank.� When one can paint as well as John Bidlake, why should one pretend to like music, when in fact one doesn't?� He looked over the seated audience and smiled.
������ 'They look as though they were in church,' he said.
������ Lady Edward raised a fan protestingly.
������ 'Who's that little woman in black,' he went on, 'rolling her eyes and swaying her body like St Teresa in an ecstasy?'
������ 'Fanny Logan,' Lady Edward whispered back.� 'But do keep quiet.'
������ 'People talk of the tribute vice pays to virtue,' John Bidlake went on, incorrigibly.� 'But everything's permitted nowadays - there's no more need of moral hypocrisy.� There's only intellectual hypocrisy now.� The tribute philistinism pays to art, what?� Just look at them all paying it - in pious grimaces and religious silence!'
������ 'You can be thankful they pay you in guineas,' said Lady Edward.� 'And now I absolutely insist that you should hold your tongue.'
������ Bidlake made a gesture of mock terror and put his hand over his mouth.� Tolley voluptuously waved his arms; Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers scraped.� And Bach, the poet, meditated of truth and beauty.
������ Fanny Logan felt the tears coming into her eyes.� She was easily moved, especially by music; and when she felt an emotion, she did not try to repress it, but abandoned herself whole-heartedly to it.� How beautiful this music was, how sad, and yet how comforting!� She felt it within her, as a current of exquisite feeling, running smoothly but irresistibly through all the labyrinthine intricacies of her being.� Even her body shook and swayed in time with the pulse and undulation of the melody.� She thought of her husband; the memory of him came to her on the current of the music, of darling, darling Eric, dead now almost two years; dead, and still so young.� The tears came faster.� She wiped them away.� The music was infinitely sad; and yet it consoled.� It admitted everything, so to speak - poor Eric's dying before his time, the pain of his illness, his reluctance to go - it admitted everything.� It expressed the whole sadness of the world, and from the depths of that sadness it was able to affirm - deliberately, quietly, without protesting too much - that everything was in some way right, acceptable.� It included the sadness within some vaster, more comprehensive happiness.� The tears kept welling up into Mrs Logan's eyes; but they were somehow happy tears, in spite of her sadness.� She would have liked to telly Polly, her daughter, what she was feeling.� But Polly was sitting in another row.� Mrs Logan could see the back of her head, two rows further forward, and her slim little neck with the pearls that darling Eric had given her on her eighteenth birthday, only a few months before he died.� And suddenly, as though she had felt that her mother was looking at her, as though she understood what she was feeling, Polly turned round and gave her a quick smile.� Mrs Logan's sad and musical happiness was complete.
������ Her mother's were not the only eyes that
looked in Polly's direction.�
Advantageously placed behind and to one side of her, Hugo Brockle
admiringly studied her profile.� How
lovely she was!� He was wondering whether
he would have the courage to tell her that they had played together in
������ Looking restlessly round the room, John Bidlake had suddenly caught sight of Mary Betterton.� Yes, Mary Betterton - that monster!� He put his hand under his chair, he touched wood.� Whenever John Bidlake saw something unpleasant, he always felt safer if he could touch wood.� He didn't believe in God, of course; he liked to tell disobliging stories about the clergy.� But wood, wood - there was something about wood ... And to think that he had been in love with her, wildly, twenty, twenty-two, he dared not think how many years ago.� How fat, how old and hideous!� His hand crept down again to the chair leg.� He averted his eyes and tried to think of something that wasn't Mary Betterton.� But the memories of the time when Mary had been young imposed themselves upon him.� He still used to ride then.� The image of himself on a black horse, of Mary on a bay, rose up before him.� They had often gone riding in those days.� It was the time he was painting the third and best of his groups of 'Bathers'.� What a picture, by God!� Mary was already a little too plump for some tastes, even then.� Not for his; he had never objected to plumpness.� These women nowadays, wanting to look like drainpipes ... He looked at her again for a moment and shuddered.� He hated her for being so repulsive, for having once been so charming.� And he was the best part of twenty years her senior.
CHAPTER III
Two flights up, between the piano nobile and the servants' quarters under the roof, Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory.
������ The younger Tantamounts were generally military.� But the heir being a cripple, Lord Edward's father had destined him for the political career, which the eldest sons had always traditionally begin in the Commons and continued majestically in the Lords.� Hardly had Lord Edward come of age, when he was given a constituency to nurse.� He nursed it dutifully.� But oh, how he hated public speaking!� And when one met a potential voter, what on earth was one to say?� And he couldn't even remember the main items in the Conservative party programme, much less feel enthusiastic about them.� Decidedly, politics were not his line.
������ 'But what are you interested in?' his father had asked.� And the trouble was that Lord Edward didn't know.� Going to concerts was about the only thing he thoroughly enjoyed.� But obviously, one couldn't spend one's life going to concerts.� The fourth marquess could not conceal his anger and disappointment.� 'The boy's an imbecile,' he said, and Lord Edward himself was inclined to agree.� He was good for nothing, a failure; the world had no place for him.� There were times when he thought of suicide.
������ 'If only he'd sow a few wild oats!' his father had complained.� But the young man was, if possible, even less interested in debauchery than in politics.� 'And he's not even a sportsman,' the accusation continued.� It was true.� The massacre of birds, even in the company of the Prince of Wales, left Lord Edward quite unmoved, except perhaps by a faint disgust.� He preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything. �But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory.� The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time.� But what was the good of that?� Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun.� He might go on reading like this for the rest of his days; but it would never help him to achieve anything.
������ On the afternoon of April 18th, 1887, he
was sitting in the library at Tantamount House, wondering whether life was
worth living and whether drowning were preferable, as a mode of dying, to
shooting.� It was the day that The
Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell's, condoning
the
������ 'The living being does not form an exception to the great natural harmony which makes things adapt themselves to one another; it breaks no concord; it is neither in contradiction to, nor struggling against, general cosmic forces.� Far from that, it is a member of the universal concert of things, and the life of the animal, for example, is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.'
������ He read the word, idly first, then more
carefully, then several times with a strained attention.� 'The life of the animal is only a fragment of
the total life of the universe.'� Then
what about suicide?� A fragment of the
universe would be destroying itself?� No,
not destroying; it couldn't destroy itself even if it tried.� It would be changing its mode of
existence.� Changing ... Bits of animals
and plants became human beings.� What was
one day a sheep's hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand
that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony.� And another day had come when thirty-six
years of pleasures, pains, hungers, loves, thoughts, music, together with
infinite unrealized potentialities of melody and harmony had manured an unknown
corner of a Viennese cemetery, to� be
transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed
into sheep, whose hind legs had in their turn been transformed into other
musicians, whose bodies in their turn ... It was all obvious, but to Lord
Edward an apocalypse.� Suddenly and for
the first time he realized his solidarity with the world.� The realization was extraordinarily exciting;
he rose from his chair and began to walk agitatedly up and down the room.� His thoughts were confused, but the muddle
was bright and violent, not dim, not foggily languid as at ordinary times.� 'Perhaps when I was at
������ Lord Edward was filled with an extraordinary exultation; he had never felt so happy in his life before.
������ That evening he told his father that he was not going to stand for Parliament.� Still agitated by the morning's revelations of Parnellism, the old gentleman was furious.� Lord Edward was entirely unmoved; his mind was made up.� The next day he advertised for a� tutor.� In the spring of the following year he was in Berlin working under Du Bois Reymond.
������ Forty years had passed since then.� The studies of osmosis, which had indirectly given him a wife, had also given him a reputation.� His work on assimilation and growth was celebrated.� But what he regarded as the real task of his life - the great theoretical treatise on physical biology - was still unfinished.� 'The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.'� Claude Bernard's words had been his life-long theme as well as his original inspiration.� The book on which he had been working all these years was but an elaboration, a quantitative and mathematical illustration of them.
������ Upstairs in the laboratory the day's work had just begun.� Lord Edward preferred to work at night.� He found the daylight hours disagreeably noisy.� Breakfasting at half-past one, he would work for an hour or two in the afternoon and return to read or write till lunchtime at eight.� At nine or half-past he would do some practical work with his assistant, and when that was over they would sit down to work on the great book or to discussion of its problems.� At one, Lord Edward had his supper, and at about four or five he would go to bed.
������ Diminished and in fragments, the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory.� They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.
������ 'Forceps,' said Lord Edward to his assistant.� He had a very deep voice, indistinct and without, so to speak, a clearly defined contour.� 'A furry voice,' his daughter Lucy had called it, when she was a child.
������ Illidge handed him the fine bright instrument.� Lord Edward made a deep noise that signified thanks and turned back with the forceps to the anaesthetized newt that lay stretched out on the diminutive operating table.� Illidge watched him critically, and approved.� The Old Man was doing the job extraordinarily well.� Illidge was always astonished by Lord Edward's skill.� You would never have expected a huge, lumbering creature like the Old Man to be so exquisitely neat.� His big hands could do the finest work; it was a pleasure to watch them.
������ 'There!' said Lord Edward at last and straightened himself up as far as his rheumatically bent back would allow him.� 'I think that's all right, don't you?'
������ Illidge nodded.� 'Perfectly all right,' he said in an accent that had certainly not been formed in any of the ancient and expensive seats of learning.� It hinted of Lancashire origin.� He was a small man, with a boyish-looking freckled face and red hair.
������ The newt began to wake up.� Illidge put it away in a place of safety.� The animal had not tail; it had lost that eight days ago, and tonight the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted on to the stump of its amputated right foreleg.� Transplanted to its new position, would the bud turn into a foreleg, or continue incongruously to grow as a tail?� Their first experiment had been with a tail-bud only just formed; it had duly turned into a leg.� In the next, they had given the bud time to grow to a considerable size before they transplanted it; it had proved too far committed to tailhood to be able to adapt itself to the new conditions; they had manufactured a monster with a tail where an arm should have been.� Tonight they were experimenting on a bud of intermediate age.
������ Lord Edward took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it, looking meditatively meanwhile at the newt.� 'Interesting to see what happens this time,' he said in his profound indistinct voice.� 'I should think that we must be just about on the border line between ...' He left the sentence unfinished; it was always difficult for him to find the words to express his meaning.� 'The bud will have a difficult choice.'
������ 'To be or not to be,' said Illidge facetiously, and started to laugh; but seeing that Lord Edward showed no signs of having been amused, he checked himself.� Almost put his foot in it again.� He felt annoyed with himself and also, unreasonably, with the Old Man.
������ Lord Edward filled his pipe.� 'Tail becomes leg,' he said meditatively.� 'What's the mechanism?� Chemical peculiarities in the neighbouring ...?� It can't obviously be the blood.� Or do you suppose it has something to do with the electric tension?� It does vary, of course, in different parts of the body.� Though why we don't all just vaguely proliferate like cancers ... Growing in a definite shape is very unlikely, when you come to think of it.� Very mysterious and ...'� His voice trailed off into a deep and husky murmur.
������ Illidge listened disapprovingly.� When the Old Man started off like this about the major and fundamental problems of biology, you never knew where he'd be getting to.� Why, as likely as not he'd begin talking about God.� It really made one blush.� He was determined to prevent anything so discreditable happening this time.� 'The next step with these newts,' he said in his most briskly practical tone, 'is to tinker with the nervous system and see whether that has any influence on the grafts.� Suppose, for example, we excised a piece of the spine ...'
������ But Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant.� He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side.� He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something.� He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened.� A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.
������ 'Bach?' said Lord Edward in a whisper.
������ Pongileoni's blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side.� The shaking air rattled Lord's Edward's membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth.� The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered 'Bach!'� He smiled with pleasure, his eyes lit up.� The young girl was singing to herself in solitude under the floating clouds.� And then the cloud-solitary philosopher began poetically to meditate.� 'We must really go downstairs and listen,' said Lord Edward.� He got up.� 'Come,' he said.� 'Work can wait.� One doesn't hear this sort of thing every night.'
������ 'But what about the clothes,' said Illidge doubtfully.� 'I can't come down like this.'� He looked down at himself.� It had been a cheap suit at the best of times.� Age had not improved it.
������ 'Oh, that doesn't matter.'� A dog with the smell of rabbits in his nostrils could hardly have shown a more indecent eagerness than Lord Edward at the sound of Pongileoni's flute.� He took his assistant's arm and hurried him out of the door and along the corridor towards the stairs.� 'It's just a little party,' he went on.� 'I seem to remember my wife having said ... Quite informal.� And besides,' he added, inventing new excuses to justify the violence of his musical appetite, 'we can just slip in without ... Nobody will notice.'
������ Illidge had his doubts.� 'I'm afraid it's not a very small party,' he began; he had seen the motors arriving.
������ 'Never mind, never mind,' interrupted Lord Edward, lusting irrepressibly for Bach.
������ Illidge abandoned himself.� He would look like a horrible fool, he reflected, in his shiny blue serge suit.� But perhaps, on second thoughts, it was better to appear in shiny blue - straight from the laboratory, after all, and under the protection of the master of the house (himself in a tweed jacket), than in that old and, as he had perceived during previous excursions into Lady Edward's luscious world, deplorably shoddy and ill-made evening suit of his.� It was better to be totally different from the rich and smart - a visitor from another intellectual planet - than a fourth-rate and snobbish imitator.� Dressed in blue, one might be stared at as an oddity; in badly cut black (like a waiter) one was contemptuously ignored, one was despised for trying without success to be what one obviously wasn't.
������ Illidge braced himself to play the part of the Martian visitor with firmness, even assertively.
������ Their entrance was even more embarrassingly conspicuous than Illidge had anticipated.� The great staircase at Tantamount House comes down from the first floor in two branches with join, like a pair of equal rivers, to precipitate themselves in a single architectural cataract of Verona marble into the hall.� It debouches under the arcades, in the centre of one of the sides of the covered quadrangle, opposite the vestibule and the front door.� Coming in from the street, one looks across the hall and sees through the central arch of the opposite arcade the wide stairs and shining balustrades climbing up to a landing on which a Venus by Canova, the pride of the third marquess's collection, stands pedestalled in an alcove, screening with a modest but coquettish gesture of her two hands, or rather failing to screen, her marble charms.� It was at the foot of this triumphal slope of marble that Lady Edward had posted the orchestra; her guests were seated in serried rows confronting it.� When Illidge and Lord Edward turned the corner in front of Canova's Venus, tiptoeing, as they approached the music and the listening crowd, with steps ever more laboriously conspiratorial, they found themselves suddenly at the focus of a hundred pairs of eyes.� A gust of curiosity stirred the assembled guests.� The apparition from a world so different from theirs of this huge bent old man, pipe-smoking and tweed-jacketed, seemed strangely portentous.� He had a certain air of the skeleton in the cupboard - broken loose; or of one of those monsters which haunt the palaces of only the best and most aristocratic families.� The Beastie of Glamis, the Minotaur itself could hardly have aroused more interest than did Lord Edward.� Lorgnons were raised, there was a general craning to left and right, as people tried to look round the well-fed obstacles in front of them.� Becoming suddenly aware of so many inquisitive glances, Lord Edward took fright.� A consciousness of social sin possessed him; he took his pipe out of his mouth and put it away, still smoking, into the pocket of his jacket.� He halted irresolutely.� Flight or advance?� He turned this way and that, pivoting his whole bent body from the hips with a curious swinging motion, like the slow ponderous balancing of a camel's neck.� For a moment he wanted to retreat.� But love of Bach was stronger than his terrors.� He was the bear whom the smell of molasses constrains in spite of all his fears to visit the hunters' camp; the lover who is ready to face an armed and outraged husband and the divorce court for the sake of an hour in his mistress's arms.� He went forward, tiptoeing down the stairs more conspiratorially than ever - Guy Fawkes discovered, but yet irrationally hoping that he might escape notice by acting as though the Gunpowder Plot were still unrolling itself according to plan.� Illidge followed him.� His face had gone very red with the embarrassment of the first moment; but in spite of this embarrassment, or rather because of it, he came downstairs after Lord Edward with a kind of swagger, one hand in his pocket, a smile on his lips.� He turned his eyes coolly this way and that over the crowd.� The expression on his face was one of contemptuous amusement.� Too busy being the Martian to look where he was going, Illidge suddenly missed his footing on this unfamiliarly regal staircase with its inordinate treads and dwarfishly low risers.� His foot slipped, he staggered wildly on the brink of a fall, waving his arms, to come to rest, however, still miraculously on his feet, some two or three steps lower down.� He resumed his descent with such dignity as he could muster up.� He felt exceedingly angry, he hated Lady Edward's guests one and all, without exception.
������
CHAPTER IV
Pongileoni surpassed himself in the final Badinerie.� Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics.� Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermess; algebra cut capers.� The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merry-making.� There was applause.� Tolley bowed, with all his usual grace; Pongileoni bowed, even the anonymous fiddlers bowed.� The audience pushed back its chairs and got up.� Torrents of pent-up chatter broke loose.
������ 'Wasn't the Old Man too mar-vellously funny?'� Polly Logan had found a friend.
������ 'And the little carroty man with him.'
������ 'Like Mutt and Jeff.'
������ 'I thought I should die of laughing,' said Norah.
������ 'Such an old magician!'� Polly spoke in a thrilling whisper, leaning forward and opening her eyes very wide, as though to express in dramatic pantomime as well as words the mysteriousness of the magical old man.� 'A wizard.'
������ 'But what does he do up there?'
������ 'Cuts up toads and salamanders and all that,' Polly answered.
������
������������������������������������� 'Eye of newt and toe of frog,
������������������������������������� Wool of bat and tongue of dog ...'
������ She recited with gusto, intoxicated by the words.� 'And he takes guinea-pigs and makes them breed with serpents.� Can you image it - a cross between a cobra and a guinea-pig?'
������ 'Ugh!' the other shuddered.� 'But why did he ever marry her, if that's the only sort of thing he's interested in?� That's what I always wonder.'
������ 'Why did she marry him?'� Polly's voice dropped again to a stage whisper.� She liked to make everything sound exciting - as exciting as she still felt everything to be.� She was only twenty.� 'There were very good reasons for that.'
������ 'Yes, I suppose so.'
������ 'And she was a Canadian, remember, which made the reasons even more cogent.'
������ 'One wonders how Lucy ever ...'
������ 'Sh-sh.'
������ The other looked round.� 'Wasn't Pongileoni splendid,' she exclaimed very loudly, and with altogether too much presence of mind.
������ 'Too wonderful!' Polly bawled back, as though she were on the stage at Drury Lane. �'Ah, there's Lady Edward.'� They were both enormously surprised and delighted.� 'We were just saying how mar-vellous Pongileoni's playing was.'
������ 'Were you?' said Lady Edward, smiling and looking from one to the other.� She had a deep rich voice and spoke slowly, as though everything she said were very serious and important.� 'That was very nice of you.'� The 'r' was most emphatically rolled.� 'He's an Italian,' she added, and her face was now quite grave and unsmiling.� 'Which makes it even more wonderful.'� And she passed on, leaving the two young girls haggardly looking into one another's blushing face.
������ Lady Edward was a small, thin woman, with an elegance of figure that, in a low-cut dress, was visibly beginning to run to bones and angles, as were also the aquiline good looks of a rather long and narrow face.� A French mother and perhaps, in these later days, the hairdresser's art accounted for the jetty blackness of her hair.� Her skin was whitely opaque.� Under arched black eyebrows her eyes had that boldness and insistence of regard which is the characteristic of all very dark eyes set in a pale face.� To this generic boldness Lady Edward added a certain candid impertinence of fixed gaze and bright ingenuous expression that was entirely her own.� They were the eyes of a child, mais d'un enfant terrible,' as John Bidlake had warned a French colleague whom he had taken to see her.� The French colleague had occasion to make the discovery on his own account.� At the luncheon table he found himself sitting next to the critic who had written of his pictures that they were the work either of an imbecile or of a practical joker.� Wide-eyed and innocent, Lady Edward had started a discussion on art ... John Bidlake was furious.� He drew her aside when the meal was over and gave her a piece of his mind.
������ 'Damn it all,' he said, 'the man's my friend.� I bring him to see you.� And this is how you treat him.� It's a bit thick.'
������ Lady Edward's bright black eyes had never been more candid, nor her voice more disarmingly French-Canadian (for she could modify her accent at will, making it more or less colonial according as it suited her to be the simple-hearted child of the North American steppe or the English aristocrat).� 'But what's too thick?' she asked.� 'What have I done this time?'
������ 'None of your comedy with me,' said Bidlake.
������ 'But it isn't a comedy.� I've no idea what's thick.� No idea.'
������ Bidlake explained about the critic.� 'You know as well as I do,' he said.� 'And now I come to think of it, we were talking about his article only last week.'
������ Lady Edward frowned, as though trying to recapture a vanished memory.� 'Se we were!' she cried at last, and looked at him with an expression of horror and repentance.� 'Too awful!� But you know what a hopeless memory I have.'
������ 'You have the best memory of any person I know,' said Bidlake.
������ 'But I always forget,' she protested.
������ 'Only what you know you ought to remember.� It's a damned sight too regular to be accidental.� You deliberately remember to forget.'
������ 'What nonsense!' cried Lady Edward.
������ 'If you had a bad memory,' Bidlake went on, 'you might occasionally forget that husbands oughtn't to be asked to meet the notorious lovers of their wives; you might sometimes forget that anarchists and leader writers in the Morning Post aren't likely to be the best of friends, and that pious Catholics don't much enjoy listening to blasphemy from professional atheists.� You might occasionally forget, if your memory were bad.� But, I assure you, it needs a first-class memory to forget every time.� A first-class memory and a first-class love of mischief.'
������ For the first time since the conversation had begun Lady Edward relaxed her ingenuous seriousness.� She laughed.� 'You're too absurd, my dear John.'
������ Talking, Bidlake had recovered his good humour; he echoed her laughter.� 'Mind you,' he said, 'I don't in the least object to your playing practical jokes on other people.� I enjoy it.� But I do draw the line at having them played on me.'
������ 'I'll do my best to remember next time,' she said meekly and looked at him with an ingenuousness that was so impertinent that he had to laugh.
������ That had been many years before; she had kept her word and played no more tricks on him.� But with other people, she was just as embarrassingly innocent and forgetful as ever.� Throughout the world in which she moved her exploits were proverbial.� People laughed.� But there were too many victims; she was feared, she was not liked.� But her parties were always thronged; her cook, her wine merchant and caterer were of the first class.� Much was forgiven her for her husband's wealth.� Besides, the company of Tantamount House was always variously and often eccentrically distinguished.� People accepted her invitations and took their revenge by speaking ill of her behind her back.� They called her, among other things, a snob and a lion hunter.� But a snob, they had to admit to her defenders, who laughed at the pomps and grandeurs for which she lived.� A hunter who collected lions in order that she might bait them. Where a middle-class Englishwoman would have been serious and abject, Lady Edward was mockingly irreverent.� She hailed from the New World; for her the traditional hierarchies were a joke - but a picturesque joke and one worth living for.
������ 'She might have been the heroine of that anecdote,' old Bidlake had once remarked of her, 'that anecdote about the American and the two English peers.� You remember?� He got into conversation with two Englishmen in the train, liked them very much, wanted to renew the acquaintance later and asked their names.� "My name," says one of them, "is the Duke of Hampshire and this is my friend the Master of Ballantrae."� "Glad to meet you," says the American.� "Allow me to present my son Jesus Christ."� That's Hilda all over. �And yet her whole life consists precisely in asking and being asked out by the people whose titles seem to her so comic.� Queer.'� He shook his head.� 'Very queer indeed.'
������ Turning away from the two discomfited young girls, Lady Edward was almost run down by a very tall and burly man, who was hurrying with dangerous speed across the crowded room.
������ 'Sorry,' he said without looking down to see who it was he had almost knocked over.� His eyes were following the movements of somebody at the other end of the room' he was only aware of a smallish obstacle, presumably human, since all the obstacles in the neighbourhood were human.� He checked himself in mid career and took a step to the side, so as to get round the obstacle.� But the obstacle was not of the kind one circumvents as easily as that.
