THOSE BARREN
LEAVES
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ALDOUS HUXLEY
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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THOSE BARREN LEAVES
YOUNG ARCHIMEDES:
AND OTHER STORIES
ANTIC HAY
ON THE MARGIN
MORTAL COILS
CROME YELLOW
LIMBO
LEDA: AND OTHER POEMS
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THOSE
BARREN LEAVES
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BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
NEW [GHD] YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
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COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THOSE BARREN LEAVES
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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CONTENTS
PART PAGE
I: AN EVENING AT MRS. ALDWINKLE’S 9
II: FRAGMENTS FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FRANCIS CHELIFER 93
III: THE LOVES OF THE PARALLELS 187
IV: THE JOURNEY 289
V: CONCLUSIONS 359
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PART I: AN EVENING AT MRS. ALDWINKLE’S
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THOSE BARREN LEAVES
PART I: An Evening at Mrs. Aldwinkle’s
CHAPTER I
The little town of Vezza stands at the confluence of two torrents that
come down in two deep valleys from the Apuan mountains. Turbulently—for
they still remember their mountain source—the united streams run through
the town; silence in Vezza is the continuous sound of running waters.
Then, gradually, the little river changes its character; the valley
broadens out, soon the hills are left behind and the waters, grown
placid as a Dutch canal, glide slowly through the meadows of the coastal
plain and mingle with the tideless Mediterranean.
Dominating Vezza itself, a bold promontory of hill juts out like a wedge
between the two valleys. Near the top of the hill and set in the midst
of ilex trees and tall cypresses that rise up blackly out of the misty
olives, stands a huge house. A solemn and regular façade, twenty windows
wide, looks down over the terraced cypresses and the olive trees on to
the town. Behind and above this façade one sees irregular masses of
buildings climbing up the slopes beyond. And the whole is dominated by a
tall slender tower that blossoms out at the top, after the manner of
Italian towers, into overhanging machicolations. It is the summer palace
of the Cybo Malaspina, one-time Princes of Massa and Carrara, Dukes of
Vezza, and marquesses, counts and barons of various other villages in
the immediate neighbourhood.
The road is steep that leads up from Vezza to the palace of the Cybo
Malaspina, perched on the hill above the town. The Italian sun can shine
most powerfully, even in September, and olive trees give but little
shade. The young man with the peaked cap and the leather wallet slung
over his shoulder pushed his bicycle slowly and wearily up the hill.
Every now and then he halted, wiped his face and sighed. It was on an
evil day, he was thinking, on a black, black day for the poor postmen of
Vezza that the insane old Englishwoman with the impossible name bought
this palace; and a blacker day still when she had elected to come and
live in it. In the old days the place had been quite empty. A couple of
peasant families had lived in the out-houses; that was all. Not more
than one letter a month between them, and as for telegrams—why there had
never been a telegram for the palace in all the memory of man. But those
happy days were now over and what with letters, what with packets of
newspapers and parcels, what with expresses and telegrams, there was
never a day and scarcely an hour in the day when some one from the
office wasn’t toiling up to this accursed house.
True, the young man went on thinking, one got a good tip for bringing a
telegram or an express. But being a young man of sense, he preferred
leisure, if a choice had to be made, to money. The expense of energy was
not to be compensated for by the three francs he would receive at the
end of the climb. Money brings no satisfaction if one has to work for
it; for if one works for it one has no time to spend it.
The ideal, he reflected, as he replaced his cap and once more started
climbing, the ideal would be to win a big prize in the lottery. A really
immense prize.
He took out of his pocket a little slip of paper which had been given
him only this morning by a beggar in exchange for a couple of soldi. It
was printed with rhymed prophecies of good fortune—and what good
fortune! The beggar had been very generous. He would marry the woman of
his heart, have two children, become one of the most prosperous
merchants of his city, and live till eighty-three. To these oracles he
gave small faith. Only the last verse seemed to him—though he would have
found it difficult to explain why—worthy of serious attention. The last
verse embodied a piece of specific good advice.
Intanto se vuoi vincere
Un bel ternone al Lotto,
Giuoca il sette e il sedici,
Uniti al cinquantotto.
He read through the verse several times until he had got it by heart;
then folded up the paper and put it away again. Seven, sixteen and
fifty-eight—there certainly was something very attractive about those
numbers.
Giuoca il sette e il sedici
Uniti al cinquantotto.
He had a very good mind to do as the oracle commanded. It was a charm, a
spell to bind fate: one couldn’t fail to win with those three numbers.
He thought of what he would do when he had won. He had just decided on
the make of car he would buy—one of the new 14-40 horse-power Lancias
would be more elegant, he thought, than a Fiat and less expensive (for
he retained his good sense and his habits of economy even in the midst
of overflowing wealth) than an Isotta Fraschini or a Nazzaro—when he
found himself at the foot of the steps leading up to the palace door. He
leaned his bicycle against the wall and, sighing profoundly, rang the
bell. This time the butler only gave him two francs instead of three.