������ Lady Edward reached out and caught him by the sleeve.� 'Webley!'� Pretending not to have felt the hand on his sleeve, not to have heard the calling of his name, Edward Webley still moved on; he had no wish and no leisure to talk to Lady Edward.� But Lady Edward would not be shaken off; she suffered herself to be dragged along, still tugging, at his side.
������ 'Webley!' she repeated.� 'Stop!� Whoa!'� And her imitation of a country carter was so loud and so realistically rustic that Webley was compelled to listen, for fear of attracting the laughing attention of his fellow guests.
������ He looked down at her.� 'Oh, it's you,' he said gruffly.� 'Sorry I hadn't noticed.'� The annoyance, expressed in his frown and his ill-mannered words, was partly genuine, partly assumed.� Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.� It kept people at a distance, saved him from being bothered.
������ 'Goodness!' exclaimed Lady Edward with an expression of terror that was frankly a caricature.
������ 'Did you want anything?' he demanded in the tone in which he might have addressed an importunate beggar in the street.
������ 'You do look cross.'
������ 'If that was all you wanted to say to me, I think I might as well ...'
������ Lady Edward, meanwhile, had been examining him critically out of her candidly impertinent eyes.
������ 'You know,' she said, interrupting him in the middle of his sentence, as though unable to delay for a moment longer the announcement of her great and sudden discovery, 'you ought to play the part of Captain Hook in Peter Pan.� Yes, really.� You have the ideal face for a pirate king.� Hasn't he, Mr Babbage?'� She caught at Illidge as he was passing, disconsolately alien, through the crowd of strangers.
������ 'Good evening,' he said.� The cordiality of Lady Edward's smile did not entirely make up for the insult of his unremembered name.
������ 'Webley, this is Mr Babbage, who helps my husband with his work.'� Webley nodded a distant acknowledgment of Illidge's existence.� 'But don't you think he's like a pirate king, Mr Babbage?' Lady Edward went on.� 'Look at him now.'
������ Illidge uncomfortably laughed.� 'Not that I'd seen many pirate kings,' he said.
������ 'But of course,' Lady Edward cried out, 'I'd forgotten; he is a pirate king.� In real life.� Aren't you Webley?'
������ Everard Webley laughed.� 'Oh, certainly, certainly.'
������ 'Because, you see,' Lady Edward explained, turning confidentially to Illidge, 'this is Mr Everard Webley.� The head of the British Freemen.� You know those men in the green uniform?� Like the male chorus at a musical comedy.'
������ Illidge smiled maliciously and nodded.� So this, he was thinking, was Everard Webley.� The founder and the head of the Brotherhood of British Freemen - the B.B.F's, the B----y, b--ing, f--s,' as their enemies called them.� Inevitably; for as the extremely well-informed correspondent of the Figaro once remarked in an article devoted to the Freemen, 'les initiales B.B.F. ont, pour le public anglais, une signification plut�t p�jorative.'� Webley had not thought of that, when he gave his Freemen their name.� It pleased Illidge to reflect that he must be made to think of it very often now.
������ 'If you've finished being funny,' said Everard, 'I'll take my leave.'
������ Tinpot Mussolini, Illidge was thinking.� Looks his part, too.� (He had a special personal hatred of anyone who was tall and handsome, or who looked in any way distinguished.� He himself was small and had the appearance of a very intelligent street Arab, grown up.)� Great lout!
������ 'But you're not offended by anything I said, are you?' Lady Edward asked with a great show of anxiety and contrition.
������ Illidge remembered a cartoon in the Daily Herald.� 'The British Freemen,' Webley had had the insolence to say, 'exist to keep the world safe for intelligence.'� The cartoon showed Webley and half a dozen of his uniformed bandits kicking and bludgeoning a workman to death.� Behind them a top-hatted company-director looked on approvingly.� Across his monstrous belly sprawled the word: INTELLIGENCE.
������ 'Not offended, Webley?' Lady Edward repeated.
������ 'Not in the least.� I'm only rather busy.� You see,' he explained in his silkiest voice, 'I have things to do.� I work, if you know what that means.'
������ Illidge wished that the hit had been scored by someone else.� The dirty ruffian!� He himself was a communist.
������ Webley left them.� Lady Edward watched him ploughing his way through the crowd.� 'Like a steam engine,' she said.� 'What energy!� But so touchy.� These politicians - worse than actresses.� Such vanity!� And dear Webley hasn't got much sense of humour.� He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation.'� (The r's roared like lions.)� 'Posthumously, if you see what I mean.� As a great historical character.� I can never remember, when I see him, that he's really Alexander the Great.� I always make the mistake of thinking it's just Webley.'
������ Illidge laughed.� He found himself positively liking Lady Edward.� She had the right feelings about things.� She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.
������ 'Not but what his Freemen aren't a very good thing,' Lady Edward went on.� Illidge's sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up.� 'Don't you think so, Mr Babbage?'
������ He made a little grimace.� 'Well ...' he began.
������ 'By the way,' said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment on Webley's Freemen, 'you must really be careful coming down those stairs.� They're terribly slippery.'
������ Illidge blushed.� 'Not at all,' he muttered and blushed still more deeply - a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair - as he realized the imbecility of what he had said.� His sympathy declined still further.
������ 'Well, rather slippery all the same,' Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat.� 'What were you working at with Edward this evening?' she went on.� 'It always interests me so much.'
������ Illidge smiled.� 'Well, if you really want to know,' he said, 'we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.'� Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.
������ 'Newts?� Those things that swim?'� Illidge nodded.� 'But how do they lose their parts?'
������ 'Well, in the laboratory,' he explained, 'they lose them because we cut them off.'
������ 'And they grow again?'
������ 'They grow again.'
������ 'Dear me,' said Lady Edward.� 'I never knew that.� How fascinating these things are.� Do tell me some more.'
������ She wasn't so bad after all.� He began to explain.� Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward.� He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings - the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg - when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.
������ 'Come with me,' she said, 'and I'll introduce you to General Knoyle.� Such an amusing old man - if only unintentionally some times.'
������ Illidge's exposition froze suddenly in his throat.� He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention.� Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.
������ General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman.� His voice was martial and asthmatic.� '"My dear fellow," I said to him' (they heard him as they approached), '"my dear fellow, don't enter the horse now.� It would be a crime," I said.� "It would be sheer madness.� Scratch him," I said, "scratch him."� And he scratched him.'
������ Lady Edward made her presence known.� The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.
������ 'I chose the Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,' said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.
������ 'Well - er - really, that was very kind of you.'� General Knoyle's confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.
������ 'I hesitated,' Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, 'between Handel's Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni.� Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.'� Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General's ruddy face.
������ 'That was very kind of you,' he protested.� 'Not that I can pretend to understand much about music.� But I know what I like, I know what I like.'� The phrase seemed to given him confidence.� He cleared his throat and started again.� 'What I always say is ...'
������ 'And now,' Lady Edward concluded triumphantly, 'I want to introduce Mr Babbage, who helps Edward with his work and who is a real expert on newts.� Mr Babbage, this is General Knoyle and this is Colonel Pilchard.'� She gave a last smile and was gone.
������ 'Well, I'm damned!' exclaimed the General, and the Colonel said she was a holy terror.
������ 'One of the holiest,' Illidge feelingly agreed.
������ The two military gentlemen looked at him for a moment and decided that from one so obviously beyond the pale the comment was an impertinence.� Good Catholics may have their little jokes about the saints and the habits of the clergy; but they are outraged by the same little jokes on the lips of infidels.� The General made no verbal comment and the Colonel contented himself with looking his disapproval.� But they way in which they turned to one another and continued their uninterrupted discussion of racehorses, as though they were alone, was so intentionally offensive, that Illidge wanted to kick them.
*���� *���� *���� *
������ 'Lucy, my child!'
������ 'Uncle John!'� Lucy Tantamount turned round and smiled at her adopted uncle.� She was of middle height and slim, like her mother, with short dark hair, oiled to complete blackness and brushed back from her forehead.� Naturally pale, she wore no rouge.� Only her thin lips were painted and there was a little blue round the eyes.� A black dress emphasized the whiteness of her arms and shoulders.� It was more than two years now since Henry Tantamount had died - for Lucy had married her second cousin.� But she still mourned in her dress, at any rate by artificial light.� Black suited her so well.� 'How are you?' she added, thinking as she spoke the words that he was beginning to look very old.
������ 'Perishing,' said John Bidlake.� Her took her arm familiarly, grasping it just above the elbow with a big, blue-veined hand.� 'Give me an excuse for going to have supper.� I'm ravenously hungry.'
������ 'But I'm not.'
������ 'No matter,' said John Bidlake.� 'My need is great than thine, as Sir Philip Sidney so justly remarked.'
������ 'But I don't want to eat.'� She objected to being domineered, to following instead of leading.� But Uncle John was too much for her.
������ 'I'll do all the eating,' he declared.� 'Enough for two.'� And jovially laughing, he continued to lead her along towards the dining-room.
������ Lucy abandoned the struggle.� They edged their way through the crowd.� Greenish-yellow and freckled, the orchid in John Bidlake's buttonhole resembled the face of a yawning serpent.� His monocle glittered in his eye.
������ 'Who's that old man with Lucy?' Polly Logan enquired as they passed.
������ 'That's old Bidlake.'
������ 'Bidlake?� The man who ... who painted the pictures?'� Polly spoke hesitatingly, in the tone of one who is conscious of a hole in her education and is afraid of making a ridiculous mistake.� 'Do you mean that Bidlake?'� Her companion nodded.� She felt enormously relieved.� 'Well I never,' she went on, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes very wide.� 'I always thought he was an� Old Master.� But he must be about a hundred by this time, isn't he?'
������ 'I should think he must be.'� Norah was also under twenty.
������ 'I must say,' Polly handsomely admitted, 'he doesn't look it.� He's still quite a beau, or a buck, or a Champagne Charlie, or whatever people were in his young days.'
������ 'He's had about fifteen wives,' said Norah.
������ It was at this moment that Hugo Brockle found the courage to present himself.� 'You don't remember me.� We were introduced in our perambulators.'� How idiotic it sounded!� He felt himself blushing all over.
������ The third and finest of John Bidlake's 'Bathers' hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room of Tantamount House.� It was a gay and joyous picture, very light in tone, the colouring very pure and brilliant.� Eight plump and pearly bathers grouped themselves in the water and on the banks of a stream so as to form with their moving bodies and limbs and kind of garland (completed above by the foliage of a tree) round the central point of the canvas.� Through the wreath of nacreous flesh (and even their faces were just smiling flesh, not a trace of spirit to distract you from the contemplation of the lovely forms and their relations) the eye travelled on towards a pale bright landscape of softly swelling downland and clouds.
������ Plate in hand and munching caviar sandwiches, old Bidlake stood with his companion, contemplating his own work.� An emotion of mingled elation and sadness possessed him.
������ 'It's good,' he said, 'it's enormously good.� Look at the way it's composed.� Perfect balance, and yet there's no suggestion of repetition or artificial arrangement.'� The other thoughts and feelings which the picture evoked in his mind he left unexpressed.� They were too many and too confused to be easily put into words.� Too melancholy above all; he did not care to dwell on them.� He stretched out a finger and touched the sideboard; it was mahogany, genuine wood.� 'Look at the figure on the right with the arms up.'� He went on with his technical exposition in order that he might keep down, might drive away the uninvited thoughts.� 'See how it compensates for the big stooping one there on the left.� Like a long lever lifting a heavy weight.'� But the figure with the arms up was Jenny Smith, the loveliest model he had ever had.� Incarnation of beauty, incarnation of stupidity and vulgarity.� A goddess as long as she was naked, kept her mouth shut, or had it kept shut for her with kisses; but oh, when she opened it, when she put on her clothes, her frightful hats!� He remembered the time he had taken her to Paris with him.� He had to send her back after a week.� 'You ought to be muzzled, Jenny,' he told her, and Jenny cried.� 'It was a mistake going to Paris,' he went on.� 'Too much sun in Paris, too many artificial lights.� Next time, we'll go to Spitzbergen.� In winter.� The nights are six months long up there.'� That had made her cry still more loudly.� The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty.� Afterwards she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity.� And finally what was left of her died.� But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts.� What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too.� Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost.� Soon even he would have disappeared.� And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny?� Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers.� And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.
������ 'It's good,' he said again, when he had finished his exposition, and his tone was mournful; his face as he looked at his picture was sad.� 'But after all,' he added, after a little pause and with a sudden explosion of voluntary laughter, 'after all, everything I do is good; damn good even.'� It was a bidding of defiance to the stupid critics who had seen a falling off in his later paintings; it was a challenge to his own past, to time and old age, to the real John Bidlake who had painted real Jenny and kissed her into silence.
������ 'Of course it's good,' said Lucy, and wondered why the old man's painting had fallen off so much of late.� This last exhibition - it was deplorable.� He himself, after all, had remained so young, comparatively speaking.� Though of course, she reflected, as she looked at him, he had certainly aged a good deal during the last few months.
������ 'Of course,' he repeated.� 'That's the right spirit.'
������ 'Though I must confess,' Lucy added, to change the subject, 'I always find your bathers rather an insult.'
������ 'An insult?'
������ 'Speaking as a woman, I mean.� Do you really find us so profoundly silly as you paint us?'
������ 'Yes, do you?' another voice� enquired.� 'Do you really?'� It was an intense, emphatic voice, and the words came out in gushes, explosively, as though they were being forced through a narrow aperture under emotional pressure.
������ Lucy and John Bidlake turned and saw Mrs Betterton, massive in dove grey, with arms, old Bidlake reflected, like thighs, and hair that was, in relation to the fleshy cheeks and chins, ridiculously short, curly, and auburn.� Her nose, which had tilted up so charmingly in the days when he had ridden the black horse and she the bay, was now preposterous, an absurd irrelevance in the middle-aged face.� Real Bidlake had talked about art with a na�ve, schoolgirlish earnestness which he had found laughable and charming.� He had cured her, he remembered, of a passion for Burne-Jones, but never, alas, of her prejudice in favour of virtue.� It was with all the old earnestness and a certain significant sentimentality as of one who remembers old times and would like to exchange reminiscences as well as general ideas, that she now addressed him.� Bidlake had to pretend that he was pleased to see her after all these years.� It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her; he could not remember having spoken to her more than three or four times in all the quarter of a century which had turned Mary Betterton into a momento mori.
������ 'Dear Mrs Betterton!' he exclaimed.� 'This is delightful.'� But he disguised his repugnance very badly.� And when she addressed him by his Christian name - 'Now, John,' she said, 'you must give us an answer to our question,' and she laid her hand on Lucy's arm, so as to associate her in the demand - old Bidlake was positively indignant.� Familiarity from a momento mori - it was intolerable.� He'd give her a lesson.� The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous.� Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul.� Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure.� Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables.� True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing.� Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive.� It was the same with women.� He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality.� It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts.� He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane.� When one is in high spirits, memento mori's cease to remind.
������ 'John, you're incorrigible,' said Mrs Betterton, indulgently.� She turned to Lucy, smiling.� 'But he doesn't mean a word he says.'
������ 'I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,' objected Lucy.� 'I've noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.'
������ Old Bidlake laughed.
������ 'Because they're the ones who know women most intimately.'
������ 'Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.'
������ 'But I assure you,' Mrs Betterton insisted, 'he doesn't mean it.� I knew him before you were born, my dear.'
������ The gaiety went out of John Bidlake's face.� The momento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton's flabby mask.
������ 'Perhaps he was different then,' said Lucy.� 'He's been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose.� We're dangerous company, Uncle John.� You ought to be careful.'
������ She had started one of Mrs Betterton's favourite hares.� That lady dashed off in serious pursuit.� 'It's the upbringing,' she explained.� 'Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays.� No wonder they're cynical.'� She proceeded eloquently.� Children were given too much, too early.� They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle.� 'I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen,' she declared, with pride.
������ 'My poor dear lady!'
������ 'I began going when I was six,' said Lucy.
������ 'And dances,' Mrs Betterton continued.� 'The hunt ball - what an excitement!� Because it only happened once a year.'� She quoted Shakespeare.
����������������������������������� 'Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
����������������������������������� Since seldom coming, in the long year set,
����������������������������������� Like stones of worth they thinly placed are ...
������ 'They're a row of pearls nowadays.'
������ 'And false ones at that,' said Lucy.
������ Mrs Betterton was triumphant.� 'False ones - you see?� But for us they were genuine, because they were rare.� We didn't "blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure" by daily wear.� Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age.� A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it's no more felt as a pleasure.'
������ 'And what's your remedy?' enquired John Bidlake.� 'If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,' he added ironically.
������ 'Naughty!' cried Mrs Betterton with an appalling playfulness.� Then, becoming serious, 'The remedy,' she went on, 'is fewer diversions.'
������ 'But I don't want them fewer,' objected John Bidlake.
������ 'In that case,' said Lucy, 'they must be stronger - progressively.'
������ 'Progressively?' Mrs Betterton repeated.� 'But where would that sort of progress end?'
������ 'In bull fighting?' suggested John Bidlake.� 'Or gladiatorial shows?� Or public executions, perhaps?� Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade?� Where?'
������ Lucy shrugged her shoulders.� 'Who knows?'
*��� *���� *��� *
������ Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.
������ 'I think it's detestable,' Polly was saying - and her face was flushed with anger, 'to make war on the poor.'
������ 'But the Freemen don't make war on the poor.'
������ 'They do.'
������ 'They don't,' said Hugo.� 'Read Webley's speeches.'
������ 'I only read about his actions.'
������ 'But they're in accordance with his words.'
������ 'They are not.'
������ 'They are.� All he's opposed to is dictatorship of a class.'
������ 'Of the poor class.'
������ 'Of any class,' Hugo earnestly insisted.� 'That's his whole point.� The classes must be equally strong.� A strong working class clamouring for high wages keeps the professional middle class active.'
������ 'Like flies on a dog,' suggested Polly and laughed with a return towards good humour.� When a ludicrous thought occurred to her she could never prevent herself from giving utterance to it, even when she was supposed to be serious, or, as in this case, in a rage.
������ 'They've jolly well got to be inventive and progressive,' Hugo continued, struggling with the difficulties of lucid exposition.� 'Otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay the workers what they demand and make a profit for themselves.� And at the same time a strong and intelligent middle class is good for the workers, because they get good leadership and good organization.� Which means better wages and peace and happiness.'
������ 'Amen,' said Polly.
������ 'So the dictatorship of one class is nonsense,' continued Hugo.� 'Webley wants to keep all the classes and strengthen them.� He wanted them to live in a condition of tension, so that the state is balanced by each pulling as hard as it can its own way.� Scientists say that the different organs of the body are like that.� They live in a state -' he hesitated, he blushed - 'of hostile symbiosis.'
������ 'Golly!'
������ 'I'm sorry,' Hugo apologized.
������ 'All the same,' said Polly, 'he doesn't want to allow men to strike.'
������ 'Because strikes are stupid.'
������ 'He's against democracy.'
������ 'Because it allows such awful people to get power.� He wants the best to rule.'
������ 'Himself, for example,' said Polly sarcastically.
������ 'Well, why not?� If you knew what a wonderful chap he was.'� Hugo became enthusiastic.� He had been acting as one of Webley's aides-de-camp for the last three months.� 'I never met anyone like him,' he said.
������ Polly listened to his outpourings with a smile.� She felt old and superior.� At school she herself had felt and talked like that about the domestic economy mistress.� All the same, she liked him for being so loyal.
CHAPTER V
A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers - it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake's imagination.� A jumble of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance.� The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas - yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.
������ The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, towards the floor.� But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night.� He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky.� Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cocatoos, up through the perennial mist of London, into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke.� He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise.� That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left - it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon.� And all these voices (what were they saying? '... made an excellent speech ...'; '... no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you've tried them ...'; '... such a bore ...'; '... eloped with the chauffeur ...'), all these voices - how exquisite and tiny they'd be up there!� But meanwhile down here, in the jungle .... Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous.
������ Looking over the heads of the people who surrounded him, he saw Frank Illidge, alone, leaning against a pillar.� His attitude, his smile were Byronic, at once world-weary and contemptuous; he glanced about him with a languid amusement, as though he were watching the drolleries of a group of monkeys.� Unfortunately, Walter reflected, as he made his way through the crowd towards him, poor Illidge hadn't the right physique for being Byronically superior.� Satirical romantics should be long, slow-moving, graceful and handsome.� Illidge was small, alert and jerky.� And what a comic face!� Like a street Arab's, with its upturned nose and wide slit of a mouth; a very intelligent, sharp-witted street Arab's face, but not exactly one to be languidly contemptuous with.� Besides, who can be superior with freckles?� Illidge's complexion was sandy with them.� Protectively coloured, the sandy-brown eyes, the sandy-orange eyebrows and lashes disappeared, at a little distance, into the skin, as a lion dissolves into the desert.� From across a room his face seemed featureless and unregarding, like the face of a statue carved out of a block of sandstone.� Pool Illidge!� The Byronic part made him look rather ridiculous.
������ 'Hullo,' said Walter, as he got within speaking distance.� The two young men shook hands.� 'How science?'� What a silly question! thought Walter as he pronounced the words.
������ Illidge shrugged his shoulders.� 'Less fashionable than the arts, to judge by this party.'� He looked round him.� 'I've seen half the writing and painting section of Who's Who this evening.� The place fairly stinks of art.'
������ 'Isn't that rather a comfort for science?' said Walter.� 'The arts don't enjoy being fashionable.'
������ 'Oh, don't they!� Why are you here, then?'
������ 'Why indeed?'� Walter parried the question with a laugh.� He looked round, wondering where Lucy could have gone.� He had not caught sight of her since the music stopped.
������ 'You've come to do your tricks and have your head patted,' said Illidge, trying to get a little of his own back; the memory of that slip on the stairs, of Lady Edward's lack of interest in newts, of the military gentlemen's insolence, still rankled.� 'Just look at that girl there with the frizzy hair, in cloth of silver.� The one like a little white negress.� What about her, for example?� It'd be pleasant to have one's head patted by that sort of thing - eh?'
������ 'Well, would it?'
������ Illidge laughed.� 'You take the high philosophical line, do you?� But, my dear chap, admit it's all humbug.� I take it myself, so I ought to know.� To tell you the truth, I envy you art-mongers your success.� It makes me really furious when I see some silly, half-witted little writer ...'
������ 'Like me, for example.'
������ 'No, you're a cut above most of them,' conceded Illidge.� 'But when I see some wretched little scribbler with a tenth of my intelligence, making money and being cooed over, while I'm disregarded, I do get furious sometimes.'
������ 'You ought to regard it as a compliment.� If they coo over us, it's because they can understand, more or less, what we're after.� They can't understand you; you're above them.� Their neglect is a compliment to your mind.'
������ 'Perhaps; but it's a damned insult to my body.'� Illidge was painfully conscious of his appearance.� He knew that he was ugly and looked undistinguished.� And knowing, he liked to remind himself of the unpleasant fact, like a man with an aching tooth, who is forever fingering the source of his pain, just to make sure it is still painful.� 'If I looked like that enormous lout, Webley, they wouldn't neglect me, even if my mind were like Newton's.� The fact is,' he said, giving the aching tooth a good tug this time, 'I look like an anarchist.� You're lucky, you know.� You look like a gentleman, or at least like an artist. You've no idea what a nuisance it is to look like an intellectual of the lower classes.'� The tooth was responding excruciatingly; he pulled at it the harder.� 'It's not merely that the women neglect you - these women, at any rate.� That's bad enough.� But the police refuse to neglect you; they take a horrid inquisitive interest.� Would you believe it, I've been twice arrested, simply because I look like the sort of man who makes infernal machines.'
������ 'It's a good story,' said Walter sceptically.
������ 'But true, I swear.� Once it was in this country.� Near Chesterfield.� They were having a coal strike.� I happened to be looking on at a fight between strikers and blacklegs.� The police didn't like my face and grabbed me.� It took me hours to get out of their clutches.� The other time was in Italy.� Somebody had just been trying to blow up Mussolini, I believe.� Anyhow, a gang of black-shirted bravoes made me get out of the train at Genoa and searched me from top to toe.� Intolerable!� Simply because of my subversive face.'