Such is life, he thought, as he coasted down through the forest of
silver olive trees towards the valley.
The telegram was addressed to Mrs. Aldwinkle; but in the absence of the
lady of the house, who had driven down with all her other guests to the
Marina di Vezza for a day’s bathing, the butler brought the telegram to
Miss Thriplow.
Miss Thriplow was sitting in a dark little Gothic room in the most
ancient part of the palace, composing the fourteenth chapter of her new
novel on a Corona typewriter. She was wearing a printed cotton
frock—huge blue checks ruled, tartan-fashion, on a white ground—very
high in the waist, very full and long in the skirt; a frock that was at
once old-fashioned and tremendously contemporary, school-girlish and
advanced, demure and more than Chelsea-ishly emancipated. The face that
she turned towards the butler as he came in was very smooth and round
and pale, so smooth and round that one would never have credited her
with all the thirty years of her age. The features were small and
regular, the eyes dark brown; and their arched brows looked as though
they had been painted on to the porcelain mask by an oriental brush. Her
hair was nearly black and she wore it drawn sleekly back from her
forehead and twined in a large knot at the base of her neck. Her
uncovered ears were quite white and very small. It was an inexpressive
face, the face of a doll, but of an exceedingly intelligent doll.
She took the telegram and opened it.
“It’s from Mr. Calamy,” she explained to the butler. “He says he’s
coming by the three-twenty and will walk up. I suppose you had better
have his room got ready for him.”
The butler retired; but instead of going on with her work, Miss Thriplow
leaned back in her chair and pensively lighted a cigarette.
Miss Thriplow came down at four o’clock, after her siesta, dressed, not
in the blue and white frock of the morning, but in her best afternoon
frock—the black silk one, with the white piping round the flounces. Her
pearls, against this dark background, looked particularly brilliant.
There were pearls too in her pale small ears; her hands were heavily
ringed. After all that she had heard of Calamy from her hostess she had
thought it necessary to make these preparations, and she was glad that
his unexpected arrival was to leave her alone with him at their first
introduction. Alone, it would be easier for her to make the right, the
favourable first impression which is always so important.
From what Mrs. Aldwinkle had said about him Miss Thriplow flattered
herself that she knew just the sort of man he was. Rich, handsome and
what an amorist! Mrs. Aldwinkle had dwelt, of course, very lengthily and
admiringly on that last quality. The smartest hostesses pursued him; he
was popular in the best and most brilliant sets. But not a mere social
butterfly, Mrs. Aldwinkle had insisted. On the contrary, intelligent,
fundamentally serious, interested in the arts and so on. Moreover, he
had left London at the height of his success and gone travelling round
the world to improve his mind. Yes, Calamy was thoroughly serious. Miss
Thriplow had taken all this with a grain of salt; she knew Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s weakness for being acquainted with great men and her habit,
when the admittedly Great were lacking, of promoting her common
acquaintances to the rank of greatness. Deducting the usual seventy-five
per cent. rebate from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s encomiums, she pictured to
herself a Calamy who was one of Nature’s Guardsmen, touched, as
Guardsmen sometimes are, with that awed and simple reverence for the
mysteries of art, which makes these aristocratic autodidacts frequent
the drawing-rooms where highbrows are to be found, makes them ask poets
out to expensive meals, makes them buy cubist drawings, makes them even
try, in secret, to write verses and paint themselves. Yes, yes, Miss
Thriplow thought, she perfectly knew the type. That was why she had made
these preparations—put on that masterpiece of a fashionable black dress,
those pearls, those rings; that was why she had donned, at the same
time, the dashing manner of one of those brilliant, equivocal-looking,
high-born young women at whose expense, according to Mrs. Aldwinkle, he
had scored his greatest amorous triumphs. For Miss Thriplow didn’t want
to owe any of her success with this young man—and she liked to be
successful with everybody—to the fact that she was a female novelist of
good repute. She wanted, since he was one of Nature’s Guardsmen with a
fortuitous weakness for artists, to present herself to him as one of
Nature’s Guardswomen with a talent for writing equally fortuitous and
unessential. She wanted to show him that, after all, she was quite up to
all this social business, even though she _had_ been poor once, and a
governess at that (and, knowing her, Miss Thriplow was sure that Mrs.
Aldwinkle couldn’t have failed to tell him that). She would meet him on
level terms, as Guardswoman to Guardsman. Afterwards, when he had liked
her for her Guardish qualities, they could get down to art and he could
begin to admire her as a stylist as well as a brilliant young woman of
his own sort.