������ 'Which corresponds, after all, to your ideas.'
������ 'Yes, but a face isn't evidence, a face isn't a crime.� Well, yes,' he added parenthetically, 'perhaps some faces are crimes.� Do you know General Knoyle?'� Walter nodded.� 'His is a capital offence.� Nothing short of hanging would do for a man like that.� God! how I'd like to kill them all!'� Had he not slipped on the stairs and been snubbed by a stupid man-butcher?� 'How I loathe the rich!� Loathe them!� Don't you think they're horrible?'
������ 'More horrible than the poor?'� The recollection of Wetherington's sickroom made him almost at once feel rather ashamed of the question.
������ 'Yes, yes.� There's something peculiarly base and ignoble and diseased about the rich.� Money breeds a kind of gangrened insensitiveness.� It's inevitable.� Jesus understood.� That bit about the camel and the needle's eye is a mere statement of fact.� And remember that other bit about loving your neighbours.� You'll be thinking I'm a Christian at this rate,' he added with parenthetic apology.� 'But honour where honour is due.� The man had sense; he saw what was what.� Neighbourliness is the touchstone that shows up the rich.� The rich haven't got any neighbours.'
������ 'But, damn it, they're not anchorites.'
������ 'But they have no neighbours in the sense that the poor have neighbours.� When my mother had to go out, Mrs Cradock from next door on the right kept an eye on us children.� And my mother did the same for Mrs Cradock when it was her turn to go out.� And when somebody had broken a leg, or lost his job, people helped with money and food.� And how well I remember, as a little boy, being sent running round the village after the nurse, because young Mrs Foster from next door on the left had suddenly been taken with birth pains before she expected!� When you live on less than four pounds a week, you've damned well got to behave like a Christian and love your neighbour.� To begin with, you can't get away from him; he's practically in your backyard.� There can be no refined and philosophical ignoring of his existence.� You must either hate or love; and on the whole you'd better make a shift to love, because you may need his help in emergencies and he may need yours - so urgently, very often, that there can be no question of refusing to give it.� And since you must give, since, if you're a human being, you can't help giving, it's better to make an effort to like the person you've anyhow got to give to.'
������ Walter nodded.� 'Obviously.'
������ 'But you rich,' the other went on, 'you have no real neighbours.� You never perform a neighbourly action or expect your neighbours to do you a kindness in return.� It's unnecessary.� You can pay people to look after you.� You can hire servants to simulate kindness for three pounds a month and board.� Mrs Cradock from next door doesn't have to keep an eye on your babies when you go out.� You have nurses and governesses doing it for money.� No, you're generally not even aware of your neighbours.� You live at a distance from them.� Each of you is boxed up in his own secret house.� There may be tragedies going on behind the shutters; but the people next door don't know anything about it.'
������ 'Thank God!' ejaculated Walter.
������ 'Thank him by all means.� Privacy's a great luxury.� Very pleasant, I agree.� But you pay for luxuries.� People aren't moved by misfortunes they don't know about. �Ignorance is insensitive bliss.� In a poor street misfortune can't be hidden.� Life's too public.� People have their neighbourly feeling kept in constant training.� But the rich never have a chance of being neighbourly to their equals.� The best they can do is to feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind.� Horrible!� And that's when they're doing their best.� When they're at their worst, they're like this.'� He indicated the crowded room.� 'They're Lady Edward - the lowest hell!� They're that daughter of hers ...' He made a grimace, he shrugged his shoulders.
������ Walter listened with a strained and agonized attention.
������ 'Damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted,' Illidge went on like a denouncing prophet.� He had only spoken to Lucy Tantamount, casually, for a moment.� She had seemed hardly to notice that he was there.
������ It was true, Walter was thinking.� She was all that people enviously or
disapprovingly called her, and yet the most exquisite and marvellous of
beings.� Knowing all, he could listen to
anything that might be said about her.�
And the more atrocious the words the more desperately he loved her.� Credo quia absurdum.� Amo quia turpe, quia indignum ...
������ 'What a putrefaction!' Illidge continued grandiloquently.� 'The consummate flower of this charming civilization of ours - that's what she is.� A refined and perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.� The logical conclusion, so far as most people are concerned, of having money and leisure.'
������ Walter listened, his eyes shut, thinking of Lucy.� 'A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.'� The words were true and an excruciation; but he loved her all the more because of the torment and because of the odious truth.
������ 'Well,' said Illidge in a changed voice, 'I must go and see if the Old Man wants to go on working tonight.� We don't generally knock off before half-past one or two.� It's rather pleasant living upside down like this.� Sleeping till lunch-time, starting work after tea.� Very pleasant, really.'� He held out his hand.� 'So long.'
������ 'We must dine together one evening,' said Walter without much conviction.
������ Illidge nodded.� 'Let's fix it up one of these days,' he said and was gone.
������ Walter edged his way through the crowd, searching.
*���� *���� *���� *
������ Everard Webley had got Lord Edward into a corner and was trying to persuade him to support the British Freemen.
������ 'But I'm not interested in politics,' the Old Man huskily protested.� 'I'm not interested in politics ...' Obstinately, mulishly, he repeated the phrase, whatever Webley might say.
������ Webley was eloquent.� Men of good will, men with a stake in the country ought to combine to resist the forces of destruction.� It was not only property that was menaced, not only the material interests of a class; it was the English tradition, it was personal initiative, it was intelligence, it was all natural distinction of any kind.� The Freemen were banded to resist the dictatorship of the stupid; they were armed to protect individuality from the mass man, the mob; they were fighting for the recognition of natural superiority in every sphere.� The enemies were many and busy.
������ But forewarned was forearmed; when you saw the bandits approaching, you formed up in battle order and drew your swords.� (Webley had a weakness for swords; he wore one when the Freemen paraded, his speeches were full of them, his home bristled with panoplies.)� Organization, discipline, force were necessary.� The battle could no longer be fought constitutionally.� Parliamentary methods were quite adequate when the two parties agreed about fundamentals and disagreed only about trifling details.� But where fundamental principles were at stake, you couldn't allow politics to go on being treated as a Parliamentary game.� You had to resort to direct action or the threat of it.
������ 'I was five years in Parliament,' said Webley.� 'Long enough to convince myself that there's nothing to be done in these days by Parliamentarism.� You might as well try to talk a fire out.� England can only be saved by direct action.� When it's saved we can begin to think about Parliament again.� (Something very unlike the present ridiculous collection of mob-elected rich men it'll have to be.)� Meanwhile, there's nothing for it but to prepare for fighting.� And preparing for fighting, we may conquer peacefully.� It's the only hope.� Believe me, Lord Edward, it's the only hope.'
������ Harassed, like a bear in a pit set upon by dogs, Lord Edward turned uneasily this way and that, pivoting his bent body from the loins.� 'But I'm not interested in pol ...'� He was too agitated to be able to finish the word.
������ 'But even if you're not interested in politics,' Webley persuasively continued, 'you must be interested in your fortune, your position, the future of your family.� Remember, all those things will go down in the general destruction.'
������ 'Yes, but ... No ...' Lord Edward was growing desperate.� 'I ... I'm not interested in money.'
������ Once, years before, the head of the firm of solicitors to whom he left the entire management of his affairs, had called, in spite of Lord Edward's express injunction that he was never to be troubled with matters of business, to consult his client about a matter of investments.� There were some eighty thousand pounds to be disposed of.� Lord Edward was dragged from the fundamental equations of the statics of living systems.� When he learned the frivolous cause of the interruption, the ordinarily mild Old Man became unrecognizably angry.� Mr Figgis, whose voice was loud and whose manner confident, had been used, in previous interviews, to having things all his own way.� Lord Edward's fury astonished and appalled him.� It was as though, in his rage, the Old Man had suddenly thrown back atavistically to the feudal past, had remembered that he was a Tantamount, talking to a hired servant.� He had given orders; they had been disobeyed and his privacy unjustifiably disturbed.� It was insufferable.� If this sort of thing should ever happen again, he would transfer his affairs to another solicitor.� And with that he wished Mr Figgis a very good afternoon.
������ 'I'm not interested in money,' he now repeated.
������ Illidge, who had approached and was hovering in the neighbourhood, waiting for an opportunity to address the Old Man, overheard the remark and exploded with inward laughter.� 'These rich!' he thought.� 'These bloody rich!'� They were all the same.
������ 'But if not for your own sake,' Webley insisted, attacking from another quarter, 'for the sake of civilization, of progress.'
������ Lord Edward started at the word.� It touched a trigger, it released a flood of energy.� 'Progress!' he echoed, and the tone of misery and embarrassment was exchanged for one of confidence.� 'Progress!� You politicians are always talking about it.� As though it were going to last.� Indefinitely.� More motors, more babies, more food, more advertising, more money, more everything, for ever.� You ought to take a few lessons in my subject.� Physical biology.� Progress, indeed!� What do you propose to do about phosphorus, for example?'� His question was a personal accusation.
������ 'But all this in entirely beside the point,' said Webley impatiently.
������ 'On the contrary,' retorted Lord Edward, 'it's the only point.'� His voice had become loud and severe.� He spoke with a much more than ordinary degree of coherence.� Phosphorus had made a new man of him; he felt very strongly about phosphorus and, feeling strongly, he was strong.� The worried bear had become the worrier.� 'With your intensive agriculture,' he went on, 'you're simply draining the soil of phosphorus.� More than half of one per cent. a year.� Going clean out of circulation.� And then the way you throw away hundreds of thousands of tons of phosphorus pentoxide in your sewage!� Pouring it into the sea.� And you call that progress.� Your modern sewage systems!'� His tone was witheringly scornful.� 'You ought to be putting it back where it came from.� On the land.'� Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned.� 'On the land, I tell you.'
������ 'But all this has nothing to do with me,' protested Webley.
������ 'Then it ought to,' Lord Edward answered sternly.� 'That's the trouble with you politicians.� You don't even think of the important things.� Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea.� It's idiotic, it's criminal, it's ... it's fiddling while Rome is burning.'� He saw Webley opening his mouth to speak and made haste to anticipate what he imagined was going to be his objection.� 'No doubt,' he said, 'you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks.� But what'll you do when the deposits are exhausted?'� He poked Everard in the shirt front.� 'What then?� Only two hundred years and they'll be finished.� You think we're being progressive because we're living on our capital.� Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre - squander them all.� That's your policy.� And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions.'
������ 'But damn it all,' said Webley, half angry, half amused, 'your phosphorus can wait.� This other danger's imminent.� Do you want a political and social revolution?'
������ 'Will it reduce the population and check production?' asked Lord Edward.
������ 'Of course.'
������ 'Then certainly I want a revolution.'� The Old Man thought in terms of geology and was not afraid of logical conclusions.� 'Certainly.'� Illidge could hardly contain his laughter.
������ 'Well, if that's your view ...' began Webley; but Lord Edward interrupted him.
������ 'The only result of your progress,' he said, 'will be that in a few generations there'll be a real revolution - a natural, cosmic revolution.� You're upsetting the equilibrium.� And in the end, nature will restore it.� And the process will be very uncomfortable for you.� Your decline will be as quick as your rise.� Quicker, because you'll be bankrupt, you'll have squandered your capital.� It takes a rich man a little time to realize all his resources.� But when they've all been realized, it takes him almost no time to starve.'
������ Webley shrugged his shoulders.� 'Dotty old lunatic!' he said to himself, and aloud, 'Parallel straight lines never meet, Lord Edward.� So I'll bid you goodnight.'� He took his leave.
������ A minute later the Old Man and his assistant were making their way up the triumphal staircase to their world apart.
������ 'What a relief!' said Lord Edward, as he opened the door of his laboratory.� Voluptuously, he sniffed the faint smell of the absolute alcohol in which the specimens were picked.� 'These parties!� One's thankful to get back to science.� Still, the music was really ...' His admiration was inarticulate.
������ Illidge shrugged his shoulders.� 'Parties, music, science - alternative entertainments for the leisured.� You pays your money and you takes your choice.� The essential is to have the money to pay.'� He laughed disagreeably.
������ Illidge resented the virtues of the rich much more than their vices.� Gluttony, sloth, sensuality and all the less comely products of leisure and an independent income could be forgiven, precisely because they were discreditable.� But disinterestedness, spirituality, incorruptibility, refinements of feeling and exquisiteness of taste - these were commonly regarded as qualities to be admired; that was why he so specially disliked them.� For these virtues, according to Illidge, were as fatally the product of wealth as were chronic guzzling and breakfast at eleven.
������ 'These bourgeois,' he complained, 'they go about handing one another bouquets for being so disinterested - that is to say, for having enough to live on without being compelled to work or be preoccupied about money.� Then there's another bouquet for being able to afford to refuse a tip.� And another for having enough money to buy the apparatus of cultured refinement.� And yet another for having the time to spare for art and reading and elaborate long-drawn love-making.� Why can't they be frank and say outright what they're all the time implying - that the root of all their virtue is a five per cent. guilt-edged security?'
������ The amused affection which he felt for Lord Edward was tempered by a chronic annoyance at the thought that the Old Man's intellectual and moral virtues, all his endearing eccentricities and absurdities were only made possible by the really scandalous state of his bank balance.� And this latent disapproval became acute whenever he heard Lord Edward being praised, admired or even laughed at by others.� Laughter, liking and admiration were permitted to him, because he understood and could forgive.� Other people did not even realize that there was anything to forgive.� Illidge was always quick to inform them.
������ 'If the Old Man wasn't the descendant of monastery-robbers,' he would say to the praisers or admirers, 'he'd be in the workhouse or the loony asylum.'
������ And yet he was genuinely fond of the Old Man, he genuinely admired his talents and his character.� The world, however, might be excused for not realizing the fact.� 'Unpleasant' was the ordinary comment on Lord Edward's assistant.
������ But being unpleasant to and about the rich, besides a pleasure, was also, in Illidge's eyes, a sacred duty.� He owed it to his class, to society at large, to the future, to the cause of justice.� Even the Old Man himself was not spared.� He had only to breathe a word in favour of the soul (for Lord Edward had what his assistant could only regard as a shameful and adulterous passion for idealistic metaphysics); Illidge would at once leap out at him with a sneer about capitalist philosophy and bourgeois religion.� An expression of distaste for hard-headed businessmen, of indifference to material interests, of sympathy for the poor, would bring an immediate reference, more or less veiled, but always sarcastic, to the Tantamount millions.� There were days (and owing to the slip on the stairs and that snub from the General, this day was one of them) when even a reference to pure science elicited its ironic comment.� Illidge was an enthusiastic biologist; but as a class-conscious citizen he had to admit that pure science, like good taste and boredom, perversity and platonic love, is a product of wealth and leisure.� He was not afraid of being logical and deriding even his own idol.
������ 'Money to pay,' he repeated.� 'That's the essential.'
������ The Old Man looked rather guiltily at his assistant.� These implied reproofs made him feel uncomfortable.� He tried to change the subject.� 'What about our tadpoles?' he asked.� 'The asymmetrical ones.'� They had a brood of tadpoles hatched from eggs that had been kept abnormally warm on one side and abnormally cold on the other.� He moved towards the glass tank in which they were kept.� Illidge frowned.
������ 'Asymmetrical tadpoles!' he repeated.� 'Asymmetrical tadpoles!� What a refinement!� Almost as good as playing Bach on the flute or having a palate for wine.'� He thought of his brother Tom, who had weak lungs and worked a broaching machine in a motor factory at Manchester.� He remembered washing days and the pink crinkled skin of his mother's water-sodden hands.� 'Asymmetrical tadpoles!' he said once more and laughed.
*���� *���� *���� *
������ 'Strange,' said Mrs Betterton, 'strange that a great artist should be such a cynic.'� In Burlap's company she preferred to believe that John Bidlake had meant what he said.� Burlap on cynicism was uplifting and Mrs Betterton liked to be uplifted.� Uplifting too on greatness, not to mention art.� 'For you must admit,' she added, 'he is a great artist.'
������ Burlap nodded slowly.� He did not look directly at Mrs Betterton, but kept his eyes averted and downcast as though he were addressing some little personage invisible to everyone but himself, standing to one side of her - his private daemon, perhaps; an emanation from himself, a little doppelg�nger.� He was a man of middle height with a stoop and a rather slouching gait.� His hair was dark, thick and curly, with a natural tonsure as big as a medal showing pink on the crown of his head.� His grey eyes were very deeply set, his nose and chin pronounced but well shaped, his mouth full-lipped and rather wide.� A mixture, according to old Bidlake, who was a caricaturist in words as well as with the pencil, of a movie villain and St Anthony of Padua by a painter of the baroque, of a card-sharping Lothario and a rapturous devotee.
������ 'Yes, a great artist,' he agreed, 'but not one of the greatest.'� He spoke slowly, ruminatively, as though he were talking to himself.� All his conversation was a dialogue with himself or that little doppelg�nger which stood invisibly to one side of the people he was supposed to be talking to; Burlap was unceasingly and exclusively self-conscious.� 'Not one of the greatest,' he repeated slowly.� As it happened, he had just been writing an article about the subject-matter of art for next week's number of the Literary World.� 'Precisely because of that cynicism.'� Should he quote himself? he wondered.
������ 'How true that is!' Mrs Betterton's applause exploded perhaps a little prematurely; her enthusiasm was always on the boil.� She clapped her hands together.� 'How true!'� She looked at Burlap's averted face and thought it so spiritual, so beautiful in its way.
������ 'How can a cynic be a great artist?' Burlap went on, having decided that he'd spout his own article at her and take the risk of her recognizing it in print next Thursday.� And even if she did recognize it, that wouldn't efface the personal impression he'd made by spouting it.� 'Though why you want to make an impression,' a mocking devil had put in, 'unless it's because she's rich and useful, goodness knows!'� The devil was pitchforked back to where he came from.� 'One has responsibilities,' an angel hastily explained.� 'The lamp mustn't be hidden under a bushel.� One must let it shine, especially on people of good will.'� Mrs Betterton was on the side of the angels; her loyalty should be confirmed.� 'A great artist,' he went on aloud, 'is a man who synthesizes all experience.� The cynic sets out by denying half the facts - the fact of the soul, the fact of ideals, the fact of God.� And yet we're aware of spiritual facts just as directly and indubitably as we're aware of physical facts.'
������ 'Of course, of course!' exclaimed Mrs Betterton.
������ 'It's absurd to deny either class of facts.'� 'Absurd to deny me,' said the demon, poking out his head into Burlap's consciousness.
������ "Absurd!'
������ 'The cynic confines himself to only half the world of possible experience.� Less than half.� For there are more spiritual than bodily experiences.'
������ 'Infinitely more!'
������ 'He may handle his limited subject-matter very well.� Bidlake, I grant you, does.� Extraordinarily well.� He has all the sheer ability of the most consummate artists.� Or had, at any rate.'
������ 'Had,' Mrs Betterton sighed.� 'When I first knew him.'� The implication was that it was her influence that had made him paint so well.
������ 'But he always applied his powers to something small.� What he synthesizes in his art was limited, comparatively unimportant.'
������ 'That's what I always told him,' said Mrs Betterton, reinterpreting those youthful arguments about Pre-Raphaelitism in a new and, for her own reputation, favourable light.� 'Consider Burne-Jones, I used to say.'� The memory of John Bidlake's huge and Rabelaisian laughter reverberated in her ears.� 'Not that Burne-Jones was a particularly good painter,' she hastened to add.� ('He painted,' John Bidlake had said - and how shocked she had been, how deeply offended! - 'as though he had never seen a pair of buttocks in the whole of his life.')� 'But his subjects were noble.� If you had his dreams, I used to tell John Bidlake, if you had his ideals, you'd be a really great artist.'
������ Burlap nodded, smiling in agreement.� Yes, she's on the side of the angels, he was thinking; she needs encouraging.� One has a responsibility.� The demon winked.� There was something in his smile, Mrs Betterton reflected, that reminded one of a Leonardo or a Sodoma - something mysterious, subtle, inward.
������ 'Though, mind you,' he said, regurgitating his article slowly, phrase by phrase, 'the subject doesn't make the work of art.� Whittier and Longfellow were fairly stuffed with Great Thoughts.� But what they wrote was very small poetry.'
������ 'How true!'
������ 'The only generalization one can risk is that the greatest works of art have had great subjects; and that works with small subjects, however accomplished, are never so good as ...'
������ 'There's Walter,' said Mrs Betterton, interrupting him.� 'Wandering like an unlaid ghost.� Walter!'
������ At the sound of his name, Walter turned.� The Betterton - good Lord!� And Burlap!� He assumed a smile.� But Mrs B. and his colleague on the Literary World were among the last people he wanted at this moment to see.
������ 'We were just discussing greatness in art,' Mrs Betterton explained.� 'Mr Burlap was saying such profound things.'
������ She began to reproduce the profundities for Walter's benefit.
������ He meanwhile was wondering why Burlap's manner towards him had been so cold, so distant, shut, even hostile.� That was the trouble with Burlap.� You never knew where you stood with him.� Either he loved you, or he hated.� Life with him was a series of scenes - scenes of hostility or, even more trying in Walter's estimation, scenes of affection.� One way or the other, the motion was always flowing.� There were hardly any intervals of comfortably slack water.� The tide was always running.� Why was it running now towards hostility?
������ Mrs Betterton went on with her exposition of the profundities.� To Walter they sounded curiously like certain paragraphs in that article of Burlap's, the proof of which he had only that morning been correcting for the printers.� Reproduced - explosion after enthusiastic explosion - from Burlap's spoken reproduction, the article did sound rather ridiculous.� A light dawned.� Could that be the reason?� He looked at Burlap.� His face was stony.
������ 'I'm afraid I must go,' said Burlap abruptly, when Mrs Betterton paused.
������ 'But no,' she protested.� 'But why?'
������ He made an effort and smiled his Sodoma smile.� 'The world is too much with us,' he quoted mysteriously.� He liked saying mysterious things, dropping them surprisingly into the middle of the conversation.
������ 'But you're not enough with us,' flattered Mrs Betterton.
������ 'It's the crowd,' he explained.� 'After a time, I get into a panic.� I feel they're crushing my soul to death.� I should begin to scream if I stayed.'� He took his leave.
������ 'Such a wonderful man!' Mrs Betterton exclaimed before he was well out of earshot.� 'It must be wonderful for you to work with him.'
������ 'He's a very good editor,' said Walter.
������ 'But I was thinking of his personality.� How shall I say?� The spiritual quality of the man.'
������ Walter nodded and said, 'Yes,' rather vaguely.� The spiritual quality of Burlap was just the thing he wasn't very enthusiastic about.
������ 'In an age like ours,' Mrs Betterton continued, 'he's an oasis in the desert of stupid frivolity and cynicism.'
������ 'Some of his ideas are first rate,' Walter cautiously agreed.
������ He wondered how soon he could decently make his escape.
*���� *���� *���� *
������ 'There's Walter,' said Lady Edward.
������ 'Walter who?' asked Bidlake.� Borne by the social currents, they had drifted together again.
������ 'Your Walter.'
������ 'Oh, mine.'� He was not much interested, but he followed the direction of her glance.� 'What a weed!' he said.� He disliked his children for growing up; growing, they� pushed him backwards, year after year, backwards towards the gulf and the darkness.� There was Walter; it was only yesterday he was born.� And yet the fellow must be five-and-twenty, if he was a day.
������ 'Poor Walter; he doesn't look at all well.'
������ 'Looks as though he had worms,' said Bidlake ferociously.
������ 'How's that deplorable affair of his going?' she asked.
������ Bidlake shrugged his shoulders.� 'As usual, I suppose.'
������ 'I never met the woman.'
������ 'I did.� She's awful.'
������ 'What, vulgar?'