Her first sight of him confirmed her in her belief that she had been
right to put on all her jewellery and her dashing manner. For the butler
ushered into the room positively the young man who, on the covers of
illustrated magazines, presses his red lips to those of the young woman
of his choice. No, that was a little unfair. He was not quite so
intolerably handsome and silly as that. He was just one of those awfully
nice, well-brought-up, uneducated young creatures who are such a relief,
sometimes, after too much highbrow society. Brown, blue-eyed, soldierly
and tall. Frightfully upper class and having all the glorious
self-confidence that comes of having been born rich and in a secure and
privileged position; a little insolent, perhaps, in his consciousness of
good looks, in his memory of amorous successes. But lazily insolent; the
roasted quails fell into his mouth; it was unnecessary to make an
effort. His eyelids drooped in a sleepy arrogance. She knew all about
him, at sight; oh, she knew everything.
He stood in front of her, looking down into her face, smiling and with
eyebrows questioningly raised, entirely unembarrassed. Miss Thriplow
stared back at him quite as jauntily. She too could be insolent when she
wanted to.
“You’re Mr. Calamy,” she informed him at last.
He inclined his head.
“My name is Mary Thriplow. Everybody else is out. I shall do my best to
entertain you.”
He bowed again, and took her extended hand. “I’ve heard a great deal
about you from Lilian Aldwinkle,” he said.
That she’d been a governess? Miss Thriplow wondered.
“And from lots of other people,” he went on. “Not to mention your
books.”
“Ah; but don’t let’s talk of those,” she waved them airily away.
“They’re irrelevant, one’s old books—irrelevant because they’re written
by some one who has ceased to exist. Let the dead bury their dead. The
only book that counts is the one one’s writing at the moment. And by the
time that it’s published and other people have begun to read it, that
too has become irrelevant. So that there never is a book of one’s own
that it’s interesting to talk about.” Miss Thriplow spoke languidly,
with a little drawl, smiling as she spoke and looking at Calamy with
half-closed eyes. “Let’s talk of something more interesting,” she
concluded.
“The weather,” he suggested.
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s a subject,” said Calamy, “about which, as a matter of fact,
I can speak at the moment with interest—I might almost say with warmth.”
He pulled out a coloured silk handkerchief and wiped his face. “Such an
inferno as those dusty roads in the plain I never walked through before.
Sometimes, I confess, in this Italian glare I pine for the glooms of
London, the parasol of smoke, the haze that takes the edge off a
building at a hundred yards and hangs mosquito netting half-way down
every vista.”
“I remember meeting a Sicilian poet,” said Miss Thriplow, who had
invented this successor of Theocritus on the spur of the moment, “who
said just the same. Only he preferred Manchester. _Bellissima_
Manchester!” She turned up her eyes and brought her hands together with
a clap. “He was a specimen in that glorious menagerie one meets at Lady
Trunion’s.” That was a good name to drop casually like that. Lady
Trunion’s was one of the salons where Nature’s Guardsmen and Guardswomen
encountered the funnies and the fuzzy-wuzzies—in a word, the artists. By
using the word “menagerie,” Miss Thriplow put herself, with Calamy, on
the Guardsmen’s side of the bars.
But the effect of the talismanic name on Calamy was not what she had
expected. “And does that frightful woman still continue to function?” he
said. “You must remember I’ve been away for a year; I’m not up to date.”
Miss Thriplow hastily readjusted the expression of her face, the tone of
her voice. Smiling with a knowing contempt, she said: “But she’s nothing
to Lady Giblet, is she? For real horrors you must go to her. Why, the
house is positively a _mauvais lieu_.” She moved her jewelled hand from
side to side with the gesture of a connoisseur in horror.
Calamy did not entirely agree. “Vulgarer, perhaps, at the Giblet’s; but
not worse,” he said—and in a tone of voice, with an expression on his
face that showed Miss Thriplow that he meant what he said and didn’t at
the bottom of his soul secretly adore these social delights. “After
having been away, as I have, for a year or so, to come back to
civilisation and find the same old people doing the same idiotic
things—it’s astonishing. One expects everything to be quite different. I
don’t know why; perhaps because one’s rather different oneself. But
everything is exactly the same. The Giblet, the Trunion and even, let’s
be frank, our hostess—though I’m honestly very fond of poor dear Lilian.
There’s not the slightest change. Oh, it’s more than astonishing—it’s
positively terrifying.”
It was at this point in the conversation that Miss Thriplow became aware
that she had made a huge mistake, that she was sailing altogether on the
wrong tack. Another moment and she would have consummated a hideous
error in social judgment, have irreparably made what she called in her
jovial undergraduatish moments a “floater.” Miss Thriplow was very
sensitive about her floaters. Memories of floaters had a way of sticking
deep in her spirit, making wounds that never thoroughly healed.