������ 'No, no.� I wish she were,' protested Bidlake.� 'She's refined, terribly refined.� And she speaks like this.'� He spoke into a drawling falsetto that was meant to be an imitation of Marjorie's voice.� 'Like a sweet little innocent girlie.� And so serious, such a highbrow.'� He interrupted the imitation with his own deep laugh.� 'Do you know what she said to me once?� I may mention that she always talks to me about Art.� Art with a capital A.� She said': (his voice went up again to the babyish falsetto) ' "I think there's a place for Fra Angelico and Rubens." '� He laughed again, homerically.� 'What an imbecile!� And she has a nose that's at least three inches too long.'
*���� *���� *���� *
������ Marjorie had opened the box in which she kept her private papers.� All Walter's letters.� She untied the ribbon and looked them over one by one.� 'Dear Mrs Carling, I enclose under separate cover that volume of Keats's Letters I mentioned today.� Please do not trouble to return it.� I have another copy, which I shall re-read for the pleasure of accompanying you, even at a distance, through the same spiritual adventure.'
������ That was the first of them.� She read it through and recaptured in memory something of the pleased surprise which that passage about the spiritual adventure had originally evoked in her.� In conversation he had always seemed to shrink from the direct and personal approach, he was painfully shy.� She hadn't expected him� to write like that.� Later, when he had written to her often, she became accustomed to his peculiarities.� She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face.� All his love - all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent - was in his letters.� The arrangement suited Marjorie perfectly.� She would have liked to go on indefinitely making cultured and verbally burning love by post.� She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination.� A correspondence course of passion was, for her, the perfect and ideal relationship with a man.� Better still were personal relationships with women; for women had all the good qualities of men at a distance, with the added advantage of being actually there.� They could be in the room with you and yet demand no more than a man at the other end of a system of post-offices.� With his face-to-face shyness and his postal freedom and ardour, Walter had seemed in Marjorie's eyes to combine the best points of both sexes.� And then he was so deeply, so flatteringly interested in everything she did and thought and felt.� Poor Marjorie was not much used to having people interested in her.
������ 'Sphinx,' she read in the third of his letters.� (He had called her that because of her enigmatic silences.� Carling, for some reason, had called her Turnip or Dumb-Bell.)� 'Sphinx, why do you hide yourself inside such a shell of silence?� One would think you were ashamed of your goodness and sweetness and intelligence.� But they pop their heads out all the same and in spite of you.'
������ The tears came into her eyes.� He had been so king to her, so tender and gentle.� And now ...
������ 'Love,' she read dimly, through the tears, in the next letter, 'love can transform physical into spiritual desire; it has the magic power to turn the body into pure soul ...'
������ Yes, he had had those desires too.� Even he.� All men had, she supposed.� Rather dreadful.� She shuddered, remembering Carling, remembering even Walter with something of the same horror.� Yes, even Walter, though he had been so gentle and considerate.� Walter had understood what she felt.� That made it all the more extraordinary that he should be behaving as he was behaving now.� It was as though he had suddenly become somebody else, become a kind of wild animal, with the animal's cruelty as well as the animal's lusts.
������ 'How can he be so cruel?' she wondered.� 'How can he, deliberately?� Walter?'� Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good.� It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having 'those' desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live� together.� She had loved even the weak and unadmirable manifestations of his considerateness; he loved him even when he let himself be overcharged by cabmen and porters, when he gave handfuls of silver to tramps with obviously untrue stories about jobs at the other end of the country and no money to pay the fare.� He was too sensitively quick to see the other person's point of view.� In his anxiety to be just to others he was often prepared to be unjust to himself.� He was always ready to sacrifice his own rights rather than run any risk of infringing the rights of others.� It was a considerateness, Marjorie realized, that had become a weakness, that was on the point of turning into a vice; a considerateness, moreover, that was due to his timidity, his squeamish and fastidious shrinking from every conflict, even every disagreeable contact.� All the same, she loved him for it, loved him even when it led him to treat her with something less than justice.� For having come to regard her as being on the hither side of the boundary between himself and the rest of the world, he had sometimes in his excessive considerateness for the rights of others, sacrificed not only his own rights, but also hers.� How often, for example, she had told him that he was being underpaid for his work on the Literary World!� She thought of the latest of their conversations on what was to him the most odious of topics.
������ 'Burlap's sweating you, Walter,' she had said.
������ 'That paper's very hard up.'� He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people towards himself.
������ 'But why should you let yourself be swindled?'
������ 'I'm not being swindled.'� There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong.� 'And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh.� After all, it's my business.'
������ 'And mine!'� She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began.� 'If you knew the price of vegetables!'
������ He had flushed up and left the room without answering.� The conversation, the case were typical of many others.� Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself.� She had never resented these injustices.� They proved how closely he associated her with himself.� But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness.� The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else - somebody ruthless and full of hate - was deliberately making her suffer.
*���� *���� *���� *
������
������ Lady Edward laughed.� 'One wonders what he saw in her, if she's so deplorable as you make out.'
������ 'What does one ever see in anyone?'� John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone.� Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill.� An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccough.� It often happened now.� Just after eating.� Bicarbonate didn't seem to do much good.� 'In these matters,' he added, 'we're all equally insane.'
������ 'Thanks!' said Lady Edward, laughing.
������ Making an essay to be gallant, 'Present company excepted,' he said with a smile and a little bow.� He stifled another hiccough.� How miserable he was feeling!� 'Do you mind if I sit down?' he asked.� 'All this standing about ...'� He dropped heavily into his chair.
������ Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing.� She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.
������ 'It must have been that caviar,' he was thinking.� 'That beastly caviar.'� He violently hated caviar.� Every sturgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy.
������ 'Poor Walter!' said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped.� 'And he has such a talent.'
������ John Bidlake snorted contemptuously.
������ Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing - by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time.� She changed the subject.
������ 'And Elinor and Quarles?'
������ 'Leaving Bombay tomorrow,' John Bidlake answered telegraphically.� He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.
CHAPTER VI
'De Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,' said Mr Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly.� He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles.� The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India.� One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose.� It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments.� There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it.� At the word 'fountain', it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr Sita Ram's plate.
������ 'Burke and Bacon,' Mr Sita Ram went on sonorously, 'Milton and Macaulay ...'
������ 'Oh, look!'� Elinor Quarles's voice was shrill with alarm.� She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backwards.� Mr Sita Ram turned towards her.
������ 'What's de matter?' he asked in a tone of annoyance.� It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.
������ Elinor pointed.� A very large grey toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda.� In the silence its movements were audible - a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.
������ 'De toad can do no harm,' said Mr Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.
������ Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband.� The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.
������ 'Really, my darling,' he protested.� He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals.� But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically.� It was the same with the food.� There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish.�� But he had managed, nonetheless, to eat it.� Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.
������ 'Perhaps you wouldn't mind driving it away,' she whispered.� Her face expressed her inward agony.� 'You know how much I detest them.'
������ Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda.� With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform.� It flopped down heavily into the garden below.� Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems.� The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky.� Not a leaf stirred.� It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced.� Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it.� But this stifling darkness ... Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.
������ 'You were saying, Mr Sita Ram?'
������ But Mr Sita Ram's first fine careless rapture had evaporated.� 'I was re-reading some of de works of Morley today,' he announced.
������ 'Golly!' said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang.� It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.
������ But Mr Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that 'Golly'.� 'What a tinker!' he pursued.� 'What a great tinker!� And de style is so chaste.'
������ 'I suppose it is.'
������ 'Dere are some good phrases,' Mr Sita Ram went on.� 'I wrote dem down.'� He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook.� 'Never mind,' he said.� 'But dey were good phrases.� Sometimes one reads a whole book without finding a single phrase one can remember or quote.� What's de good of such a book, I ask you?'
������ 'What indeed?'
������ Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates.� A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance.� Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat.� Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom.� They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea.� The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats - large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.
������ Under the influence of the champagne, Mr Sita Ram recovered his eloquence.� His latest oration re-uttered itself.
������ 'Dere is one law for de English,' he said, 'and another for de Indians, one for de oppressors and another for de oppressed.� De word justice as eider disappeared from your vocabulary, or else it has changed its meaning.'
������ 'I'm inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,' said Philip.
������ Mr Sita Ram paid no attention.� He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent.� 'Consider de case,' he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control) 'of de unfortunate stationmaster of Bhowanipore.'
������ But Philip refused to consider it.� He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning.� Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country.� It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.
������ The stationmaster of Bhoranipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.
������ 'But why don't you teach them birth control, Mr Sita Ram?' Elinor had asked.� These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince.� She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born.� And after all, and had had chloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet.� Whereas the wife of the stationmaster of Bhowanipore ... She had heard accounts of Indian midwives.� She shuddered.� 'Isn't it the only hope for India?'
������ Mr Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government.� He went on with the stationmaster's history.� The man had passed all his examinations with credit; his qualifications were the highest possible.� And yet he had been passed over for promotion no less than four times.� Four times, and always in favour of Europeans or Eurasians.� Mr Sita Ram's blood boiled when he thought of the five thousand years of Indian civilization, Indian spirituality, Indian moral superiority, cynically trampled, in the person of the stationmaster of Bhowanipore, under English feet ...
������ 'Is dat justice, I ask?'� He banged the table.
������ Who knows?'� Philip wondered.� Perhaps it is.
������ Elinor was still thinking of the nine children.� To obtain a quick delivery, the midwives, she had heard, stamp on their patients.� And, instead of ergot, they use a paste made of cow-dung and powdered glass.
������ 'Do you call dat justice?' Mr Sita Ram repeated.
������ Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, 'No.'
������ 'You ought to write about it,' said Mr Sita Ram, 'you ought to show de scandal up.'
������ Philip excused himself; he was only a writer of novels, not a politician, not a journalist. 'Do you know old Daulat Singh?' he added with apparent irrelevance.� 'The one who lives at Ajmere?'
������ 'I have met de man,' said Mr Sita Ram, in a tone that made it quite clear that he didn't like Daulat Singh, or perhaps (more probably, thought Philip) hadn't been liked or approved by him.
������ 'A fine man, I thought,' said Philip.� For men like Daulat Singh justice would have to mean something very different from what it meant for Mr Sita Ram or the stationmaster of Bhowanipore.� He remembered the noble old face, the bright eyes, the restrained passion of his words.� If only he could have refrained from chewing pan ...
������ The time came for them to go.� At last.� They said goodbye with an almost excessive cordiality, climbed into the waiting car and were driven away.� The ground beneath the palm trees of Joohoo was littered with a mintage of shining silver, splashed with puddles of mercury.� They rolled through a continuous flickering of light and dark - the cinema film of twenty years ago - until, emerging from under the palm trees, they found themselves in the full glare of the enormous moon.
������ 'Three-formed Hecate,' he thought, blinking at the round brilliance.� 'But what about Sita Ram and Daulat Singh and the stationmaster, what about old appalling India, what about justice and liberty, what about progress and the future?� The fact is, I don't care.� Not a pin.� It's disgraceful.� But I don't.� And the forms of Hecate aren't three.� They're a thousand, they're millions.� The tides.� The Nemorensian goddess, the Tifatinian.� Varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distances.� A florin at arm's length, but as big as the Russian Empire.� Bigger than India.� What a comfort it will be to be back in Europe again!� And to think there was a time when I read books about yoga and did breathing exercises and tried to persuade myself that I didn't really exist!� What a fool!� It was a result of talking with that idiot Burlap.� But luckily people don't leave much trace on me.� They make an impression easily, like a ship in water.� But the water closes up again.� I wonder what this Italian ship will be like tomorrow?� The Lloyd Triestino boats are always supposed to be good.� "Luckily," I said; but oughtn't one to be ashamed of one's indifference?� That parable of the sower.� The seed that fell in shallow ground.� And yet, obviously, it's no use pretending to be what one isn't. �One sees that results of that in Burlap.� What a comedian!� But he takes in a lot of people.� Including himself, I suppose.� I don't believe there's such a thing as a conscious hypocrite, except for special occasions.� You can't keep it up all the time.� All the same, it would be good to know what it's like to believe in something to the point of being prepared to kill people or get yourself killed.� It would be an experience ...'
������ Elinor had lifted her face towards the same bright disc.� Moon, full moon ... And instantly she had changed her position in space and time.� She dropped her eyes and turned towards her husband; she took his hand and leaned tenderly against him.
������ 'Do you remember those evenings?' she asked.� 'In the garden, at Gattenden.� Do you remember, Phil?'
������ Elinor's words came to his ears from a great distance and from a world in which, for the moment, he felt no interest.� He roused himself with reluctance.� 'Which evenings?' he asked, speaking across gulfs, and in the rather flat and colourless voice of one who answers an importunate telephone.
������ At the sound of that telephone voice Elinor quickly drew away from him.� To press yourself against someone who turns out simply not to be there is not only disappointing; it is also rather humiliating. Which evenings, indeed!
������ 'Why don't you love me any more?' she asked despairingly.� As if she could have been talking about any other evenings than those of that wonderful summer they had spent, just after their marriage, at her mother's house.� 'You don't even take any interest in me now - less than you would in a piece of furniture, much less than in a book.'
������ 'But, Elinor, what are you talking about?'� Philip put more astonishment into his voice than he really felt.� After the first moment, when he had had time to come to the surface, so to speak, from the depths of his reverie, he had understood what she meant, he had connected this Indian moon with that which had shone, eight years ago, on the Hertfordshire garden.� He might have said so, of course. �It would have made things easier.� But he was annoyed at having been interrupted, he didn't like to be reproached, and the temptation to score a debater's point against his wife was strong.� 'I ask a simple question,' he went on, 'merely wanting to know what you mean.� And you retort by complaining that I don't love you.� I fail to see the logical connection.'
������ 'But you know quite well what I was talking about,' said Elinor.� 'And besides, it is true - you don't love me any more.'
������ 'I do, as it happens,' said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit vainly, as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination.� 'But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started.� We began with evenings and now ...'
������ But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic.� 'Oh, I know you don't want to say you don't love me,' she interrupted.� 'Not in so many words.� You don't want to hurt my feelings.� But it would really hurt them less if you did so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now.� Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement.� And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there's suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain.� So long as the words haven't been definitely spoken, there's always just a chance that they mayn't have been tacitly implied.� Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied.� There's still room for hope.� And where there's hope there's disappointment.� It isn't really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it's crueller.'
������ 'But I don't evade the question,' he retorted.� 'Why should I, seeing that I love you?'
������ 'Yes, but how?� How do you love me?� Not in the way you used to, at the beginning.� Or perhaps you've forgotten.� You didn't even remember the time when we were first married.'
������ 'But, my dear child,' Philip protested, 'do be accurate.� You just said "those evenings" and expected me to guess which.'
������ 'Of course I expected,' said Elinor.� 'You ought to have known.� You would have known, if you took any interest.� That's what I complain of.� You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you.� Do you think I can forget those evenings?'
������ She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall, where they had sat together.� She remembered what he had said and his kisses, the touch of his hands.� She remembered everything - remembered with the minute precision of one who loves to explore and reconstruct the past, of one who is for ever turning over and affectionately verifying each precious detail of recollected happiness.
������ 'It's all simply faded out of your mind,' she added, mournfully reproachful.� For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.
������ 'But of course I remember,' said Philip impatiently.� 'Only one can't readjust one's mind instantaneously.� At the moment, when you spoke, I happened to be thinking of something else; that was all.'
������ Elinor sighed.� 'I wish I had something else to think about,' she said.� 'That's the trouble; I haven't.� Why should I love you so much?� Why?� It isn't fair.� You're protected by an intellect and a talent.� You have your work to retire into, your ideas to shield you.� But I have nothing - no defence against my feelings, no alternative to you.� And it's I who need the defence and the alternative.� For I'm the one who really cares.� You've got nothing to be protected from.� You don't care.� No, it isn't fair, it isn't fair.'
������ And after all, she was thinking, it had always been like this.� He hadn't ever really loved her, even at the beginning.� Not profoundly and entirely, not with abandonment.� For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her.� On her side she had offered everything, everything.� And he had taken, but without return.� His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld.� Always, even from the first, even when he had loved her most.� She had been happy then - but only because she had not known better than to be happy, because she had not realized, in her inexperience, that love could be different and better.� She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity, in laying waste her memories.� The moon, the dark and perfumed garden, the huge black tree and its velvet shadow on the lawn ... She denied them, she rejected the happiness which they symbolized in her memory.
������ Philip Quarles, meanwhile, said nothing.� There was nothing, really, to say.� He put his arm round her and drew her towards him; he kissed her forehead and her fluttering eyelids; they were wet with tears.
������ The sordid suburbs of Bombay slid past them - factories and little huts and huge tenements, ghastly and bone-white under the moon.� Brown, thin-legged pedestrians appeared for a moment in the glare of the headlights, like truths apprehended intuitively and with immediate certainty, only to disappear again almost instantly into the void of the outer darkness.� Here and there, by the roadside, the light of a fire mysteriously hinted at dark limbs and faces.� The inhabitants of a world of thought starrily remote from theirs peered at them, as the car flashed past, from creaking bullock carts.
������ 'My darling,' he kept repeating, 'my darling ...'
������ Elinor permitted herself to be comforted.� 'You love me a little?'
������ 'So much.'
������ She actually laughed, rather sobbingly, it is true; but still, it was a laugh.� 'You do your best to be nice to me.'� And after all, she thought, those days at Gattenden had really been blissful.� 'You make such efforts.� It's sweet of you.'
������ 'It's silly to talk like that,' he protested.� 'You know I love you.'
������ 'Yes, I know you do.'� She smiled and stroked his cheek.� 'When you have time and then by wireless across the Atlantic.'
������ 'No, that isn't true.'� But secretly he knew that it was.� All his life long he had walked in a solitude, in a private void, into which nobody, not his mother, not his friends, not his lovers had ever been permitted to enter.� Even when he held her thus, pressed close to him, it was by wireless, as she had said, and across an Atlantic that he communicated with her.
������ 'It isn't true,' she echoed, tenderly mocking.� 'But, my poor old Phil, you couldn't even take in a child.� You don't know how to lie convincingly.� You're too honest.� That's one of the reasons why I love you.� If you knew how transparent you were!'
������ Philip was silent.� These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable.� They threatened his solitude - that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone, nevertheless, his spirit could live in comfort, in which alone he felt himself free.� At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives.� But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air.� But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence.� He entrenched himself now in silence, in that calm, remote, frigid silence, which he was sure that Elinor would not attempt, knowing the hopelessness of the venture, to break through.� He was right; Elinor glanced at him for an instant, and then, turning away, looked out� at the moonlit landscape.� Their parallel silences flowed on through time, unmeeting.
������ They were driven on through the Indian darkness.� Almost cool against their faces, the moving air smelt now of tropical flowers, now of sewage, or curry, or burning cow-dung.
������ 'And yet,' said Elinor suddenly, unable any longer to contain her resentful thoughts, 'you couldn't do without me.� Where would you be if I left you, if I went to somebody who was prepared to give me something in return for what I give?� Where would you be?'
������ The question dropped into the silence.� Philip made no answer.� But where would he be?� He too wondered.� For in the ordinary daily world of human contacts he was curiously like a foreigner, uneasily not at home among his fellows, finding it difficult or impossible to enter into communication with any but those who could speak his native intellectual language of ideas.� Emotionally, he was a foreigner.� Elinor was his interpreter, his dragoman.� Like her father, Elinor Bidlake had been born with a gift of intuitive understanding and social ease.� She was quickly at home with anybody.� She knew, instinctively, as well as old John himself, just what to say to every type of person - to every type except, perhaps, her husband's.� It is difficult to know what to say to someone who does not say anything in return, who answers the impersonal world with the personal, the particular and feeling word with an intellectual generalization.� Still, being in love with him, she persisted in her efforts to lure him into direct contact; and though the process was rather discouraging - like singing to deaf-mutes or declaiming poetry to an empty hall - she went on giving him her intimacies of thought and feeling.� There were occasions when, making a great effort, he did his best, in exchange, to admit her into his own personal privacies.� But whether it was that the habit of secrecy had made it impossible for him to give utterance to his inward feelings, or whether the very capacity to feel had actually been atrophied by consistent silence and repression, Elinor found these rare intimacies disappointing.� The holy of holies into which he so painfully ushered her was almost as naked and empty as that which astonished the Roman invaders, when they violated the temple of Jerusalem.� Still, she was grateful to Philip for his good intentions in at least wanting to admit her to his emotional intimacy, even though there mightn't be much of an emotional life to be intimate with.� A kind of Pyrrhonian indifference, tempered by a consistent gentleness and kindness, as well as by the more violent intermittences of physical passion - this was the state of being which nature and second nature had made normal for him.� Elinor's reason told her that this was so; but her feelings would not accept in practice what she was sure of in theory.� What was living and sensitive and irrational in her was hurt by his indifference, as though it were a personal coldness directed only against herself.� And yet, whatever she might feel, Elinor knew all the time that his indifference wasn't personal, that he was like that with everybody, that he loved her as much as it was possible for him to love, that his love for her hadn't diminished, because it had never really been greater - more passionate once perhaps, but never more emotionally rich in intimacies and self-giving, even at its most passionate, than it was now.� But all the same her feelings were outraged; he oughtn't to be like this.� He oughtn't to be; but there, he was.� After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence - that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including the emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.
������ Once, when he had been telling her about Koehler's book on the apes, 'You're like a monkey on the superman side of humanity,' she said.� 'Almost human, like those poor chimpanzees.� The only difference is that they're trying to think up with their feelings and instincts, and you're trying to feel down with your intellect.� Almost human.� Trembling on the verge, my poor Phil.'
������ He understood everything so perfectly.� That was why it was such fun being his dragoman and interpreting other people for him.� (It was less amusing when one had to interpret oneself.)� All that the intelligence could seize upon he seized.� She reported her intercourse with the natives of the realm of emotion and he understood at once, he generalized her experience for her, he related it with other experiences, classified it, found analogies and parallels.� From single and individual it became in his hands part of a system.� She was astonished to find that she and her friends had been, all unconsciously, substantiating a theory, or exemplifying some interesting generalization.� Her functions as dragoman were not confined to mere scouting and reporting.� She acted also directly as personal interpreter between Philip and any third party he might wish to get into touch with, creating the atmosphere in which alone the exchange of personalities is possible, preserving the conversation from intellectual desiccation.� Left to himself Philip would never have been able to establish personal contact or preserve it when once established.� But when Elinor was there to make and keep the contact for him, he could understand, he could sympathize, with his intelligence, in a way which Elinor assured him was all but human.� In his subsequent generalizations from the experience she had made possible for him he became once more undisguisedly the overman.
������ Yes, it was fun to serve as dragoman to such an exceptionally intelligent tourist in the realm of feeling.� But it was more than fun; it was also, in Elinor's eyes, a duty.� There was his writing to consider.
������ 'Ah, if you were a little less of an overman, Phil,' she used to say, 'what good novels you'd write!'
������ Rather ruefully he agreed with her.� He was intelligent enough to know his own defects.� Elinor did her best to supply them - gave him first-hand information about the habits of the natives, acted as� go-between when he wanted to come into personal contact with one of them.� Not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the novelist he might be, she wished he could break his habit of impersonality and learn to live with the intuitions and feelings and instincts as well as with the intellect.� Heroically, she had even encouraged him in his velleities of passion for other women.� It might do him good to have a few affairs.� So anxious was she to do him good as a novelist, that on more than one occasion, seeing him look admiringly at some young woman or other, she had gone out of her way to establish for him the personal contact which he would never have been able to establish for himself.� It was risky, of course.� He might really fall in love; he might forget to be intellectual and become a reformed character, but for some other woman's benefit.� Elinor took the risk, partly because she thought that his writing ought to come before everything else, even her own happiness, and partly because she was secretly convinced that there was in reality no risk at all, that he would never lose his head so wholly as to want to run off with another woman.� The cure by affairs, if it worked at all, would be gentle in its action; and if it did not work, she was sure she would know how to profit by its good effects on him.� Anyhow, it hadn't worked so far.� Philip's infidelities amounted to very little and had had no appreciable effect on him.� He remained depressingly, even maddeningly the same - intelligent to the point of being almost human, remotely kind, separately passionate and sensual, impersonally sweet.� Maddening.� Why did she go on loving him?� She wondered.� One might almost as well go on loving a bookcase.� One day she would really leave him.� There was such a thing as being too unselfish and devoted.� One should think of one's own happiness sometimes.� To be loved for a change, instead of having to do all the loving oneself; to receive instead of perpetually giving ... Yes, one day she really would leave him.� She had herself to think about.� Besides, it would be a punishment for Phil.� A punishment - for she was sure that, if she left him, he would be genuinely unhappy, in his way, as much as it lay in him to be unhappy.� And perhaps the unhappiness might achieve the miracle she had been longing and working for all these years; perhaps it would sensitize him, personalize him.� Perhaps it might be the making of him as a writer.� Perhaps it was even her duty to make him unhappy, the most sacred of her duties ...