Cicatrised, the old scars still hurt from time to time. Suddenly, for no
reason, in the middle of the night, or even in the middle of the
jolliest party, she would remember an ancient floater—just like that, _à
propos de bottes_—would remember and be overcome by a feeling of
self-reproach and retrospective shame. And there was no remedy, no
spiritual prophylaxis. One might do one’s best to invent triumphantly
right and tactful alternatives to the floater—imagine oneself, for
example, whispering to sister Fanny the mollifying instead of the
bitter, wounding phrase; might walk in fancy with the airiest dignity
out of Bardolph’s studio into the dirty little street, past the house
with the canary hanging in the window (an exquisite touch the canary),
away, away—when in fact (oh, Lord, what a fool one had been, and how
miserable, afterwards!), in actual fact one had stayed. One could do
one’s best; but one could never really persuade oneself that the floater
hadn’t happened. Imagination might struggle to annihilate the odious
memory; but it never had power to win a decisive victory.
And now, if she wasn’t careful, she’d have another floater rankling and
suppurating in her memory. “How could I have been so stupid?” she
thought, “how could I?” For it was obvious now that the dashing manner,
the fashionable disguise were entirely inappropriate to the occasion.
Calamy, it was clear, didn’t appreciate that sort of thing at all; he
might have once, but he didn’t now. If she went on like this she’d have
him putting her down as merely frivolous, worldly, a snob; and it would
need time and enormous efforts to obliterate the disastrous first
impression.
Surreptitiously Miss Thriplow slipped the opal ring from off the little
finger of her right hand, held it for a moment, clenched out of sight in
her left; then, when Calamy wasn’t looking, pushed it down into the
crevice between the padded seat and the back of her chintz-covered
arm-chair.
“Terrifying!” she echoed. “Yes, that’s exactly the word. Those things
_are_ terrifying. The size of the footmen!” She held up one hand above
her head. “The diameter of the strawberries!” She brought both hands
(still far too glittering, she regretfully noticed, with their freight
of rings) to within a foot of one another in front of her. “The inanity
of the lion hunters! The roaring of the lions!” It was unnecessary to do
anything with her hands now; she dropped them back into her lap and took
the opportunity to rid herself of the scarab and the brilliants. And
like the conjuror who makes patter to divert attention from the workings
of his trick, she leaned forward and began to talk very rapidly and
earnestly. “And seriously,” she went on, putting seriousness into her
voice and smoothing the laughter out of her face, so that it was
wonderfully round, earnest and ingenuous, “what rot the lions do roar! I
suppose it’s awfully innocent of me; but I always imagined that
celebrated people must be more interesting than other people. They’re
not!” She let herself fall back, rather dramatically, into her chair. In
the process, one hand seemed to have got accidentally stuck behind her
back. She disengaged it, but not before the scarab and the brilliants
had been slipped into the cache. There was nothing left now but the
emerald; that could stay. It was very chaste and austere. But she would
never be able to take off her pearls without his noticing. Never—even
though men are so inconceivably unobservant. Rings were easy enough to
get rid of; but a necklace.... And they weren’t even real pearls.
Calamy, meanwhile, was laughing. “I remember making the same discovery
myself,” he said. “It’s rather painful at first. One feels as though one
has been somehow swindled and done in. You remember what Beethoven said:
‘that he seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi
that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect.’ One has a
right to expect celebrated people to live up to their reputations; they
_ought_ to be interesting.”
Miss Thriplow leaned forward again, nodding her assent with a child-like
eagerness. “I know lots of obscure little people,” she said, “who are
much more interesting and much more genuine, one somehow feels, than the
celebrated ones. It’s genuineness that counts, isn’t it?”
Calamy agreed.
“I think it’s difficult to be genuine,” Miss Thriplow went on, “if one’s
a celebrity or a public figure, or anything of that sort.” She became
very confidential indeed. “I get quite frightened when I see my name in
the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask
me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only
thrives in the dark. Like celery.” How little and obscure she was! How
poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s,
those boring lion huntresses ... they had no hope of passing through the
needle’s eye.
“I’m delighted to hear you saying all this,” said Calamy. “If only all
writers felt as you do!”
Miss Thriplow shook her head, modestly declining the implied compliment.
“I’m like Jehovah,” she said; “I just am that I am. That’s all. Why
should I make believe that I’m somebody else? Though I confess,” she
added, with a greatly daring candour, “that I was intimidated by your
reputation into pretending that I was more _mondaine_ than I really am.
I imagined you as being so tremendously worldly and smart. It’s a great
relief to find you’re not.”
“Smart?” repeated Calamy, making a grimace.
“You sounded so dazzlingly social from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s accounts.” And
as she spoke the words she felt herself becoming correspondingly
obscurer and littler.
Calamy laughed. “Perhaps I was that sort of imbecile once,” he said.
“But now—well, I hope all that’s over now.”
“I pictured you,” Miss Thriplow went on, straining, in spite of her
obscurity, to be brilliant, “I pictured you as one of those people in
the _Sketch_—‘walking in the Park with a friend,’ you know; a friend who
would turn out at the least to be a duchess or a distinguished novelist.
Can you wonder that I was nervous?” She dropped back into the depths of
her chair. Poor little thing! But the pearls, though not marine, were
still rather an embarrassment.
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CHAPTER II
Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned, found them on the upper terrace,
looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza
at their feet was already eclipsed by the shadow of the great bluff
which projected, on the further side of the westernmost of the two
valleys, into the plain. But, beyond, the plain was still bright. It
lay, stretched out beneath them like a map of itself—the roads marked in
white, the pinewoods dark green, the streams as threads of silver,
ploughland and meadowland in chequers of emerald and brown, the railway
a dark brown line ruled along it. And beyond its furthest fringes of
pinewoods and sand, darkly, opaquely blue, the sea. Towards this wide
picture, framed between the projecting hills, of which the eastern was
still rosily flushed with the light, the western profoundly dark, a
great flight of steps descended, past a lower terrace, down, between
columnar cypresses, to a grand sculptured gateway half-way down the
hill.
They stood there in silence, leaning their elbows on the balustrade.
Ever since she had jettisoned the Guardswoman they had got on, Miss
Thriplow thought, most awfully well. She could see that he liked her
combination of moral ingenuousness and mental sophistication, of
cleverness and genuineness. Why she had ever thought of pretending she
was anything but simple and natural she couldn’t now imagine. After all,
that was what she really was—or at least what she had determined that
she ought to be.
From the entrance court on the west flank of the palace came the hoot of
a motor horn and the sound of voices.
“There they are,” said Miss Thriplow.
“I rather wish they weren’t,” he said, and sighing he straightened
himself up and turned round, with his back to the view, towards the
house. “It’s like heaving a great stone into a calm pool—all this noise,
I mean.”
Mentally cataloguing herself among the tranquil charms of evening, Miss
Thriplow took the remark to be complimentary to herself. “What smashings
of crystal one has to put up with,” she said. “Every other moment, if
one’s at all sensitive.”
Through the huge echoing saloons of the palace the sound of an
approaching voice could be heard. “Calamy,” it called, “Calamy!”
mounting through the syllables of the name from a low to a much higher
note, not, however, through any intervals known to music, but in a
succession of uncertain and quite unrelated tones. “Calamy!” It was as
vague and tuneless as the call of an articulate wind. There were
hurrying footsteps, a rustling of draperies. In the huge pompous doorway
at the head of the steps leading down from the house to the terrace
appeared the figure of Mrs. Aldwinkle.
“There you are!” she called in a rapture. Calamy walked to meet her.
Mrs. Aldwinkle was one of those large, handsome, old-masterish women who
look as though they had been built up from sections of two different
people—such broad shoulders they have, so Junonian a form; and growing
from between the shoulders such a slender neck, such a small, compact
and childish head. They look their best between twenty-eight and, shall
we say, five and thirty, when the body is in its perfect maturity and
the neck, the little head, the unravaged features seem still to belong
to a young girl. Their beauty is made the more striking, the more
attractive by the curious incongruousness of its components.
“At thirty-three,” Mr. Cardan used to say of her, “Lilian Aldwinkle
appealed to all the instinctive bigamist in one. She was eighteen in the
attics and widow Dido on the floors below. One had the impression of
being with two women at the same time. It was most stimulating.”
He spoke, alas, in the past tense; for Mrs. Aldwinkle was no longer
thirty-three, nor had been these twelve, these fifteen years or more.
The Junonian form—that was still stately and as yet not too massive. And
from behind, it is true, the head still looked like a child’s head set
on those broad shoulders. But the face, which had once been so much the
younger member of the partnership, had outstripped the body in the race
through time and was old and worn beyond its years. The eyes were the
youngest feature. Large, blue and rather prominent, they stared very
glitteringly and intently out of the face. But the setting of them was
pouchy and crow’s footed. There were a couple of horizontal wrinkles
across the broad forehead. Two deep folds ran down from the corner of
the nose, past the mouth, where they were partially interrupted by
another system of folds that moved with the movements of the lips, to
the lower edge of the jaw, forming a sharp line of demarcation between
the sagging cheeks and the strong, prominent chin. The mouth was wide,
with lips of rather vague contour, whose indefiniteness was enhanced by
Mrs. Aldwinkle’s very careless reddening of them. For Mrs. Aldwinkle was
an impressionist; it was the effect at a distance, the grand theatrical
flourish that interested her. She had no patience, even at the
dressing-table, for niggling pre-Raphaelite detail.
She stood there for a moment at the top of the steps, an imposing and
majestic figure. Her long and ample dress of pale green linen hung down
in stiff fluted folds about her. The green veil tied round her wide
straw hat floated airily over her shoulders. She carried a large
reticule over one arm and from her waist there dangled at the end of
little chains a whole treasury of gold and silver objects.