������ The sight of a dog running across the road just in front of the car aroused her from her reverie.� How suddenly, how startlingly it had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps!� It existed for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world.� Another dog was suddenly in its place, pursuing.
������ 'Oh!' cried Elinor.� 'It'll be ...'� The headlights swerved and swung straight again, there was a padded jolt, as though one of the wheels had passed over a stone; but the stone yelped. '...run over,' she concluded.
������ 'It has been run over.'
������ The Indian chauffeur looked round at them, grinning.� They could see the flash of his teeth.� 'Dog!' he said.� He was proud of his English.
������ 'Poor beast!'� Elinor shuddered.
������ 'It was his fault,' said Philip.� 'He wasn't looking.� That's what comes of running after the females of one's species.'
������ There was a silence.� It was Philip who broke it.
������ 'Morality'd be very queer,' he reflected aloud, 'if we loved seasonally, not all the year round.� Moral and immoral would change from one month to another.� Primitive societies are apt to be more seasonal than cultivated ones.� Even in Sicily there are twice as many births in January as in August.� Which proves conclusively that in the spring the young man's fancy ... But nowhere only in the spring.� There's nothing human quite analogous to heat in mares or she-dogs.� Except,' he added, 'except perhaps in the moral sphere.� A bad reputation in a woman allures like the signs of heat in a bitch. Ill-fame announces accessibility.� Absence of heat is the animal's equivalent of the chaste woman's habits and principles ...'
������ Elinor listened with interest and at the same time a kind of horror.� Even the squashing of a wretched animal was enough to set that quick untiring intelligence to work.� A poor starved pariah dog had its back broken under the wheels and the incident evoked from Philip a selection from the vital statistics of Sicily, a speculation about the relativity of morals, a brilliant psychological generalization.� It was amusing, it was unexpected, it was wonderfully interesting; but oh! she almost wanted to scream.
CHAPTER VII
Mrs Betterton had been shaken off, his father and Lady Edward distantly waved to and avoided; Walter was free to continue his search.� And at last he found what he was looking for.� Lucy Tantamount had just emerged from the dining-room and was standing under the arcades, glancing in indecision this way and that.� Against the mourning of her dress the skin was luminously white.� A bunch of gardenias was pinned to her bodice.� She raised a hand to touch her smooth black hair, and the emerald of her ring shot a green signal to him across the room.� Critically, with a kind of cold intellectual hatred, Walter looked at her and wondered why he loved.� Why?� There was no reason, no justification.� All the reasons were against his loving her.
������ Suddenly she moved, she walked out of sight.� Walter followed.� Passing the entrance to the dining-room, he noticed Burlap, no longer the anchorite, drinking champagne and being talked to by the Comtesse d'Exergillod.� Gosh! thought Walter, remembering his own experiences with Molly d'Exergillod.� 'But Burlap probably adores her.� He would ... He ...'� But there she was again, talking - damnation! - with General Knoyle.� Walter hung about at a little distance, waiting impatiently for an opportunity to address her.
������ 'Caught at last,' said the General, patting her hand.� 'Been looking for you the whole evening.'
������ Half satyr, half uncle, he had an old man's weakness for Lucy.� 'Charming little girl!' he would assure all those who wanted to hear.� 'Charming little figure!� Such eyes!'� For the most part he preferred them rather younger.� 'Nothing like youth!' he was fond of saying.� His life-long prejudice against America and Americans had been transformed into enthusiastic admiration ever since, at the age of sixty-five, he had visited California and seen the flappers of Hollywood and the bathing beauties on the Pacific beaches.� Lucy was nearly thirty; but the General had known her for years; he continued to regard her as hardly more than the young girl of his first memories.� For him, she was still about seventeen.� He patted her hand again.� 'We'll have a good talk,' he said.
������ 'That will be fun,' said Lucy with sarcastic politeness.
������ From his post of observation Walter looked on.� The General had been handsome once.� Corseted, his tall figure still preserved its military bearing.� The gallant and the gentleman, he smiled; he fingered his white moustache.� The next moment he was the playful, protective and confidential old uncle.� Faintly smiling, Lucy looked at him out of her pale grey eyes with a detached and unmerciful amusement.� Walter studied her.� She was not even particularly good-looking.� So why, why?� He wanted reasons, he wanted justification.� Why?� The question persistently reverberated.� There was no answer.� He had just fallen in love with her - that was all; insanely, the first time he set eyes on her.
������ Turning her head, Lucy caught sight of him.� She beckoned and called his name.� He pretended to be surprised and delightfully astonished.
������ 'I hope you've not forgotten our appointment,' he said.
������ 'Do I ever forget?� Except occasionally on purpose,' she qualified with a little laugh.� She turned to the General.� 'Walter and I are going to see your stepson this evening,' she announced in the tone and with the smile which one employs when one talks to people about those who are dear to them.� But between Spandrell and his stepfather the quarrel, she knew very well, was mortal.� Lucy had inherited all her mother's fondness for the deliberate social blunder and with it a touch of her father's detached scientific curiosity.� She enjoyed experimenting, not with frogs and guinea-pigs, but with human beings.� You did unexpected things to people, you put them in curious situations and waited to see what would happen.� It was the method of Darwin and Pasteur.
������ What happened in this case was that General Knoyle's face became extremely red.� 'I haven't seen him for some time,' he said stiffly.
������ 'Good,' she said to herself.� 'He's reacting.'
������ 'But he's such good company,' she said aloud.
������ The General grew redder and frowned.� What he hadn't done for that boy!� And how ungratefully the boy had responded, how abominably he had behaved!� Getting himself kicked out of every job the General had wrangled him into.� A waster, an idler; drinking and drabbing; making his mother miserable, sponging on her, disgracing the family name.� And the insolence of the fellow, the things he had ventured to say the last time they had met and, as usual, had a scene together!� The General was never likely to forget being called 'an impotent old fumbler.'
������ 'And so intelligent,' Lucy was saying.� With an inward smile she remembered Spandrell's summary of his stepfather's career.� 'Superannuated from Harrow,' it began, 'passed out from Sandhurst at the bottom of the list, he had a most distinguished career in the Army, rising during the War to a high post in the Military Intelligence Department.'� The way he rolled out this anticipated obituary was really magnificent.� He was the Times made audible.� And then his remarks on Military Intelligence in general!� 'If you look up "Intelligence" in the new volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,' he had said, 'you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military.� My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.'
������ 'So intelligent,' Lucy repeated.
������ 'Some people think so, I know,' said General Knoyle very stiffly.� 'But personally ...' He cleared his throat with violence.� That was his personal opinion.
������ A moment later, still rigid, still angrily dignified, he took his leave.� He felt that Lucy had offended him.� Even her youth and her bare shoulders did not compensate him for those laudatory references to Maurice Spandrell.� Insolent, bad-blooded young cub!� His existence was the General's standing grievance against his wife.� A woman had no right to have a son like that, no right.� Poor Mrs Knoyle had often atoned to her second husband for the offences of her son.� She was there, she could be punished, she was too weak to resist.� The exasperated General visited the sins of the child on his parent.
������ Lucy glanced after the retreating figure, then turned to Walter.� 'I can't risk that sort of thing happening again,' she said.� 'It would be bad enough even if it didn't smell so unpleasant.� Shall we go away?'
������ Walter desired nothing better.� 'But what about your mother and the social duties?' he asked.
������ She shrugged her shoulders.� 'After all, mother can look after her own bear garden.'
������ 'Bear garden's the word,' said Walter, feeling suddenly hopeful.� 'Let's sneak away to some place where it's quiet.'
������ 'My poor Walter!'� Her eyes were derisive.� 'I never knew anybody with such a mania for quietness as you.� But I don't want to be quiet.'
������ His hope evaporated, leaving a feeble little bitterness, an ineffective anger.� 'Why not stay here then?' he asked with an attempt at sarcasm.� 'Isn't it noisy enough?'
������ 'Ah, but noisy with the wrong sort of noise,' she explained.� 'There's nothing I hate more than the noise of cultured, respectable, eminent people, like those creatures.'� She waved a hand comprehensively.� The words evoked, for Walter, the memory of hideous evenings passed with Lucy in the company of the disreputable and uncultured - tipsy after that.� Lady Edward's guests were bad enough.� But the others were surely worse.� How could she tolerate them?
������ Lucy seemed to divine his thoughts.� Smiling, she laid a hand reassuringly on his arm.� 'Cheer up!' she said.� 'I'm not taking you into low company this time.� There's Spandrell ...'
������ 'Spandrell,' he repeated and made a grimace.
������ 'And if Spandrell isn't classy enough for you, we shall probably find Mark Rampion and his wife, if we don't arrive too late.'
������ At the name of the painter and writer, Walter nodded approvingly.
������ 'No, I don't mind listening to Rampion's noise,' he said.� And then, making an effort to overcome the timidity which always silenced him when the moment came to give words to his feelings, 'but I'd much rather,' he added jocularly, so as to temper the boldness of his words, 'I'd much rather listen to your noise, in private.'
������ Lucy smiled, but said nothing.� He flinched away in a kind of terror from her eyes.� They looked at him calmly, coldly, as though they had seen everything before and were not much interested - only faintly amused, very faintly and coolly amused.
������ 'All right,' he said, 'let's go.' �His tone was resigned and wretched.
������ 'We must do a creep,' she said.� 'Furtive's the word.� No good being caught and headed back.'
������ But they did not escape entirely unobserved.� They were approaching the door, when there was a rustle and a sound of hurrying steps behind them.� A voice called Lucy's name.� They turned round and saw Mrs Knoyle, the General's wife.� She laid a hand on Lucy's arm.
������ 'I've just heard that you're going to see Maurice this evening,' she said, but did not explain that the General had told her so only because he wanted to relieve his feelings by saying something disagreeable to somebody who couldn't resent the rudeness.� 'Give him a message from me, will you?'� She leaned forward appealingly.� 'Will you?'� There was something pathetically young and helpless about her manner, something very young and soft even about her middle-aged looks.� To Lucy, who might have been her daughter, she appealed as though to someone older and stronger than herself.� 'Please.'
������ 'But of course,' said Lucy.
������ Mrs Knoyle smiled gratefully.� 'Tell him I'll come to see him tomorrow afternoon,' she said.
������ 'Tomorrow afternoon.'
������ 'Between four and half-past.� And don't mention it to anyone else,' she added after a moment of embarrassed hesitation.
������ 'Of course I won't.'
������ 'I'm so grateful to you,' said Mrs Knoyle, and with a sudden shy impulsiveness she leaned forward and kissed her.� 'Good night, my dear.'� She slipped away into the crowd.
������ 'One would think,' said Lucy, as they crossed the vestibule, 'that it was an appointment with her lover she was making, not her son.'
������ Two footmen let them out, obsequiously automatic.� Closing the door, one winked to the other significantly.� For an instant, the machines revealed themselves disquietingly as human beings.
������ Walter gave the address of Sbisa's restaurant to the taxi driver and stepped into the enclosed darkness of the cab.� Lucy had already settled into her corner.
������ Meanwhile, in the dining-room, Molly d'Exergillod was still talking.� She prided herself on her conversation.� Conversation was in the family.� Her mother had been one of the celebrated Miss Geoghegans of Dublin.� Her father was that Mr Justice Brabant, so well known for his table talk and his witticisms from the bench.� Moreover she had married into conversation. D'Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust.� Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage, if she had not already been one by birth.� Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue.� Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented.� She was industrious, she worked hard to develop her native powers.� Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before she got up in the morning.� She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded, as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensations, every trope and anecdote and witticism that caught her fancy.� Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner?� The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before her ordeal, laboriously mugging up Jean Cocteau's epigrams about art and Mr Birrell's after-dinner stories and W.B. Yeats's anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her last time she was in Hollywood.� Like all professional talkers Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom.� There are not enough bons mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion.� Though extensive, Molly's repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited.� A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night's dinner to furnish out this morning's lunch.� Monday's funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday's wedding.
������ To Denis Burlap she was at this moment serving up the talk that had already been listened to with such appreciation by Lady Benger's lunch party, by the weekenders at Gobley, by Tommy Fitton, who was one of her young men, and Vladimir Pavloff, who was another, by the American Ambassador and Baron Benito Cohen.� The talk turned on Molly's favourite topic.
������ 'Do you know what Jean said about me?' she was saying (Jean was her husband).� 'Do you?' she repeated insistently, for she had a curious habit of demanding answers to merely rhetorical questions.� She leaned towards Burlap, offering dark eyes, teeth, a d�collet�.
������ Burlap duly replied that he didn't know.
������ 'He said that I wasn't quite human.� More like an elemental than a woman.� A sort of fairy.� Do you think it's a compliment or an insult?'
������ 'That's depends on one's tastes,' said Burlap, making his face look arch and subtle as though he had said something rather daring, witty and at the same time profound.
������ 'But I don't feel that it's even true,' Molly went on.� 'I don't strike myself as at all elemental or fairy-like.� I've always considered myself a perfectly simple, straightforward child of nature.� A sort of peasant, really.'� At this point in Molly's performance all her other auditors had burst into laughing protestation.� Baron Benito Cohen had vehemently declared that she was 'one of Nature'th Roman Empreththeth.'
������ Burlap's reaction was unexpected different from that of the others.� He wagged his head, he smiled with a far-away, whimsical sort of expression.� 'Yes,' he said, 'I think that's true.� A child of nature, malgr� tout.� You wear disguises, but the simple genuine person shows through.'
������ Molly was delighted by what she felt was the highest compliment Burlap could pay her.� She had been equally delighted by the others' denials of her peasanthood.� Denial had been their highest compliment.� The flattering intention, the interest in her personality were the things that mattered.� About the actual opinions of her admirers she cared little.
������ Burlap, meanwhile, was developing Rousseau's antithesis between the Man and the Citizen.� She cut him short and brought the conversation back to the original theme.
������ 'Human beings and fairies - I think it's a very good classification, don't you?'� She leaned forward with offered face and bosom, intimately.� 'Don't you?' she repeated the rhetorical question.
������ 'Perhaps.'� Burlap was annoyed at having been interrupted.
������ 'The ordinary human - yes, let's admit it - all too human being on the one hand.� And the elemental on the other.� The one so attached and involved and sentimental - I'm terribly sentimental, I may say.'� ('About ath thentimental ath the Thirenth in the Odyththey,' had been Baron Benito's classical comment.)� 'The other, the elemental, quite free and apart from things, like a cat; coming and going - and going just as lightheartedly as it came; charming, but never charmed; making other people feel, but never really feeling itself.� Oh, I envy them their free airiness.'
������ 'You might as well envy a balloon,' said Burlap, gravely.� He was always on the side of the heart.
������ 'But they have such fun.'
������ 'They haven't got enough feelings to have fun with.� That's what I should have thought.'
������ 'Enough to have fun,' she qualified; 'but perhaps not enough to be happy.� Certainly not enough to be unhappy.� That's where they're so enviable.� Particularly if they're intelligent.� Take Philip Quarles, for example.� There's a fairy if ever there was one.'� She launched into her regular description of Philip.� 'Zoologist of fiction,'� 'learnedly elfish,' 'a scientific Puck' were a few of her phrases.� But the best of them had slipped her memory.� Desperately she hunted it,, but it eluded her.� Her Theophrastian portrait had to go out into the world robbed this time of its most brilliantly effective passage, and a little marred as a whole by Molly's consciousness of the loss and her desperate efforts, as she poured forth, to make it good.� 'Whereas his wife,' she concluded, rather painfully aware that Burlap had not smiled as frequently as he should have done, 'is quite the opposite of a fairy.� Neither elfish, nor learned, nor particularly intelligent.'� Molly smiled rather patronizingly.� 'A man like Philip must find her a little inadequate sometimes, to say the least.'� The smile persisted, a smile now of self-satisfaction.� Philip had had a faible for her, still had.� He wrote such amusing letters, almost as amusing as her own.� ('Quand je veux briller dans le monde,' Molly was fond of quoting her husband's compliments, 'je cite des phrases de tes lettres.')� Poor Elinor!� 'A little bit of a bore sometimes,' Molly went on.� 'But mind you, a most charming creature.� I've known her since we were children together.� Charming, but not exactly a Hypatia.'� Too much of a fool even to realize that Philip was bound to be attracted by a woman of his own mental stature, a woman he could talk to on equal terms.� Too much of a fool to notice, when she had brought them together, how thrilled he had been.� Too much of a fool to be jealous.� Molly had felt the absence of jealousy as a bit of an insult.� Not that she ever gave real cause for jealousy.� She didn't sleep with husbands; she only talked to them.� Still, they did do a lot of talking; there was no doubt of that.� And wives had been jealous.� Elinor's ingenuous confidingness had piqued her into being more than ordinarily gracious to Philip.� But he had started to go round the world before much conversation had taken place.� The talk, she anticipated, would be agreeably renewed by his return.� Poor Elinor, she thought pityingly.� Her feelings might have been a little less Christian, if she had realized that poor Elinor had noticed the admiring look in Philip's eye even before Molly had noticed it herself, and, noticing, had conscientiously proceeded to act the part of dragoman and go-between.� Not that she had much hope or fear that Molly would achieve the transforming miracle.� One does not fall very desperately in love with a loud speaker, however pretty, however firmly plump (for Philip's tastes were rather old-fashioned), however attractively callipygous.� Her only hope was that the passions aroused by the plumpness and prettiness would be so very inadequately satisfied by the talking (for talk was all, according to report, that Molly ever conceded) that poor Philip would be reduced to a state of rage and misery most conducive to good writing.
������ 'But of course,' Molly went on, 'intelligence ought never to marry intelligence.� That's why Jean is always threatening to divorce me.� He says I'm too stimulating.� "Tu ne m'ennuies pas assez," he says; and that what he needs is une femme s�dative.� And I believe he's really right.� Philip Quarles has been wise.� Imagine an intelligent fairy of a man like Philip married to an equally fairyish intelligent woman - Lucy Tantamount, for example.� It would be a disaster, don't you think?'
������ 'Lucy'd be rather a disaster for any man, wouldn't she, fairy or no fairy?'
������ 'No, I must say, I like Lucy.'� Molly turned to her inner storehouse of Theophrastian phrases.� 'I like the way she floats through life instead of trudging.� I like the way she flits from flower to flower - which is perhaps a rather too botanical and poetical description of Bentley and Jim Conklin and poor Reggie Tantamount and Maurice Spandrell and Tom Trivet and Poniatovsky and that young Frenchman who writes plays, what is his name? and the various others one has forgotten or never heard about.'� Burlap smiled; they all smiled at this passage.� 'Anyhow, she flits.� Doing a good deal of damage to the flowers, I must admit.'� Burlap smiled again.� 'But getting nothing but fun out of it herself.� I must say, I rather envy her.� I wish I were a fairy and could float.'
������ 'She has much more reason to envy you,' said Burlap, looking deep, subtle and Christian once more, and wagging his head.
������ 'Envy me for being unhappy?'
������ 'Who's unhappy?' asked Lady Edward breaking in on them at this moment. 'Good evening, Mr Burlap,' she went on without waiting for an answer.� Burlap told her how much he had enjoyed the music.
������ 'We were just talking about Lucy,' said Molly d'Exergillod, interrupting him.� 'Agreeing that she was like a fairy.� So light and detached.'
������ 'Fairy!' repeated Lady Edward, emphatically rolling the 'r' far back in her throat.� 'She's like a leprechaun.� You've no idea, Mr Burlap, how hard it is to bring up a leprechaun.'� Lady Edward shook her head.� 'She used really to frighten me sometimes.'
������ 'Did she?' said Molly.� 'But I should have thought you were a bit of a fairy yourself, Lady Edward.'
������ 'A bit,' Lady Edward admitted.� 'But never to the point of being a leprechaun.'
*���� *���� *���� *
������ 'Well?' said Lucy, as Walter sat down beside her in the cab.� She seemed to be uttering a kind of challenge.� 'Well?'
������ The cab started.� He lifted her hand and kissed it.� It was his answer to her challenge.� 'I love you.� That's all.'
������ 'Do you, Walter?'� She turned towards him and, taking his face between her two hands, looked at him intently in the half-darkness.� 'Do you?' she repeated; and as she spoke, she shook her head slowly and smiled.� Then, leaning forward, she kissed him on the mouth.� Walter put his arms round her; but she disengaged herself from the embrace.� 'No, no,' she protested and dropped back into her corner.� 'No.'
������ He obeyed her and drew away.� There was a silence.� Her perfume was of gardenias; sweet and tropical, the perfumed symbol of her being enveloped him.� 'I ought to have insisted,' he was thinking.� 'Brutally.� Kissed her again and again.� Compelled her to love me.� Why didn't I?� Why?'� He didn't know.� Nor why she had kissed him, unless it was just provocatively, to make him desire her more violently, to make him more hopelessly her slave.� Nor why, knowing this, he still loved her.� Why, why? he kept repeating to himself.� And echoing his thoughts out loud her voice suddenly spoke.
������ 'Why do you love me?' she asked from her corner.
������ He opened his eyes.� They were passing a street lamp.� Through the window of the moving cab the light of it fell on her face.� It stood out for a moment palely against the darkness, then dropped back into invisibility - a pale mask that had seen everything before and whose expression was one of amused detachment and a hard, rather weary languor.� 'I was just wondering,' Walter answered.� 'And wishing I didn't.'
������ 'I might say that same, you know.� You're not particularly amusing when you're like this.'
������ How tiresome, she reflected, these men who imagined that nobody had ever been in love before!� All the same, she liked him.� He was attractive.� No, 'attractive' wasn't the word.� Attractive, as a possible lover, was just what he wasn't.� 'Appealing' was more like it.� An appealing lover?� It wasn't exactly her style.� But she liked him.� There was something very nice about him.� Besides, he was clever, he could be a pleasant companion.� And tiresome as it was, his love-sickness did at least make him very faithful.� That, for Lucy, was important.� She was afraid of loneliness and needed her cavalier servants in constant attendance.� Walter attended with a dog-like fidelity.� But why did he look so like a whipped dog sometimes?� So abject.� What a fool!� She felt suddenly annoyed by his abjection.
������ 'Well, Walter,' she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, 'why don't you talk to me?'
������ He did not reply.
������ 'Or is mum the word?'� Her fingers brushed electrically along the back of his hand and closed round his wrist.� 'Where's your pulse?' she asked after a moment.� 'I can't feel it anywhere.'� She groped over the soft skin for the throbbing of the artery.� He felt the touch of her fingertips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist.� 'I don't believe you've got a pulse,' she said.� 'I believe your blood stagnates.'� The tone of her voice was contemptuous.� What a fool! she was thinking.� What an abject fool! �'Just stagnates!' she repeated and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp file-pointed nails into his flesh.� Walter cried out in surprise and pain.� 'You deserved it,' she said and laughed in his face.
������ He seized her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely.� Anger had quickened his desire; his kisses were a vengeance.� Lucy shut her eyes and abandoned herself unresistingly, limply.� Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic flutter, like fluttering moths, through her skin.� And suddenly sharp fingers seemed to pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle-strings of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body starting involuntarily within his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt.� Kissing her, he found himself wondering if she had expected him to react in this way to her provocation, if she had hoped he would.� He took her slender neck in his two hands.� His thumbs were on her windpipe.� He pressed gently.� 'One day,' he said between his clenched teeth, 'I shall strangle you.'