“There you are!” she smiled at the approaching Calamy, smiled what had
once been a smile of piercing sweetness, of alluring enchantment. Its
interest now, alas, was chiefly historical. With a gesture at once
theatrically exaggerated and inexpressive, Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly
stretched out both her hands in welcome and ran down the steps to meet
him. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s movements were as inharmonious and uncertain as
her voice. She moved awkwardly and stiffly. The majesty of her repose
was dissipated.
“Dear Calamy,” she cried, and embraced him. “I must kiss you,” she said.
“It’s such ages since I saw you.” Then turning with a look of suspicion
to Miss Thriplow, “How long has he been here?” she asked.
“Since before tea,” said Miss Thriplow.
“Before tea?” Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed shrilly, as though outraged. “But
why didn’t you let me know in time when you were coming?” she went on,
turning to Calamy. The thought that he had arrived when she was not
there and that he had, moreover, spent all this time talking with Mary
Thriplow annoyed her. Mrs. Aldwinkle was perpetually haunted by the fear
that she was missing something. For a number of years now the universe
had always seemed to be conspiring to keep her away from the places
where the exciting things were happening and the wonderful words being
said. She had been loth enough, this morning, to leave Miss Thriplow
behind at the palace; Mrs. Aldwinkle didn’t want her guests to lead
independent existences out of her sight. But if she had known, if she
had had the slightest suspicion, that Calamy was going to arrive while
she was away, that he would spend hours _en tête à tête_ with Mary
Thriplow—why then she would never have gone down to the sea at all.
She’d have stayed at home, however tempting the prospect of a bathe.
“You seem to have made yourself extremely smart for the occasion,” Mrs.
Aldwinkle went on, looking at Miss Thriplow’s pearls and her black silk
with the white piping round the flounces.
Miss Thriplow looked at the view and pretended not to have heard what
her hostess had said. She had no wish to engage in a conversation on
this particular subject.
“Well now,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle to her new guest, “I must show you the
view and the house and all that.”
“Miss Thriplow’s already very kindly been doing that,” said Calamy.
At this piece of information Mrs. Aldwinkle looked extremely annoyed.
“But she can’t have shown you everything,” she said, “because she
doesn’t know what there is to show. And besides, Mary knows nothing
about the history of the place, or the Cybo Malaspinas, or the artists
who worked on the palace, or ...” she waved her hand with a gesture
indicating that, in fine, Mary Thriplow knew nothing whatever and was
completely incapable of showing any one round the house and its gardens.
“In any case,” said Calamy, doing his best to say the right thing, “I’ve
seen enough already to make me think the place perfectly lovely.”
But Mrs. Aldwinkle was not content with this spontaneous and untutored
admiration. She was sure that he had not really seen the beauty of the
view, that he had not understood it, not known how to analyse it into
its component charms. She began to expound the prospect.
“The cypresses make such a wonderful contrast with the olives,” she
explained, prodding the landscape with the tip of her parasol, as though
she were giving a lantern lecture with coloured slides.
_She_ understood it all, of course; _she_ was entirely qualified to
appreciate it in every detail. For the view was now her property. It was
therefore the finest in the world; but at the same time, she alone had
the right to let you know the fact.
We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to
us. Provincial picture galleries are always stuffed with Raphaels and
Giorgiones. The most brilliant metropolis in Christendom, according to
its inhabitants, is Dublin. My gramophone and my Ford car are better
than yours. And how pathetically boring are those poor but cultured
tourists who show us their collection of picture postcards with as much
pride as if they had been the original paintings themselves.
With the palace Mrs. Aldwinkle had purchased vast domains unmentioned
in the contract. She had bought, to begin with, the Cybo Malaspina and
their history. This family, whose only claim to fame is to have
produced, a little before its extinction, that Prince of Massa Carrara
to whom the Old Woman in “Candide”—when she was young and a Pope’s
ravishing daughter—was once engaged to be married, had now become for
Mrs. Aldwinkle as splendid as the Gonzaga, the Este, the Medici, or
the Visconti. Even the dull Dukes of Modena, the tenants of the palace
(except during the brief Napoleonic interlude) between the extinction
of the Cybo Malaspina and the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy, even
the Dukes of Modena had so far profited by their connection with the
place that for Mrs. Aldwinkle they were now patrons of letters and
fathers of their people. And Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciochi, who
had, while Princess of Lucca, passed more than one hot summer on these
heights, had come to be credited by the present owner with an
unbounded enthusiasm for the arts and, what in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes
was almost more splendid, an unbounded enthusiasm for love. In Elisa
Buonaparte-Bacciochi Mrs. Aldwinkle had acquired a sister soul, whom
she alone understood.