������ Lucy only laughed.� He bent forward and kissed her laughing mouth.� The touch of his lips against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running unbearably through her.� The panic moth-wings fluttered over her body.� She hadn't expected such fierce and savage ardours from Walter.� She was agreeably surprised.
������ The taxi turned into Soho Square, slowed down, came to a halt.� They had arrived.� Walter let fall his hands and drew away from her.
������ She opened her eyes and looked at him. �'Well?' she asked challengingly, for the second time that evening.� There was a moment's silence.
������ 'Lucy,' he said, 'let's go somewhere else.� Not here; not this horrible place.� Somewhere where we can be alone.'� His voice trembled, his eyes were imploring.� The fierceness had gone out of his desire; it had become abject again, dog-like.� 'Let's tell the man to drive on,' he begged.
������ She smiled and shook her head.� Why did he implore, like that?� Why was he so abject?� The fool, the whipped dog!
������ 'Please, please!' he begged.� But he should have commanded.� He should simply have ordered the man to drive on, and taken her in his arms again.
������ 'Impossible,' said Lucy and stepped out of the cab.� If he behaved like a whipped dog, he could be treated like one.
������ Walter followed her, abject and miserable.
������ Sbisa himself received them on the threshold.� He bowed, he waved his fat white hands, and his expanding smile raised a succession of waves in the flesh of his enormous cheeks.� When Lucy arrived, the consumption of champagne tended to rise.� She was an honoured guest.
������ 'Mr Spandrell here?' she asked.� 'And Mr and Mrs Rampion?'
������ 'Oo yez, oo yez,' old Sbisa repeated with Neapolitan, almost oriental emphasis.� The implication was that they were not only there, but that if it had been in his power, he would have provided two of each of them for her benefit.� 'And you? Quaite well, quaite well, I hope?� Sooch lobster we have tonight, sooch lobster ...'� Still talking, he ushered them into the restaurant.
������
CHAPTER VIII
'What I complain of,' said Mark Rampion, 'is the horrible unwholesome tameness of our world.'
������ Mary Rampion laughed wholeheartedly from the depths of her lungs.� 'You wouldn't say that,' she said, 'if you'd been your wife instead of you.� Tame?� I could tell you something about tameness.'
������ There was certainly nothing very tame about Mark Rampion's appearance.� His profile was steep, with a hooked fierce nose like a cutting instrument and a pointed chin.� The eyes were blue and piercing, and the very fine hair, a little on the reddish side of golden, fluttered up at every movement, every breath of wind, like wisps of blown flame.
������ 'Well, you're not exactly a sheep either,' said Rampion.� 'But two people aren't the world.� I was talking about the world, not us.� It's tame, I say.� Like one of those horrible big gelded cats.'
������ 'Did you find the War so tame?' asked Spandrell, speaking from the half-darkness outside the little world of pink-tinged lamplight in which their table stood.� He sat leaning backwards, his chair tilted on his hind legs against the wall.
������ 'Even the War,' said Rampion.� 'It was a domesticated outrage.� People didn't go and fight because their blood was up.� They went because they were told to; they went because they were good citizens.� "Man is a fighting animal," as your stepfather is so fond of saying in his speeches.� But what I complain of is that he's a domestic animal.'
������ 'And getting more domestic every day,' said Mary Rampion, who shared her husband's opinions - or perhaps it would be truer to say, shared most of his feelings and, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed his opinions when she wanted to express them.� 'It's factories, it's Christianity, it's science, it's respectability, it's our education,' she explained.� 'They weigh on the modern soul.� They suck the life out of it.� They ...'
������ 'Oh, for God's sake shut up!' said Rampion.
������ 'But isn't that what you say?'
������ 'What I say is what I say.� It becomes quite different when you say it.'
������ The expression of irritation which had appeared on Mary Rampion's face cleared away.� She laughed.� 'Ah, well,' she said good-humouredly, 'ratiocination was never my strongest point.� But you might be a little more polite about it in public.'
������ 'I don't suffer fools gladly.'
������ 'You'll suffer one very painfully, if you're not careful,' she menaced laughingly.
������ 'If you'd like to throw a plate at him,' said Spandrell, pushing one over to her as he spoke, 'don't mine me.'
������ Mary thanked him.� 'It would do him good,' she said.� 'He gets so bumptious.'
������ 'And it would do you no harm,' retorted Rampion,� 'if I gave you a black eye in return.'
������ 'You just try.� I'll take you on with one hand tied behind my back.'
������ They all burst out laughing.
������ 'I put my money on Mary,' said Spandrell, tilting back his chair. �Smiling with a pleasure which he would have found it hard to explain, he looked from one to the other - from the thin, fierce, indomitable little man to the big golden woman.� Each separately was good; but together, as a couple, they were better still.� Without realizing it, he had quite suddenly begun to feel happy.
������ 'We'll have it out one of these days,' said Rampion and laid his hand for a moment on hers.� It was a delicate hand, sensitive and expressive.� An aristocrat's hand if ever there was one, thought Spandrell.� And hers, so blunt and strong and honest, was a peasant's.� And yet by birth it was Rampion who was the peasant and she the aristocrat.� Which only showed what nonsense the genealogies talked.
������ 'Ten rounds,' Rampion went on.� 'No gloves.' �He turned to Spandrell.
������ 'You ought to get married, you know,' he said.
������ Spandrell's happiness suddenly collapsed.� It was though he had come with a jolt to his senses.� He felt almost angry with himself.� What business had he to go and sentimentalize over a happy couple?
������ 'I can't box,' he answered; and Rampion detected a bitterness in his jocularity, an inward hardening.
������ 'No, seriously,' he said, trying to make out the expression on the other's face.� But Spandrell's head was in the shadow, and the light of the interposed lamp on the table between them dazzled him.
������ 'Yes, seriously,' echoed Mary.� 'You ought.� You'd be a changed man.'
������ Spandrell uttered a brief and snorting laugh, and letting his chair fall back on to its four legs, leaned forward across the table.� Pushing aside his coffee cup and his half emptied liqueur glass, he planted his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands.� His face came into the light of the rosy lamp.� Like a gargoyle, Mary thought, a gargoyle in a pink boudoir.� There was one on Notre Dame in just that attitude, leaning forward with his demon's face between his claws.� Only the gargoyle was a comic devil, so extravagantly diabolical that you couldn't take his devilishness very seriously.� Spandrell was a real person, not a caricature; that was why his face was so much more cynical and tragical.� It was a gaunt face.� Cheekbone and jaw showed in hard outline through the tight skin.� The grey eyes were deeply set.� In the cadaverous mask only the mouth was fleshy - a wide mouth, with lips that stood out from the skin like two thick weals.
������ 'When he smiles,' Lucy Tantamount had once said of him, 'it's like an appendicitis operation with ironical corners.'� The red scar was sensual, but firm at the same time and determined, as was the round chin below.� There were lines round the eyes and at the corners of his lips.� The thick brown hair had begun to retreat from the forehead.
������ 'He might be fifty, to look at him,' Mary Rampion was thinking.� 'And yet, what is his age?'� She made calculations and decided that he couldn't be more than thirty-two or thirty-three.� Just the right age for settling down.'
������ 'A changed man,' she repeated.
������ 'But I don't particularly want to be changed.'
������ Mark Rampion nodded.� 'Yes, that's the trouble with you, Spandrell.� You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice.� You don't want to be made healthy.� You enjoy your unwholesomeness.� You're rather proud of it, even.'
������ 'Marriage would be the cure,' persisted Mary, indefatigably enthusiastic in the cause of the sacrament to which she herself owed all her life and happiness.
������ 'Unless, of course, it merely destroyed the wife,' said Rampion.� 'He might infect her with his own gangrene.'
������ Spandrell through back his head and laughed profoundly, but, as was his custom, almost inaudibly, a muted explosion.� 'Admirable!' he said.� 'Admirable!� The first really good argument in favour of matrimony I ever heard.� Almost thou persuadest me, Rampion.� I've never actually carried it as far as marriage.'
������ 'Carried what?' asked Rampion, frowning a little.� He disliked the other's rather melodramatically cynical way of talking.� So damned pleased with his naughtinesses!� Like a stupid child, really.
������ 'The process of infection.� I'd always stopped this side of the registry office.� But I'll cross the threshold next time.'� He drank some more brandy.� 'I'm like Socrates,' he went on.� 'I'm divinely appointed to corrupt the youth, the female youth more particularly.� I have a mission to educate them in the way they shouldn't go.'� He threw back his head to emit that voiceless laugh of his.� Rampion looked at him distastefully.� So theatrical.� It was as though the man were overacting in order to convince himself he was there at all.
������ 'But if you only knew what marriage could mean,' Mary earnestly put in.� 'If you only knew ...'
������ 'But, my dear woman, of course he knows,' Rampion interrupted with impatience.
������ 'We've been married more than fifteen years now,' she went on, the missionary spirit strong within her.� And I assure you ...'
������ 'I wouldn't waste my breath, if I were you.'
������ Mary glanced enquiringly at her husband.� Wherever human relationships were concerned, she had an absolute trust in Rampion's judgement.� Through those labyrinths he threaded his way with a sure tact which she could only envy, not imitate.� 'He can smell people's souls,' she used to say of him.� She herself had but an indifferent nose for souls.� Wisely then, she allowed herself to be guided by him.� She glanced at him.� Rampion was staring into his coffee cup.� His forehead was puckered into a frown; he had evidently spoken in earnest.� 'Oh, very well,' she said and lit another cigarette.
������ Spandrell looked from one to the other almost triumphantly.� 'I have a regular technique with the young ones,' he went on in the same too cynical manner.� Mary shut her eyes and thought of the time when she and Rampion had been young.
CHAPTER IX
'What a blotch!' said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley.� Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke.� The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach.� The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows.� 'Our poor view!� It oughtn't to be allowed.� It really oughtn't.
������ 'Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,' quoted her brother George.
������ The other young man was more practically minded.� 'If one could plant a battery here,' he suggested, 'and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place ...'
������ 'It would be a good thing,' said Mary emphatically.� 'A really good thing.'
������ Her approval filled the military young man with happiness.� He was desperately in love.� 'Heavy howitzers,' he added, trying to improve on his suggestion.� But George interrupted him.
������ 'Who the devil is that?' he asked.
������ The others looked round in the direction he was pointing.� A stranger was walking up the hill towards them.
������ 'No idea,' said Mary, looking at him.
������ The stranger approached.� He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind - for he wore no hat.� He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey flannel trousers.� His tie was red; he walked without a stick.
������ 'Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,' said George.
������ And indeed, the young man was coming straight towards them.� He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important business.
������ 'What an extraordinary face!' thought Mary, as he approached.� 'But how ill he looks!� So thin, so pale.'� But his eyes forbade her to feel pity.� They were bright with power.
������ He came to a halt in front of them drawing up his thin body very rigidly, as though he were on parade.� There was defiance in the attitude, and earnest defiance in the expression of his face.� He looked at them fixedly with his bright eyes, turning from one to the other.
������ 'Good afternoon,' he said.� It was costing him an enormous effort to speak.� But speak he must, just because of that insolent unawareness in their blank rich faces.
������ Mary answered for the others.� 'Good afternoon.'
������ 'I'm trespassing here,' said the stranger.� 'Do you mind?'� The seriousness of his defiance deepened.� He looked at them sombrely.� The young men were examining him from the other side of the bars, from a long way off, from the vantage ground of another class.� They had noticed his clothes.� There was hostility and contempt in their eyes.� There was also a kind of fear.� 'I'm a trespasser,' he repeated.� His voice was rather shrill, but musical.� His accent was of the country.
������ 'One of the local cads,' George had been thinking.
������ 'A trespasser.'� It would have been much easier, much pleasanter to sneak out unobserved.� That was why he had to affront them.
������ There was a silence.� The military man turned away.� He dissociated himself from the whole unpleasant business.� It had nothing to do with him, after all.� The park belonged to Mary's father.� He was only a guest.� 'I've gotta motta: Always merry and bright,' he hummed to himself, as he looked out over the black town in the valley.
������ It was George who broke the silence.� 'Do we mind?' he said, repeating the stranger's words.� His face had gone very red.
������ 'How absurd he looks!' thought Mary, as she glanced at him.� 'Like a bull calf.� A blushing bull calf.'
������ 'Do we mind?'� Damned insolent little bounder!� George was working up a righteous indignation.� 'I should just think we do mind.� And I'll trouble you to ...'
������ Mary broke out into laughter.� 'We don't mind at all,' she said.� 'Not in the least.'
������ Her brother's face became even redder.� 'What do you mean, Mary?' he asked furiously.� ('Always merry and bright,' hummed the military man, more starrily detached than ever.)� 'The place is private.'
������ 'But we don't mind a bit,' she said, not looking at her brother, but at the stranger.� 'Not a bit, when people come and are frank about it, like you.'� She smiled at him; but the young man's face remained as proudly serious as ever.� Looking into those serious bright eyes, she too suddenly became serious.� It was no joke, she saw all at once, no joke.� Grave issues were involved, important issues.� But why grave and in what way important she did not know.� She was only obscurely and profoundly aware that it was no joke.� 'Goodbye,' she said in an altered voice, and held out her hand.
������ The stranger hesitated for a second, then took it.� 'Goodbye,' he said.� 'I'll get out of the park as quick as I can.'� And turning round, he walked rapidly away.
������ 'What the devil!' George began, turning angrily on his sister.
������ 'Oh, hold your tongue!' she answered impatiently.
������ 'Shaking hands with the fellow,' he went on protesting.
������ 'A bit of a pleb, wasn't he?' put in the military friend.
������ She looked from one to the other without speaking and walked away.� What louts they were!� The two young men followed.
������ 'I wish to God Mary would learn how to behave herself properly,' said George, still fuming.
������ The military young man made deprecating noises.� He was in love with her; but he had to admit that she was rather embarrassingly unconventional sometimes.� It was her only defect.
������ 'Shaking that bounder's hand!' George went on grumbling.
������ That was their first meeting.� Mary then was twenty-two and Mark Rampion was a year younger.� He had finished his second year at Sheffield University and was back at Stanton for the summer vacation.� His mother lived in one of a row of cottages near the station.� She had a little pension - her husband had been a postman - and made a few extra shillings by sewing.� Mark was a scholarship boy.� His younger and less talented brothers were already at work.
������ 'A very remarkable young man,' the Rector insisted more than once in the course of his sketch of Mark Rampion's career, some few days later.
������ The occasion was a church bazaar and charitable garden party at the Rectory.� Some of the Sunday School children had acted a little play in the open air.� The dramatist was Mark Rampion.
������ 'Quite unassisted,' the Rector assured the assembled gentry.� 'And what's more, the lad can draw.� They're a little eccentric perhaps, his pictures, a little ... ah ...' he hesitated.
������ 'Weird,' suggested his daughter, with an upper middle-class smile, proud of her incomprehension.
������ 'But full of talent,' the Rector continued.� 'The boy's a real cygnet of Tees,' he added with a self-conscious, almost guilty laugh.� He had a weakness for literary allusions.� The gentry smiled perfunctorily.
������ The prodigy was introduced.� Mary recognized the trespasser.
������ 'I've met you before,' she said.
������ 'Poaching your view.'
������ 'You're welcome to it.'� The words made him smile, a little ironically it seemed to her.� She blushed, fearful lest she had said something that might have sounded rather patronizing.� 'But I suppose you'd go on poaching whether you were welcome or not,' she added with a nervous little laugh.
������ He said nothing, but nodded, still smiling.
������ Mary's father stepped in with congratulations.� His praises went trampling over the delicate little play like a herd of elephants.� Mary writhed.� It was all wrong, hopelessly wrong.� She could feel that.� But the trouble, as she realized, was that she couldn't have said anything better herself.� The ironic smile still lingered about his lips.� 'What fools he must think us all!' she said to herself.
������ And now it was her mother's turn.� 'Jolly good' was replaced by 'too charming'.� Which was just as bad, just as hopelessly beside the point.
������ � When Mrs Felpham asked him to tea, Rampion wanted to refuse the invitation -� but to refuse it without being boorish or offensive.� After all, she meant well enough, poor woman.� She was only rather ludicrous.� The village Maecenas, in petticoats, patronizing art to the extent of two cups of tea and a slice of plum cake.� The r�le was a comic one.� While he was hesitating, Mary joined in the invitation.
������ 'Do come,' she insisted.� And her eyes, her smile expressed a kind of rueful amusement and an apology.� She saw the absurdity of the situation.� 'But I can't do anything about it,' she seemed to say.� 'Nothing at all.�� Except apologize.'
������ 'I should like to come very much,' he said, turning back to Mrs Felpham.
������ The appointed day came.� His tie as red as ever, Rampion presented himself.� The men were out fishing; he was received by Mary and her mother.� Mrs Felpham tried to rise to the occasion.� The village Shakespeare, it was obvious, must be interested in the drama.
������ 'Don't you love Barrie's plays?' she asked.� 'I'm so fond of them.'� She talked on; Rampion made no comment.� It was only later, when Mrs Felpham had given him up as a bad job and had commissioned Mary to show him round the garden, that he opened his lips.
������ 'I'm afraid your mother thought me very rude,' he said, as they walked along the smooth flagged paths between the roses.
������ 'Of course not,' Mary protested with an excessive heartiness.
������ Rampion laughed.� 'Thank you,' he said.� 'But of course she did.� Because I was rude in order that I shouldn't be ruder.� Better say nothing than say what I thought about Barrie.'
������ 'Don't you like his plays?'
������ 'Do I like them?� I?'� He stopped and looked at her.� The blood rushed up into her cheeks; what had she said?� 'You can ask that here.'� He waved his hand at the flowers, the little pool with the fountain, the high terrace, with the stonecrops and the aubretias growing from between the stones, the grey, severe Georgian house beyond.� 'But come down with me into Stanton and ask me there.� We're sitting on the hard reality down there, not with an air cushion between us and the facts.� You must have an assured five pounds a week at least, before you can begin to enjoy Barrie.� If you're sitting on the bare facts, he's an insult.'
������ There was a silence.� They walked up and down among the roses - those roses which Mary was feeling that she ought to disclaim, to apologize for.� But a disclaimer, an apology would be an offence.� A big retriever puppy came frisking clumsily along the path towards them.� She called its name; the beast stood up on its hind legs and pawed at her.
������ 'I think I like animals better than people,' she said, as she protected herself from its ponderous playfulness.
������ 'Well, at least they're genuine, they don't live on air cushions like the sort of people you have to do with,' said Rampion, bringing out the obscure relevance of her remark to what had been said before.� Mary was amazed and delighted by the way he understood.
������ 'I'd like to know more of your sort of people,' she said; 'genuine people, people without air cushions.'
������ 'Well, don't imagine I'm going to do the Cook's guide for you,' he answered ironically.� 'We're not a Zoo, you know; we're not natives in quaint costume, or anything of that sort.� If you want to go slumming, apply to the Rector.'
������ She flushed very red.� 'You know I wasn't meaning that,' she protested.
������ 'Are you sure?' he asked her.� 'When one's rich, it's difficult not to mean that.� A person like you simply can't imagine what it is not to be rich.� Like a fish.� How can a fish imagine what life out of the water is like?'
������ 'But can't one discover, if one tries?'
������ 'There's a great gulf,' he answered.
������ 'It can be crossed.'
������ 'Yes, I suppose it can be crossed.'� But his tone was dubious.
������ They walked and talked among the roses for a few minutes longer; then Rampion looked at his watch and said he must be going.
������ 'But you'll come again?'
������ 'Would there be much point in my coming again?' he asked.� 'It's rather like interplanetary visiting, isn't it?'
������ 'I hadn't felt it like that,' she answered, and added, after a little pause, 'I suppose you find us all very stupid, don't you?'� She looked at him.� He had raised his eyebrows, he was about to protest.� She wouldn't allow him to be merely polite.� 'Because, you know, we are stupid.� Terribly stupid.'� She laughed, rather ruefully.� With people of her own kind stupidity was rather a virtue than a defect.� To be too intelligent was to risk not being a gentleman.� Intelligence wasn't altogether safe.� Rampion had made her wonder whether there weren't better things than gentlemanly safety.� In his presence she didn't feel at all proud of being stupid.
������ Rampion smiled at her.� He liked her frankness.� There was something genuine about her.� She hadn't been spoilt - not yet, at any rate.
������ 'I believe you're an agent provocateur,' he bantered, 'trying to tempt me to say rude and subversive things about my betters.� But as a matter of fact, my opinions aren't a bit rude.� You people aren't stupider than anyone else.� Not naturally stupider.� You're victims of your way of living.� It's put a shell round you and blinkers over your eyes.� By nature a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird.� But you must admit that its way of living doesn't exactly encourage intelligence.'
������ They met again several times in the course of that summer.� Most often they walked together over the moors.� 'Like a force of nature,' he thought as he watched her with bent head tunnelling her way through the damp wind.� A great physical force.� Such energy, such strength and health - it was magnificent.� Rampion himself had been a delicate child, constantly ailing.� He admired the physical qualities he did not himself possess.� Mary was a sort of berserker Diana of the moors.� He told her as much one day.� She liked the compliment.
������ 'Wass f�r ein Atavismus!� That was what my old German governess used to say about me.� She was right, I think.� I am a bit of an Atavismus.'
������ Rampion laughed.� 'It sounds ridiculous in German.�� But it isn't at all absurd in itself.� An atavismus - that's what we all ought to be.� Atavismuses with all modern conveniences.� Intelligent primitives.� Big game with a soul.'
������ It was a wet cold summer.� On the morning of the day fixed for their next meeting, Mary received a letter from him.� 'Dear Miss Felpham,' she read, and this first sight of his handwriting gave her a strange pleasure.� 'I've idiotically gone and caught a chill.� Will you be more forgiving than I am - for I can't tell you how inexpressibly disgusted and angry I am with myself - and excuse me for putting you off till today week?'
������ He looked pale and thin, when she next saw him, and was still troubled by a cough.� When she enquired about his health, he cut her short almost with anger.� 'I'm quite all right,' he said sharply, and changed the subject.
������ 'I've been re-reading Blake,' he said.� And he began to speak about the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
������ 'Blake was civilized,' he insisted, 'civilized.� Civilization is a harmony and completeness.� Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body - Blake managed to include and harmonize everything.� Barbarism is being lopsided.� You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body.� A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality.� Christianity made us barbarians of the soul, and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect.� Blake was the last civilized man.'
������ He spoke of the Greeks and those naked sunburnt Etruscans in the sepulchral wall paintings.� 'You've seen the originals?' he said.� 'My word, I envy you.'
������ Mary felt terribly ashamed.� She had seen the painted tombs at Tarquinia; but how little she remembered of them!� They had just been curious old works of art like all those other innumerable old works of art she had dutifully seen in company with her mother on their Italian journey the year before.� They had really been wasted on her.� Whereas if he could have afforded to go to Italy ...
������ 'They were civilized,' he was saying, 'they knew how to live harmoniously and completely, with their whole being.'� He spoke with a kind of passion, as though he were angry - with the world, with himself, perhaps.� 'We're all barbarians,' he began; but was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing.� Mary waited for the paroxysm to subside.� She felt anxious and at the same time embarrassed and ashamed, as one feels when one has come upon a man off his guard and displaying a weakness which at ordinary times he is at pains to conceal.� She wondered whether she ought to say something sympathetic about the cough, or pretend that she hadn't noticed it.� He solved her problem by referring to it himself.
������ 'Talk of barbarism,' he said, when the fit was over.� He spoke in a tone of disgust, his smile was wry and angry.� 'Have you ever heard anything more barbarous than that cough?� A cough like that wouldn't be allowed in a civilized society.'
������ Mary proffered solicitude and advice.� He laughed impatiently.
������ 'My mother's very words,' he said.� 'Word for word.� You women are all the same.� Clucking like hens after their chickens.'
������ 'But think how miserable you'd be if we didn't cluck!'