It was the same with the landscape. It was hers down to the remote
horizon, and nobody but she could really give it its due. And then, how
she appreciated the Italians! Ever since she had bought a house in
Italy, she had become the one foreigner who knew them intimately. The
whole peninsula and everything it contained were her property and her
secret. She had bought its arts, its music, its melodious language, its
literature, its wine and cooking, the beauty of its women and the
virility of its Fascists. She had acquired Italian passion: _cuore_,
_amore_ and _dolore_ were hers. Nor had she forgotten to buy the
climate—the finest in Europe—the fauna—and how proud she was when she
read in her morning paper that a wolf had devoured a Pistoiese sportsman
within fifteen miles of home!—the flora—especially the red anemones and
the wild tulips—the volcanoes—still so wonderfully active—the
earthquakes....
“And now,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she had polished off the view, “now
we must look at the house.”
She turned her back on the view. “This part of the palace,” she said,
continuing her lecture, “dates from about 1630.” She pointed upwards
with her parasol; the coloured slides were now architectural. “A very
fine specimen of early baroque. What remains of the old castle, with the
tower, constitutes the eastern wing of the present house....”
Miss Thriplow, who had heard all this before, listened none the less
with the rapt expression of interest that one sees on the faces of
children at Royal Institution lectures; partly to atone in Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s eyes for the offence of having been at home when Calamy
arrived, and partly to impress Calamy himself with her capacity for
being frankly, totally and uncritically absorbed in the little affairs
of the moment.
“Now I’ll show you the inside of the palace,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle,
mounting the steps that led from the terrace to the house; her treasures
jingled at the end of their chains. Obediently Miss Thriplow and Calamy
followed in her wake.
“Most of the paintings,” proclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, “are by Pasquale da
Montecatini. A great painter—dreadfully underrated.” She shook her head.
Miss Thriplow was somewhat embarrassed when, at this remark, her
companion turned to her and made a hardly perceptible grimace. Whether
to smile confidentially and ironically back, whether to ignore the
grimace and preserve the Royal Institution expression—that was the
question. In the end she decided to ignore the tacit confidence.
On the threshold of the great saloon they were met by a young girl
dressed in a frock of pale pink linen, with a very young round face
(otherwise ingenuous than Miss Thriplow’s) looking out of a rectangular
window cut in a short smooth bell of copper-coloured hair. A pair of
wide-open pale blue eyes looked out from beneath the straight metallic
fringe. Her nose was small and delicately snubby. A short upper lip made
her look at once pathetic and merry, like a child. It was Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s niece, Irene.
She shook hands with Calamy.
“I suppose,” he said, “that I ought to tell you that you’ve grown up
tremendously since I saw you last. But the truth is that I don’t think
you have at all.”
“I can’t help my appearance,” she answered. “But inside....” Inside
Irene was older than the rocks on which she sat. It was not for nothing
that she had passed the five most impressionable years of her life under
her Aunt Lilian’s guardianship.
Mrs. Aldwinkle impatiently cut short the conversation. “I want you to
look at this ceiling,” she said to Calamy. Like hens drinking they
stared up at the rape of Europa. Mrs. Aldwinkle lowered her gaze. “And
the rustic work with the group of marine deities.” In a pair of large
niches, lined with shell-work and sponge-stone, two fishy groups
furiously writhed. “So delightfully _seicento_,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle.
Irene, meanwhile, feeling herself excused by long familiarity from
paying much attention to the marine deities, had noticed that the loose
cretonne covers of the arm-chairs were crumpled. Being naturally
tidy—and since she had lived with Aunt Lilian she had had to be tidy for
two—she tiptoed across the room to smooth them out. Bending down to the
nearest of the chairs, she took hold of the loose cover near the front
of the seat and gave it a smart pull down, so as to loosen it completely
before she tucked it tidily in again. The stuff came forward like a
suddenly bellying sail and with it there was shot out—from nowhere, as
though Irene had been doing a conjuring trick—a glittering shower of
jewels. They rattled on the floor, they rolled over the tiles. The noise
disturbed Miss Thriplow in her rapt and child-like contemplation of the
sponge-stone niches. She turned round just in time to see a scarab ring
racing towards her, with the limp of an eccentric hoop, across the
tiles. Arrived within a few feet of her it lost speed, it staggered, it
fell on its side. Miss Thriplow picked it up.
“Oh, it’s only my rings,” she said airily, as though it were the most
natural thing in the world for her rings to come jumping out of the
chair when Irene straightened out the cover. “That’s all,” she added
reassuringly to Irene, who was standing, as though petrified by
surprise, looking down at the scattered jewels.
Mrs. Aldwinkle was fortunately absorbed in telling Calamy about Pasquale
da Montecatini.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
Dinner was served in the Saloon of the Ancestors. In Mrs. Aldwinkle’s
enthusiastic imagination what marvellous symposia had been held within
those walls—centuries even before they were built—what intellectual
feasts! Aquinas, here, had confided to an early Malaspina his secret
doubt on the predicability of rollations, had twitted the robber
marquess, over a goblet of wine, with the feebleness of his synderesis.