������ A few days later - with some misgivings - he took her to see his mother.� The misgivings were groundless; Mary and Mrs Rampion seemed to find no difficulties in making spiritual contact.� Mrs Rampion was a woman of about fifty, still handsome and with an expression on her face of calm dignity and resignation.� Her speech was slow and quiet.� Only once did Mary see her manner change and that was when, Mark being out of the room preparing the tea, she began to talk about her son.
������ 'What do you think of him?' she asked, leaning forward towards her guest with a sudden brightening of the eyes.
������ 'What do I think?' Mary laughed. 'I'm not impertinent enough to set up as a judge of my betters.� But he's obviously somebody, somebody that matters.'
������ Mrs Rampion nodded, smiling with pleasure.� 'He's somebody,' she repeated.� 'That's what I've always said.'� Her face became grave.� 'If only he were stronger!� If I could only have afforded to bring him up better.� He was always delicate.� He ought to have been brought up more carefully than I could do.� No, not more carefully.� I was as careful as I could be.� More comfortably, more healthily.� But there, I couldn't afford it.'� She shook her head.� 'There you are.'� She gave a little sigh and, leaning back in her chair, sat there in silence, with folded arms, looking at the floor.
������ Mary made no comment; she did not know what to say.� Once more she felt ashamed, miserable and ashamed.
������ 'What did you think of my mother?' Rampion asked later, when he was escorting her home.
������ 'I liked her,' Mary answered.� 'Very much indeed.� Even though she did make me feel so small and petty and bad.� Which is another way of saying that I admired her, and liked her because of my admiration.'
������ Rampion nodded.� 'She is admirable,' he said.� 'She's courageous and strong and enduring.� But she's too resigned.'
������ 'But I thought that was one of the wonderful things about her.'
������ 'She has no right to be resigned,' he answered, frowning.� 'No right.� When you've had a life like hers, you oughtn't to be resigned.� You ought to be rebellious.� It's this damned religion.� Did I tell you she was religious?'
������ 'No; but I guessed it, when I saw her,' Mary answered.
������ 'She's a barbarian of the soul,' he went on.� 'All soul and future.� No present, no past, no body, no intellect.� Only the soul and the future and in the meantime resignation.� Could anything be more barbarous?� She ought to rebel.'
������ 'I should leave her as she is,' said Mary.� 'She'll be happier.� And you can rebel enough for two.'
������ Rampion laughed.� 'I'll rebel enough for millions,' he said.
������ At the end of the summer, Rampion returned to Sheffield, and a little later the Felphams moved southwards to their London house.� It was Mary who wrote the first letter.� She had expected to hear from him; but he did not write.� Not that there was any good reason why he should.� But somehow she had expected that he would write; she was disappointed when he did not.� The weeks passed.� In the end she wrote to ask him the name of a book about which he had spoken in one of their conversations.� The pretext was flimsy; but it served.� He answered; she thanked him; the correspondence became an established fact.
������ At Christmas Rampion came up to London; he had had some things accepted by the newspapers and was unprecedentedly rich - he had ten pounds to do what he liked with.� He did not let Mary know of his proximity till the day before his departure.
������ 'But why didn't you tell me before?' she asked reproachfully, when she heard how many days he had already been in London.
������ 'I didn't want to inflict myself on you,' he answered.
������ 'But you know I should have been delighted.'
������ 'You have your own friends.'� Rich friends, the ironical smile implied.
������ 'But aren't you one of my friends?' she asked, ignoring the implication.
������ 'Thank you for saying so.'
������ 'Thank you for being so,' she answered without affectation or coquetry.
������ He was moved by the frankness of her avowal, the genuineness and simplicity of her sentiment.� He knew, of course, that she liked and admired him; but to know and to be told are different things.
������ 'I'm sorry, then, I didn't write to you before,' he said, and then regretted his words.� For they were hypocritical.� The real reason why he had kept away from her was not a fear of being badly received; it was pride.� He could not afford to take her out; he did not want to accept anything.
������ They spent the afternoon together and were unreasonably, disproportionately happy.
������ 'If only you'd told me before,' she repeated when it was time for her to go.� 'I wouldn't have made this tiresome engagement for the evening.'
������ 'You'll enjoy it,' he assured her with a return of that ironical tone in which all his references to her life as a member of the monied class were made.� The expression of happiness faded from his face.� He felt suddenly rather resentful at having been so happy in her company.� It was stupid to feel like that.� What was the point of being happy on opposite sides of the gulf?� 'You'll enjoy it,' he repeated, more bitterly.� 'Good food and wine, distinguished people, witty conversation, the theatre afterwards.� Isn't it the ideal evening?'� His tone was savagely contemptuous.
������ She looked at him with sad, pained eyes, wondering why he should suddenly have started thus to lay waste retrospectively to their afternoon.� 'I don't know why you talk like that,' she said.� 'Do you know yourself?'
������ The question reverberated in his mind long after they had parted.� 'Do you know yourself?'� Of course he knew.� But he also knew that there was a gulf.
������ They met again at Stanton in Easter week.� In the interval they had exchanged many letters, and Mary had received a proposal of marriage from the military friend who had wanted to obliterate Stanton with howitzers.� To the surprise and somewhat to the distress of her relations, she refused him.
������ 'He's such a nice boy,' her mother had insisted.
������ 'I know. But one simply can't take him seriously, can one?'
������ 'Why not?'
������ 'And then,' Mary continued, 'he doesn't really exist.� He isn't completely there.� Just a lump; nothing more.� One can't marry someone who isn't there.'� She thought of Rampion's violently living face; it seemed to burn, it seemed to be sharp and glowing.� 'One can't marry a ghost, even when it's tangible and lumpy - particularly when it's lumpy.'� She burst out laughing.
������ 'I don't know what you're talking about,' said Mrs Felpham with dignity.
������ 'But I do,' Mary answered.� 'I do.� And after all, that's what chiefly matters in the circumstances.'
������ Walking with Rampion on the moors, she told him of the laying of this too, too solid military phantom.� He made no comment.� There was a long silence.� Mary felt disappointed and at the same time ashamed of her disappointment.� 'I believe,' she said to herself, 'I believe I was trying to get him to propose to me.'
������ The days passed; Rampion was silent and gloomy.� When she asked him the reason, he talked unhappily about his future prospects.� At the end of the summer, he would have finished his university course; it would be time to think of a career.� The only career that seemed to be immediately open - for he could not afford to wait - was teaching.
������ 'Teaching,' he repeated with emphatic horror, 'teaching!� Does it surprise you that I should feel depressed?'� But his misery had other causes besides the prospect of having to teach.� 'What she laugh at me, if I asked her?' he was wondering.� He didn't think she would.� But if she wasn't going to refuse, was it fair on his part to ask?� Was it fair to let her in for the kind of life she would have to lead with him?� Or perhaps she had money of her own; and in that case his own honour would be involved.
������ 'Do you see me as a pedagogue?' he asked aloud.� The pedagogue was his scapegoat.
������ 'But why should you be a pedagogue, when you can write and draw?� You can live on your wits.'
������ 'But can I?� At least pedagogy's safe.'
������ 'What do you want to be safe for?' she asked, almost contemptuously.
������ Rampion laughed.� 'You wouldn't ask if you'd had to live on a weekly wage, subject to a week's notice.� Nothing like money for promoting courage and self-confidence.'
������ 'Well then, to that extent money's a good thing.� Courage and self-confidence are virtues.'
������ They walked on for a long time in silence.� 'Well, well,' said Rampion at last, looking up at her, 'you've brought it on yourself.'� He made an attempt at laughter.� 'Courage and self-confidence are virtues; you said so yourself.� I'm only trying to live up to your moral standards.� Courage and self-confidence!� I'm going to tell you that I love you.'� There was another long silence.� He waited; his heart was beating as though with fear.
������ 'Well?' he questioned at last.� Mary turned towards him and, taking his hand, lifted it to her lips.
������ Before and after their marriage Rampion had many occasions of admiring those wealth-fostered virtues.� It was she who made him give up all thought of teaching and trust exclusively to his wits for a career.� She had confidence for both.
������ 'I'm not going to marry a schoolmaster,' she insisted.� And she didn't; she married a dramatist who had never had a play performed, except at the Stanton-in-Teesdale church bazaar, a painter who had never sold a picture.
������ 'We shall starve,' he prophesied.� The spectre of hunger haunted him; he had seen it too often to be able to ignore its existence.
������ 'Nonsense,' said Mary, strong in the knowledge that people didn't starve.� Nobody that she knew had ever been hungry.� 'Nonsense.'� She had her way in the end.
������ What made Rampion the more reluctant to take the unsafe course was the fact that it could only be taken at Mary's expense.
������ 'I can't live on you,' he said.� 'I can't take your money.'
������ 'But you're not taking my money,' she insisted, 'you're simply an investment.� I'm putting up capital in the hope of getting a good return.� You shall live on me for a year or two, so that I may live on you for the rest of my life.� It's business; it's positively sharp practice.'
������ He had to laugh.
������ 'And in any case,' she continued, 'you won't live very long on me.� Eight hundred pounds won't last for ever.'
������ He agreed at last to borrow her eight hundred pounds at the current rate of interest.� He did it reluctantly, feeling that he was somehow betraying his own people.� To start life with eight hundred pounds - it was too easy, it was a shirking of difficulties, a taking of unfair advantages.� If it had not been for that sense of responsibility which he felt towards his own talents, he would have refused the money and either desperately risked the career of literature without a penny, or gone the safe and pedagogical way.� When at last he consented to take the money, he made it a condition that she should never accept anything from her relations.� Mary agreed.
������ 'Not that they'll be very anxious to give me anything.' she added with a laugh.
������ She was right.� Her father's horror at the misalliance was as profound as she had expected.� Mary was in no danger, so far as he was concerned, of becoming rich.
������ They were married in August and immediately went abroad.� They took the train as far as Dijon and from there began to walk south-east, towards Italy.� Rampion had never been out of England before.� The strangeness of France was symbolical to him of the new life he had just begun, the new liberty he had acquired.� And Mary herself was no less symbolically novel than the country through which they travelled.� She had not only self-confidence, but a recklessness which was altogether strange and extraordinary in his eyes.� Little incidents impressed him.� There was that occasion, for example, when she left her spare pair of shoes behind in the farm where they had spent the night.� It was only late in the afternoon that she discovered her loss.� Rampion suggested that they should walk back and reclaim them.� She would not hear of it.
������ 'They're gone,' she said.� 'It's no use bothering.� Let the boots bury their boots.'� He got quite angry with her.� 'Remember you're not rich any more,' he insisted.� 'You can't afford to throw away a good pair of shoes.� We shan't be able to buy a new pair till we get home.'� They had taken a small sum with them for their journey and had vowed that in no circumstances would they spend more.� 'Not till we get home,' he repeated.
������ 'I know, I know,' she answered impatiently.� 'I shall learn to walk barefoot.'
������ And she did.
������ 'I was born to be a tramp,' she declared one evening when they were lying on hay in a barn.� 'I can't tell you how I enjoy not being respectable.� It's the Atavismus coming out.� You bother too much, Mark.� Consider the lilies of the field.'
������ 'And yet,' Rampion meditated, 'Jesus was a poor man.� Tomorrow's bread and boots must have mattered a great deal in his family.� How was it that he could talk about the future like a millionaire?'
������ 'Because he was one of nature's dukes,' she answered.� 'That's why.� He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king.� Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they're terribly preoccupied about tomorrow.� Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down.� None of your titled financiers or soap boilers.� A genuine aristocrat.� And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius.� He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and tomorrow.'� She was silent for a little and then added, as an afterthought: 'And what's more, he wasn't respectable.� He didn't care about appearances.� They have their reward.� But I don't mind if we do look like scarecrows.'
������ 'You've paid yourself a nice lot of compliments,' said Rampion.� But he meditated her words and her spontaneous, natural, untroubled way of living.� He envied her her Atavismus.
������ It was not merely tramping that Mary liked.� She got almost as much enjoyment out of the more prosaic settled life they led, when they returned to England.� 'Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon,' was what Rampion called her, when he saw her cooking the dinner; she did it with such child-like enthusiasm.
������ 'Think carefully,' he had warned her before they married.� 'You're going to be poor.� Really poor; not poor on a thousand a year like your impecunious friends.� There'll be no servants.� You'll have to cook and mend and do housework.� You won't find it pleasant.'
������ Mary only laughed.� 'You'll be the one who won't find it pleasant,' she answered, 'at any rate until I've learnt to cook.'
������ She had never so much as friend an egg when she married him.
������ Strangely enough that child-like, Marie-Antoinette-ish enthusiasm for doing things - for cooking on a real range, using a real carpet sweeper, a real sewing machine - survived the first novel and exciting months.� She went on enjoying herself.
������ 'I could never go back to being a perfect lady,' she used to say.� 'It would bore me to death.� Goodness knows, housework and managing and looking after the children can be boring and exasperating enough.� But being quite out of touch with all the ordinary facts of existence, living in a different planet from the world of daily, physical reality - that's much worse.'
������ Rampion was of the same opinion.� He refused to make art and thought excuses for living a life of abstraction.� In the intervals of painting and writing he helped Mary with the housework.
������ 'You don't expect flowers to grow in nice clean vacuums.'� That was his argument.� 'They need mould and clay and dung.� So does art.'
������ For Rampion, there was also a kind of moral compulsion to live the life of the poor.� Even when he was making quite a reasonable income, they kept only one maid and continued to do a great part of the housework themselves.� It was a case, with him, of noblesse oblige - or rather roture oblige.� To live like the rich, in a comfortable abstraction from material cares would be, he felt, a kind of betrayal of his class, his own people.� If he sat still and paid servants to work for him, he would somehow be insulting his mother's memory, he would be posthumously telling her that he was too good to lead the life she had led.
������ There were occasions when he hated this moral compulsion, because he felt that it was compelling him to do foolish and ridiculous things; and hating, he would try to rebel against it.� How absurdly shocked he had been, for example, by Mary's habit of lying in bed of a morning.� When she felt lazy, she didn't get up; and there was an end of it.� The first time it happened, Rampion was really distressed.
������ 'But you can't stay in bed all the morning,' he protested.
������ 'Why not?'
������ 'Why not?� Because you can't.'
������ 'But I can,' said Mary calmly.� 'And I do.'
������ It shocked him.� Unreasonably, as he perceived when he tried to analyse his feelings.� But all the same, he was shocked.� He was shocked because he had always got up early himself, because all his people had had to get up early.� It shocked him that one should lie in bed while other people were up and working.� To get up late was somehow to add insult to injury.� And yet, obviously, getting up early oneself, unnecessarily, did nothing to help those who had to get up early.� Getting up, when one wasn't compelled to get up, was just a tribute of respect, like taking off one's hat in a church.� And at the same time it was an act of propitiation, a sacrificial appeasement of the conscience.
������ 'One oughtn't to feel like that,' he reflected.� 'Imagine a Greek feeling like that!'
������ It was unimaginable.� And yet the fact remained that, however much he might disapprove of the feeling, he did in fact feel like that.
������ 'Mary's healthier than I am,' he though; and he remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals.� ''They do not sweat and whine about their condition.� They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.'� Mary was like that and it was good.� To be a perfect animal and a perfect human - that was the ideal.� All the same, he was shocked when she didn't get up in the morning.� He tried not to be; but he was shocked.� Rebelling, he would sometimes lie in bed himself till noon, on principle.� It was a duty not to be a barbarian of the conscience.� But it was a very long time before he could genuinely enjoy his laziness.
������ Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him.� During those first months of their marriage he was often, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her.� Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly.� The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.
������ 'You're such an absurd old puritan,' she told him.
������ The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded.� By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he was half a puritan.� His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being.� Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice.� The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself.� Theoretically, he approved of Mary's easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification.� And yet, whenever, in those early days, she began to talk in her calm matter-of-fact way of what he had only heard of, portentously, as fornication and adultery, he felt a shock, not in his reason (for that, after a moment's reflection, approved), but in some deeper layer of his being.� And the same part of him obscurely suffered from her great and wholeheartedly expressed capacity for pleasure and amusement, from her easy laughter, her excellent appetite, her unaffected sensuality.� It took him a long time to unlearn the puritanism of his childhood.� There were moments when his love for his mother turned almost to hatred.
������ 'She had no right to bring me up like that,' he said.� 'Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree.� No right.'
������ And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary.� He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery.� Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.
������ 'Living comes to you too easily,' he tried to explain.� 'You live by instinct.� You know what to do quite naturally, like an insect when it comes out of the pupa.� It's too simple, too simple.'� He shook his head.� 'You haven't earned your knowledge, you've never realized the alternatives.'
������ 'In other words,' said Mary, 'I'm a fool.'
������ 'No, a woman.'
������ 'Which is your polite way of saying the same thing.� But I'd like to know,' she went on with an irrelevance that was only apparent, 'where you'd be without me.� I'd like to know what you'd be doing if you'd never met me.'� She moved from stage to stage of an emotionally coherent argument.
������ 'I'd be where I am and be doing exactly what I'm doing now.'� He didn't mean it, of course; for he knew, better than anyone, how much he owed to her, how much he had learnt from her example and precept.� But it amused him to annoy her.
������ 'You know that's not true,' Mary was indignant.
������ 'It is true.'
������ 'It's a lie.� And to prove it,' she added, 'I've a very good mind to go away with the children and leave you for a few months to stew in your own juice.� I'd like to see how you get on without me.'
������ 'I should get on perfectly well,' he assured her with exasperating calmness.
������ Mary flushed; she was beginning to be genuinely annoyed.� 'Very well then,' she answered, 'I'll really go.� This time I really will.'� She had made the threat before; they quarrelled a good deal, for both were quick-tempered.
������ 'Do,' said Rampion.� 'But remember that two can play at that going-away game.� When you go away from me, I go away from you.'
������ 'We'll see how you get on without me,' she continued menacingly.
������ 'And you?' he asked.
������ 'What about me?'
������ 'Do you imagine that you can get on any better without me than I can get on without you?'
������ They looked at one another for a little time in silence and then, simultaneously, burst out laughing.
CHAPTER X
'A regular technique,' Spandrell repeated.� 'One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking they're �mes incomprises.'� He was boastfully generalizing from the case of poor little Harriet Watkins.� If he had just badly recounted his affair with Harriet, it wouldn't have sounded such a very grand exploit.� Harriet was such a pathetic, helpless little creature; anybody could have done her down.� But generalized like this, as though her case was only one of hundreds, told in a language of the cookery book ('one chooses them unhappy' - it was one of Mrs Beeton's recipes), the history sounded, he thought, more cynically impressive.� 'And one starts by being very, very kind, and so wise, and perfectly pure, an elder brother, in fact.� And they think one's really wonderful, because, of course, they've never met anybody who wasn't just a city man, with city ideas and city ambitions.� Simply wonderful, because one knows all about art and has met all the celebrities and doesn't think exclusively about money and in terms of the morning paper.� And they're a little in awe of one too,' he added, remembering little Harriet's expression of scared admiration; 'one's so unrespectable and yet so high-class, so at ease and at home among the great works and the great men, so wicked but so extraordinarily good, so learned, so well travelled, so brilliantly cosmopolitan and West-End (have you ever heard a suburban talking of the West-End?), like that gentleman with the order of the Golden Fleece in the advertisements for De Reszke cigarettes.� Yes, they're in awe of one; but at the same time they adore.� One's so understanding, one knows so much about life in general and their souls in particular, and one isn't a bit flirtatious or saucy like ordinary men, not a bit.� They feel they could trust one absolutely; and so they can, for the first weeks.� One has to get them used to the trap; quite tame and trusting, trained not to shy at an occasional brotherly pat on the back or an occasional chaste uncle-ish kiss on the forehead.� And meanwhile one coaxes out their little confidences, one makes them talk about love, one talks about it oneself in a man-to-man sort of way, as though they were one's own age and as sadly disillusioned and bitterly knowing as oneself - which they find terribly shocking (though of course they don't say so), but oh, so thrilling, so enormously flattering.� They simply love you for that.� Well then, finally, when the moment seems ripe and their thoroughly domesticated and no more frightened, one stages the d�nouement.� Tea in one's rooms - one's got them absolutely used to coming with absolute impunity to one's rooms - and they're going to go out to dinner with one, so that there's no hurry.� The twilight deepens, one talks disillusionedly and yet feelingly about the amorous mysteries, one produces cocktails - very strong - and goes on talking so that they ingurgitate them absentmindedly without reflection.� And sitting on the floor at their feet, one begins very gently stroking their ankles in an entirely platonic way, still talking about amorous philosophy, as though one were quite unconscious of what one's hand were doing.� If that's not resented and the cocktails have done their work, the rest shouldn't be difficult.� So at least I've always found.'� Spandrell helped himself to more brandy and drank.� 'But it's then, when they've become one's mistress, that the fun really begins.� It's then one deploys all one's Socratic talents.� One develops their little temperaments, one domesticates them - still so wisely and sweetly and patiently - to every outrage of sensuality.� It can be done, you know; the more easily, the more innocent they are.� They can be brought in perfect ingenuousness to the most astonishing pitch of depravity.'
������ 'I've no doubt they can,' said Mary indignantly.� 'But what's the point of doing it?'
������ 'It's an amusement,' said Spandrell with theatrical cynicism.� 'It passes the time and relieves the tedium.'
������ 'And above all,' Mark Rampion went on, without looking up from his coffee cup, 'above all it's a vengeance.� It's a way of getting one's own back on women, it's a way of punishing them for being women and so attractive, it's a way of expressing one's hatred of them and of what they represent, it's a way of expressing one's hatred of oneself.� The trouble with you, Spandrell,' he went on, suddenly and accusingly raising his bright pale eyes to the other's face, 'is that you really hate yourself.� You hate the very source of your life, its ultimate basis - for there's no denying it, sex is fundamental.� And you hate it, hate it.'
������ 'Me?'� It was a novel accusation.� Spandrell was accustomed to having himself blamed for his excessive love of women and the sensual pleasures.
������ 'Not only you.� All these people.'� With a jerk of his head he indicated the other diners.� 'And all the respectable ones too.� Practically everyone.� It's the disease of modern man.� I call it Jesus's disease on the analogy of Bright's disease.� Or rather Jesus's and Newton's disease; for the scientists are as much responsible as the Christians.� So are the big business men, for that matter.� It's Jesus's and Newton's and Henry Ford's disease.� Between them, the three have pretty well killed us.� Ripped the life out of our bodies and stuffed us with hatred.'
������ Rampion was full of his subject. He had been busy all day on a drawing that symbolically illustrated it.� Jesus, in the loincloth of the execution morning, and an overalled surgeon were represented, scalpel in hand, one on either side of an operating table, on which, foreshortened, the soles of his feet presented to the spectator, lay crucified a half-dissected man.� From the horrible wound in his belly escaped a coil of entrails which, falling to the earth, mingled with those of the gashed and bleeding woman lying in the foreground, to be transformed by an allegorical metamorphosis into a whole people of living snakes.� In the background receded a landscape of hills, dotted with black collieries and chimneys.� On one side of the picture, behind the figure of Jesus, two angels - the spiritual product of the vivisectors' mutilations - were trying to rise on their outspread wings.� Vainly, for their feet were entangled in the coils of the serpents.� For all their efforts, they could not leave the earth.
������ 'Jesus and the scientists are vivisecting us,' he went on, thinking of his picture.� 'Hacking our bodies to bits.'
������ 'But after all, why not?' objected Spandrell.� 'Perhaps they're meant to be vivisected.� The fact of shame is significant.� We feel spontaneously ashamed of the body and its activities.� That's a sign of the body's absolute and natural inferiority.'
������ 'Absolute and natural rubbish!' said Rampion indignantly.� 'Shame isn't spontaneous, to begin with.� It's artificial, it's acquired.� You can make people ashamed of anything.� Agonizingly ashamed of wearing brown boots with a black coat, of speaking with the wrong sort of accent, or having a drop at the end of their noses.� Of absolutely anything, including the body and its functions.� But that particular shame's just as artificial as any other.� The Christians invented it, just as the tailors in Savile Row invented the shame of wearing brown boots with a black coat.� There was precious little of it before Christian times.� Look at the Greeks, the Etruscans.'
������ The antique names transported Mary back to the moors above Stanton.� He was just the same.� Stronger now, that was all.� How ill he had looked that day!� Had she loved him then as much as she loved him now?
������ Spandrell had lifted a long and bony hand.� 'I know, I know.� Noble and nude and antique.� But I believe they're entirely a modern invention, those Swedish-drill pagans of ours.� We trot them out whenever we want to bait the Christians.� But did they ever exist?� I have my doubts.'
������ 'But look at their art,' put in Mary, thinking of the paintings at Tarquinia.� She had seen them a second time with Mark - really seen them on that occasion.
������ 'Yes, and look at ours,' retorted Spandrell.� 'When the Royal Academy sculpture room is dug up three thousand years hence, they'll say that twentieth-century Londoners wore fig-leaves, suckled their babies in public and embraced one another in the parks, stark naked.'
������ 'I only wish they did,' said Rampion.
������ 'But they don't.� And then - leaving this question of shame on one side for the moment - what about asceticism as the preliminary condition of the mystical experience?'
������ Rampion brought his hands together with a clap and, leaning back in his chair, turned up his eyes.� 'Oh, my sacred aunt!' he said.� 'So it's come to that, has it?� Mystical experience and asceticism.� The fornicator's hatred of life in a new form.'
������ 'But seriously ...' the other began.
������ 'No, seriously, have you read Anatole France's Tha�s?'
������ Spandrell shook his head.
������ 'Read it,' said Rampion.� 'Read it.� It's elementary, of course.� A boy's book.� But one mustn't grow up without having read all the boys' books.� Read it and then come and talk to me again about asceticism and mystical experiences.'
������ 'I'll read it,' said Spandrell.� 'Meanwhile, all I wanted to say is that there are certain states of consciousness known to ascetics that are unknown to people who aren't ascetics.'
������ 'No doubt.� And if you treat your body in the way nature meant you to, as an equal, you attain to states of consciousness unknown to the vivisecting ascetics.'
������ 'But the states of the vivisectors are better than the states of the indulgers.'
������ 'In other words, lunatics are better than sane men.� Which I deny.� The sane, harmonious, Greek man gets as much as he can of both sets of states.� He's not such a fool as to want to kill part of himself.� He strikes a balance.� It isn't easy of course; it's even damnably difficult.� The forces to be reconciled are intrinsically hostile.� The conscious soul resents the activities of the unconscious, physical, instinctive part of the total being.� The life of the one is the other's death and vice versa.� But the sane man at least tries to strike a balance.� The Christians, who were sane, told people that they'd got to throw half of themselves in the wastepaper basket.� And now the scientists and business men come and tell us that we must throw away half of what the Christians left us.� But I don't want to be three-quarters dead.� I prefer to be alive, entirely alive.� It's time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.'
������ 'But from your point of view,' said Spandrell, 'I should have thought this epoch needed no reforming.� It's the golden age of guzzling, sport and promiscuous love-making.'
������ 'But if you know what a puritan Mark really was!' Mary Rampion laughed.� 'What a regular old puritan!'
������ 'Not a puritan,' said her husband.� 'Merely sane.� You're like everyone else,' he went on, addressing himself to Spandrell.� 'You seem to imagine that the cold, modern, civilized lasciviousness is the same as the healthy - what shall I call it? - phallism (that gives the religious quality of the old way of life; you've read the Acharnians?) phallism, then, of the ancients.'
������ Spandrell groaned and shook his head.� 'Spare us the Swedish exercisers.'
������ 'But it isn't the same,' the other went on.� 'It's just Christianity turned inside out.� The ascetic contempt for the body expressed in a different way.� Contempt and hatred.� That was what I was saying just now.� You hate yourselves, you hate life.� Your only alternatives are promiscuity or asceticism.� Two forms of death.� Why, the Christians themselves understood phallism a great deal better than this godless generation.� What's that phrase in the marriage service?� "With my body I thee worship."� Worshipping with the body - that's the genuine phallism.� And if you imagine it has anything to do with the umimpassioned civilized promiscuity of our advanced young people, you're very much mistaken indeed.'
������ 'Oh, I'm quite ready to admit the deathliness of our civilized entertainments,' Spandrell answered.� 'There's a certain smell,' he went on speaking in snatches between sucks at the half-smoked cigar he was trying to relight, 'of cheap scent ... and stale unwashedness ... I often think ... the atmosphere of hell ... must be composed of it.'� He threw the match away.� 'But the other alternative - there's surely no death about that.� No death in Jesus or St Francis, for example.'
������ 'In spots,' said Rampion.� 'They were dead in spots.� Very much alive in others, I quite agree.� But they simply left half of existence out of account.� 'No, no, they won't do.� It's time people stopped talking about them.� I'm tired of Jesus and Francis, terribly tired of them.'
������ 'Well, then, the poets,' said Spandrell.� 'You can't say that Shelley's a corpse.'
������ 'Shelley?' exclaimed Rampion.� 'Don't talk to me of Shelley.'� He shook his head emphatically.� 'No, no.� There's something very dreadful about Shelley.� Not human, not a man.� A mixture between a fairy and a white slug.'
������ 'Come, come,' Spandrell protested.
������ 'Oh, exquisite and all that.� But what a bloodless kind of slime inside!� No blood, no real bones and bowels.� Only pulp and a white juice.� And oh, that dreadful lie in the soul!� The way he was always pretending for the benefit of himself and everybody else that the world wasn't really the world, but either heaven or hell.� And that going to bed with women wasn't really going to bed with them, but just two angels holding hands.� Ugh!� Think of his treatment of women - shocking, really shocking.� The women loved it of course - for a little.� It made them feel so spiritual - that is, until it made them feel like committing suicide.� So spiritual.� And all the time he was just a young schoolboy with a sensual itch like anybody's elses, but persuading himself and other people that he was Dante and Beatrice rolled into one, only much more so.� Dreadful, dreadful!� The only excuse is that, I suppose, he couldn't help it.� He wasn't born a man; he was only a kind of fairy slug with the sexual appetites of a schoolboy.� And then, think of that awful incapacity to call a spade a spade.� He always had to pretend it was an angel's harp or a platonic imagination.� Do you remember the Ode to the Skylark? "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!� Bird thou never wert!"'� Rampion recited with a ludicrous parody of an elocutionist's 'expression'.� 'Just pretending, just lying to himself, as usual.� The lark couldn't be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars.� Oh no! That wasn't nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse.� It had to be a disembodied spirit.� Bloodless, boneless.� A kind of ethereal flying slug.� It was only to be expected.� Shelley was a kind of flying slug himself; and, after all, nobody can really write about slugs, even though your subject is supposed to be a skylark.� But I wish to God,' Rampion added, with a sudden burst of comically extravagant fury, 'I wish to God the bird had had as much sense as those sparrows in the book of Tobit and dropped a good large mess in his eye.� It would have served him damned well right for saying it wasn't a bird.� Blithe spirit, indeed!� Blithe spirit!'
CHAPTER XI
In Lucy's neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public.� The more the merrier was her principle; or if 'merrier' were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously distracting.� Within five minutes of her arrival, the corner in which Spandrell and Rampion had been sitting all evening in the privacy of quiet conversation was invaded and in a twinkling overrun by a loud and alcoholic party from the inner room.� Cuthbert Arkwright was the noisiest and the most drunken - on principle and for the love of art as well as for that of alcohol.� He had an idea that by bawling and behaving offensively, he was defending art against the Philistines.� Tipsy, he felt himself arrayed on the side of the angels, of Baudelaire, of Edgar Allan Poe, of De Quincey, against the dull unspiritual mob.� And if he boasted of his fornications, it was because respectable people had thought Blake a madman, because Bowdler had edited Shakespeare, and the author of Madame Bovary had been prosecuted, because when one asked for the Earl of Rochester's Sodom at the Bodleian, the librarians would give it unless one had a certificate that one was engaged on bona fide literary research.� He made his living, and in the process convinced himself that he was serving the arts, by printing limited and expensive editions of the more scabrous specimens of the native and foreign literatures.� Blond, beer-red, with green and bulging eyes, his large face shining, he approached vociferating greetings.� Willie Weaver jauntily followed, a little man perpetually smiling, spectacles astride his long nose, bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage.� Behind him, his twin in height and also spectacled, but grey, dim, shrunken and silent, came Peter Slipe.
������ 'They look like the advertisement of a patent medicine,' said Spandrell as they approached.� 'Slipe's the patient before, Weaver's the same after one bottle, and Cuthbert Arkwright illustrates the appalling results of taking the complete cure.'
������ Lucy was still laughing at the joke when Cuthbert took her hand.� 'Lucy!' he shouted.� 'My angel!� But why in heaven's name do you always writer in pencil?� I simply cannot read what you write.� It's a mere chance that I'm here tonight.'
������ So she'd written to tell him to meet her here, thought Walter.� That vulgar, stupid lout.
������ Willie Weaver was shaking hands with Mary Rampion and Mark.� 'I had no idea I was to meet the great,' he said.� 'Not to mention the fair.'� He bowed towards Mary, who broke into loud and masculine laughter.� Willie Weaver was rather pleased than offended.� 'Positively the Mermaid Tavern!' he went on.
������ 'Still busy with the bric-�-brac?' asked Spandrell, leaning across the table to address Peter Slipe, who had taken the seat next to Walter's.� Peter was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.
������ 'But why in pencil, why in pencil?' Cuthbert was roaring.
������ 'I get my fingers so dirty when I use a pen.'
������ 'I'll kiss the ink away,' protested Cuthbert, and bending over the hand he was still holding, he began to kiss the thin fingers.
������ Lucy laughed.� 'I think I'd rather buy a stylo,' she said.
������ Walter looked on in misery.� Was it possible?� A gross and odious clown like that?
������ 'Ungrateful!' said Cuthbert.� 'But I simply must talk to Rampion.'
������ And turning away, he gave Rampion a clap on the shoulder and simultaneously waved his other hand at Mary.
������ 'What an agape!' Willie Weaver simmered on, like a tea kettle.� The spout was now turned towards Lucy, 'What a symposium!� What a -' he hesitated for a moment in search of the right, the truly staggering phrase - 'what Athenian enlargements!� What a more than Platonic orgy!'
������ 'What is an Athenian enlargement?' asked Lucy.
������ Willie sat down and began to explain.� 'Enlargements, I mean, by contrast with our bourgeois and Pecksniffian smuggeries ...'
������ 'Why don't you give me something of yours to print?' Cuthbert was persuasively enquiring.
������ Rampion looked at him with distaste.� 'Do you think I'm ambitious of having my books sold in the rubber shops?'
������ 'They'd be in good company,' said Spandrell.� 'The Works of Aristotle ...'� Cuthbert roared in protest.
������ 'Compare an eminent Victorian with an eminent Periclean,' said Willie Weaver.� He smiled, he was happy and eloquent.
������ On Peter Slipe the burgundy had acted as a depressant, not a stimulant.� The wine had only enhanced his native dimness and melancholy.
������ 'What about Beatrice?' he said to Walter, 'Beatrice Gilway?' he hiccoughed and tried to pretend that he had coughed.� 'I suppose you see her often, now that she works on the Literary World.'
������ Walter saw her three times a week and always found her well.
������ 'Give her my love, when you see her next,' said Slipe.
������ 'The stertorous borborygms of the dyspeptic Carlyle!' declaimed Willie Weaver, and beamed through his spectacles.� The mot, he flattered himself, could hardly have been more exquisitely juste.� He gave a little cough which was his invariable comment on the best of his phrases.� 'I would laugh, I would applaud,' the little cough might be interpreted; 'but modesty forbids.'
������ 'Stertorous what?' asked Lucy.� 'Do remember that I've never been educated.'
������ 'Warbling your native woodnotes wild!' said Willie.� 'May I help myself to some of that noble brandy?� The blushful Hippocrene.'
������ 'She treated me badly, extremely badly.'� Peter Slipe was plaintive.� 'But I don't want her to think that I bear her any grudge.'
������ Willie Weaver smacked his lips over the brandy.� 'Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion's children know,' he misquoted and repeated his little cough of self-satisfaction.
������ 'The trouble with Cuthbert,' Spandrell was saying,' is that he's never quite learnt to distinguish art from pornography.'
������ 'Of course,' continued Peter Slipe, 'she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own house.� But to turn me out at such short notice.'
������ At another time Walter would have been delighted to listen to poor little Slipe's version of that curious story.� But with Lucy on his other hand, he found it difficult to take much interest.
������ 'But I sometimes wonder if the Victorians didn't have more fun than we did,' she was saying.� 'The more prohibitions, the greater the fun.� If you want to see people drinking with real enjoyment, you must go to America.� Victorian England was dry in every department.� For example, there was a nineteenth amendment about love.� They must have made it as enthusiastically as the Americans drink whiskey.� I don't know that I really believe in Athenian enlargements - that is, if we're one of them.'
������ 'You prefer Pecksniff to Alcibiades,' Willie Weaver concluded.
������ Lucy shrugged her shoulders. 'I've had no experience of Pecksniff.'
������ 'I don't know,' Peter Slipe was saying, 'whether you've ever been pecked by a goose.'
������ 'Been what?' asked Walter, recalling his attention.
������ 'Been pecked by a goose?'
������ 'Never, that I can remember.'
������ 'It's a hard, dry sensation.'� Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger.� 'Beatrice is like that.� She pecks; she enjoys pecking.� But she can be very kind at the same time.� She insists on being kind in her way, and she pecks if you don't like it.� Pecking's part of the kindness; so I always found.� I never objected.� But why should she have turned me out of the house as though I were a criminal?� And rooms are so difficult to find now.� I had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks.� The food ...' He shuddered.
������ Walter could not help smiling.
������ 'She must have been in a great hurry to install Burlap in your place.'
������ 'But why in such a hurry as all that?'
������ 'When it's a case of off with the old love and on with the new ...'
������ 'But what has love to do with it?' asked Slipe.� 'In Beatrice's case.'
������ 'A great deal,' Willie Weaver broke in.� 'Everything.� These superannuated virgins - always the most passionate.'
������ 'But she's never had a love affair in her life.'
������ 'Hence the violence,' concluded Willie triumphantly.� 'Beatrice has a nigger sitting on the safety valve.� And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean.� That's most sinister.'
������ 'Perhaps she likes being well dressed,' suggested Lucy.
������ Willie Weaver shook his head.� The hypothesis was too simple.
������ 'That woman's unconscious as a black hole.'� Willie hesitated a moment.� 'Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,' he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.
*���� *���� *���� *
������ Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole.� She was thirty-five, but seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless.� Her skin was clear and fresh.� From shallow and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining.� In a sharp, determined way her face was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the pouting mouth and round defiant chin.� But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking and mischievously inquisitive.
������ She stitched away.� The clock ticked.� The moving instant which, according to Sir Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advance inexorably through the dimension of time.� Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man might suck for ever at an unending piece of macaroni.� Every now and then Beatrice actualized a potential yawn.� In a basket by the fireplace a black she-cat lay on her side purring and suckling four blind and parti-coloured kittens.� The walls of the room were primrose yellow.� On the top shelf of the bookcase the dust was thickening on the textbooks of Assyriology which she had bought when Peter Slips was the tenant of her upper floor.� A volume of Pascal's Thoughts, with pencil annotations by Burlap, lay open on the table.� The clock continued to tick.
������ Suddenly the front door banged.� Beatrice put down her pink silk camisole and sprang to her feet.
������ 'Don't forget that you must drink your hot milk, Denis,' she said, looking out into the hall.� Her voice was clear, sharp and commanding.
������ Burlap hung up his coat and came to the door.� 'You oughtn't to have sat up for me,' he said, with tender reproachfulness, giving her one of his grave and subtle Sodona smiles.
������ 'I had some work I simply had to get finished,' Beatrice lied.
������ 'Well, it was most awfully sweet of you.'� These pretty colloquialisms, with which Burlap liked to pepper his conversation, had for sensitive ears a most curious ring.� 'He talks slang,' Mark Rampion once said, 'as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English - but a foreigner's command.� I don't know if you've ever heard an Indian calling anyone a "jolly good sport",.� Burlap's slang reminds me of that.'
������ For Beatrice, however, that 'awfully sweet' sounded entirely natural and un-alien.� She flushed with a young-girlishly timid pleasure.� But, 'Come in and shut the door,' she rapped out commandingly.� Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny, there was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient.� 'Sit down there,' she ordered; and while she was briskly busy over the milk-jug, the saucepan, the gas-ring, she asked him if he had enjoyed the party.
������ Burlap shook his head.� 'Fascinatio nugacitatis,' he said.� Fascinatio nugacitatis.'� He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from Piccadilly Circus.
������ Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words connoted disapproval.� 'Parties are rather a waste of time, aren't they?' she said.
������ Burlap nodded.� 'A waste of time,' he echoed in his slow ruminant's voice, keeping his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice's left.� 'One's forty, one has lived more than half one's life, the world is marvellous and mysterious.� And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount House.� Why should triviality be so fascinating.� Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one?� Is it some vague fantastic hope that one may meet the messianic person one's always been looking for, or hear the revealing word?'� Burlap wagged his head as he spoke with a curious loose motion, as though the muscles of his neck were going limp.� Beatrice was so familiar with the motion that she saw nothing strange in it any more.� Waiting for the milk to boil, she listened admiringly, she watched him with a serious church-going face.� A man whose excursions into the drawing-rooms of the rich were episodes in a lifelong spiritual quest might justifiably be regarded as the equivalent of Sunday morning church.
������ 'All the same,' Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous, gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, 'the champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.'� It was the demon that had suddenly interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations.� Burlap had allowed him to speak out loud.� Why not?� It amused him to be baffling.� He looked at Beatrice.
������ Beatrice was duly baffled.� 'I'm sure they were,' she said, readjusting her church-going face to make it harmonize with the grin.� She laughed rather nervously and turned away to pour out the milk into a cup.� 'Here's your milk,' she rapped out, taking refuge from her bafflement in officious command.� 'Mind you drink it while it's hot.'
������ There was a long silence.� Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly knew for what.
������ 'You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffet,' said Burlap at last.
������ Beatrice smiled.� 'Luckily there's no big spider.'
������ 'Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.'
������ 'Yes it is,' said Beatrice.� That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she reflected; he was so trustworthy.� Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw you about and kiss you.� Dreadful that was, quite dreadful.� Beatrice had never really got over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie's brother-in-law, whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a hansom.� The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such a panic fear of being touched.� She was over thirty now and had never allowed anyone to touch her.� The soft quivering little girl underneath the business-like shell of her had often fallen in love.� But the terror of being pawed about, of being even touched, had always been stronger than the love.� At the first sign of danger, she had desperately pecked, she had hardened her shell, she had fled.� Arrived in safety, the terrified little girl had drawn a long breath.� Thank Heaven!� But a little sigh of disappointment was always included in the big sigh of relief.� She wished she hadn't been frightened, she wished that the happy relationship that had existed before the pawing could have gone on for ever, indefinitely.� Sometimes she was angry with herself; more often she thought there was something fundamentally wrong with love, something fundamentally dreadful about men.� That was the wonderful thing about Denis Burlap; he was so reassuringly not a pouncer or a pawer.� Beatrice could adore him without a qualm.
������ 'Susan used to sit on poufs, like little Miss Muffett,' Burlap resumed after a pause.� His voice was melancholy.� He had spent the last minutes in ruminating the theme of his dead wife.� It was nearly two years now since Susan had been carried off in the influenza epidemic.� Nearly two years: but the pain, he assured himself, had not diminished, the sense of loss had remained as overwhelming as ever.� Susan, Susan, Susan - he had repeated the name to himself over and over again.� He would never see her any more, even if he lived for a million years.� A million years, a million years.� Gulfs opened all round the words.� 'Or on the floor,' he went on, reconstructing her image as vividly as he could.� 'I think she liked sitting on the floor best.� Like a child.'� A child, a child, he repeated to himself.� So young.
������ Beatrice sat in silence, looking into the empty grate.� To have looked at Burlap, she felt, would have been indiscreet, indecent almost.� Poor fellow!� When she turned towards him at last, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks.� The sight filled her with a sudden passion of maternal pity.� 'Like a child,' he had said.� But he was like a child himself.� Like a poor unhappy child.� Leaning forward she drew her fingers caressingly along the back of his limply hanging hand.
*���� *���� * ����*
������ 'Batrachian grapplings!' Lucy repeated and laughed.� 'That was a stroke of genius, Willie.'
������ 'All my strokes are strokes of genius,' said Willie modestly.� He acted himself; he was Willie Weaver in the celebrated r�le of Willie Weaver.� He exploited artistically that love of eloquence, that passion for the rotund and reverberating phrase with which, more than three centuries too late, he had been born.� In Shakespeare's youth he would have been a literary celebrity.� Among his contemporaries, Willie's euphemisms only raised a laugh.� But he enjoyed applause, even when it was derisive.� Moreover, the laughter was never malicious; for Willie Weaver was so good-natured and obliging that everybody liked him.� It was to a hilariously approving audience that he played his part; and, feeling the approval through the hilarity, he played it for all it was worth.� 'All my strokes are strokes of genius.'� The remark was admirably in character.� And perhaps true?� Willie jested, but with a secret belief.� 'And mark my words,' he added, 'one of these days the batrachians will erupt, they'll break out.'
������ 'But why batrachians?' asked Slipe.� 'Anything less like a batrachian than Beatrice ...'
������ 'And why should they break out?' put in Spandrell.
������ 'Frogs don't peck.'� But Slipe's thin voice was drowned by Mary Rampion's.
������ 'Because things do break out,' she cried.� 'They do.'
������ 'Moral,' Cuthbert concluded: 'don't shut anything up.� I never do.'
������ 'But perhaps the fun consists in breaking out,' Lucy speculated.
������ ;'Perverse and paradoxical prohibitionist!'
������ 'But obviously,' Rampion was saying, 'you get revolutions occurring inside as well as outside.� It's poor against rich in the state.� In the individual, it's the oppressed body and instincts against the intellect.� The intellect's been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel.'
������ 'Hear, hear!' shouted Cuthbert, and banged the table.
������ Rampion frowned.� He felt Cuthbert's approbation as a personal insult.
������ 'I'm a counter-revolutionary,' said Spandrell.� 'Put the spiritual lower classes in their place.'
������ 'Except in your own case, eh?' said Cuthbert grinning.
������ 'Mayn't one theorize?'
������ 'People have been forcibly putting them in their place for centuries,' said Rampion; 'and look at the result.� You, among other things.'� He looked at Spandrell, who threw back his head and noiselessly laughed.� 'Look at the result,' he repeated.� 'Inward personal revolution and consequent outward and social revolution.'
������ 'Come, come,' said Willie Weaver.� 'You talk as though the thermidorian thumbrils were already rumbling.� England still stands very much where it did.'
������ 'But what do you know of England and Englishmen?' Rampion retorted.� 'You've never been out of London or your class.� Go to the North.'
������ 'God forbid!' Willie piously interjected.
������ 'Go to the coal and iron country.� Talk a little with the steel workers.� It isn't revolution for a cause.� It's a revolution as an end in itself.� Smashing for smashing's sake.'
������ 'Rather sympathetic it sounds,' said Lucy.
������ 'It's terrifying.� It simply isn't human.� Their humanity has all been squeezed out of them by civilized living, squeezed out of them by the weight of coal and iron.� It won't be a rebellion of men.� It'll be a revolution of elementals, monsters, pre-human monsters.� And you just shut your eyes and pretend everything's too perfect.'
*���� *���� *���� *
������ 'Think of the disproportion,' Lord Edward was saying, as he smoked his pipe. 'It's positively ...'� His voice failed.� 'Take coal, for example.� Man's using a hundred and ten times as much as he used in 1800.� But the population's only two and a half times what it was.� With other animals ... Surely quite different.� Consumption's proportionate to numbers.'
������ Illidge objected.� 'But if animals can get more than they actually require to subs