Dante had insisted on the advantages of having a Platonic mistress whom
one never met and who could, when necessary, be identified with
Theology. Peter of Picardy, meanwhile, on his way to Rome had recited
from his rhymed version of _Physiologus_ the lines on the Hyaena, a
beast which, besides being an hermaphrodite, carries in its eye a stone
which, held by a man in his mouth, permits him to see the future; it
symbolizes moreover avarice and lasciviousness. Learned Boccaccio had
discoursed on the genealogy of the gods. Pico della Mirandola, over the
boar’s head, quoted the kaballa in support of the doctrine of the
Trinity. Michelangelo had expounded his plans for the façade of San
Lorenzo in Florence. Galileo had speculated why it is only up to
thirty-two feet that Nature abhors a vacuum. Marini had astonished with
his conceits. Luca Giordano, for a wager, had painted, between the roast
and the dessert, a full-sized picture of Hannibal crossing the Alps....
And then, what brilliant ladies heightened the lustre of these feasts!
Lovely, perennially young, accomplished as the protagonists of
Castiglione’s _Courtier_, amorous in the extreme—they inspired the men
of genius to yet higher flights, they capped their hardiest sallies with
a word of feminine grace.
It had been Mrs. Aldwinkle’s ambition, ever since she bought the palace,
to revive these ancient glories. She saw herself, unofficially a
princess, surrounded by a court of poets, philosophers and artists.
Beautiful women should swim through the great saloons and the gardens,
glowing with love for the men of genius. And periodically—for the
apartment of the dwarfs, which the Cybo Malaspina, in imitation of the
Gonzaga, had included in their palace, demanded appropriate inhabitants
to furnish it—periodically they should bring forth, painlessly, children
to the men of genius—all curly-headed, fully toothed and two years old
on the day of birth, and all infant prodigies. Rows of little Mozarts.
In a word, the palace of Vezza should re-become what it had never been
except in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s fancy.
What it had been in fact one could only guess by looking at the faces of
the Ancestors who gave the banqueting-hall its name.
From circular niches set high in the walls of the huge square room the
lords of Massa Carrara looked out, bust after bust, across the
intervening centuries. Right round the room they went, beginning on the
left of the fireplace and ending, with the penultimate Cybo Malaspina,
who arranged the room, on the right. And as marquess succeeded marquess
and prince, prince, an expression of ever profounder imbecility made
itself apparent on the faces of the Ancestors. The vulture’s nose, the
formidable jaw of the first robber marquess transformed themselves by
gradual degrees into the vague proboscides of ant-eaters, into
criminally prognathous deformities. The foreheads grew lower with every
generation, the marble eyes stared ever blanklier and the look of
conscious pride became more and more strongly marked on every
countenance. It was the boast of the Cybo Malaspina that they had never
married beneath them and that their heirs had always been legitimate.
One had only to look at the faces of the last three Princes to feel sure
that the boast was amply justified. Were these the Muses’ friends?
“You can imagine the splendour of the scene,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle
rapturously as she entered the Saloon of the Ancestors on Calamy’s arm.
“The innumerable candles, the silks, the jewels. And all the crowd
manœuvring in the most stately manner according to the rules of
etiquette.” The last representative, albeit adoptive, of these gorgeous
beings, Mrs. Aldwinkle lifted her head still higher and with a still
more swelling port sailed across the huge room towards the little table
where, in shrunken splendour, the successors of Cybo Malaspina were to
dine. The train of her coral-coloured velvet dress rustled after her.
“It must have been very fine,” Calamy agreed. “Certainly, from the point
of view of picturesqueness, we’ve lost by the passing of etiquette. One
wonders how much further informality will go. Mr. Gladstone, in his old
age, paid a visit to Oxford and was horrified to observe the new
fashions in undergraduate’s dress. In his young days every young man who
respected himself had at least one pair of trousers in which he never
sat down for fear of making them bag at the knees, while the outfit in
which he normally walked about the streets was never worth less than
seventy or eighty pounds. And yet, in the time of Mr. Gladstone’s visit,
the undergraduates still wore stiff collars and bowler hats. What would
he have said if he could have seen them now? And what shall we say fifty
years hence?”
The company disposed itself round the table. Calamy, as the new arrival,
occupied the place of honour on Mrs. Aldwinkle’s right.
“You’ve broached a very interesting subject,” said Mr. Cardan, who sat
opposite him, on their hostess’s left. “Very interesting,” he repeated,
as he unfolded his napkin. Mr. Cardan was a middle-sized, thickly built
man. The upper hem of his trouser followed an ample geodesic; his
shoulders were very broad, his neck short and powerful. The red face
looked tough and knobbly like the head of a cudgel. It was an enigmatic
and equivocal face, whose normal expression was at once gross and
sensitively refined, serious and sly. The mouth was small and its thin
lips fitted tightly together, as though they were the moving parts of a
very well-made piece of furniture. The line that marked the meeting of
the lips was almost straight, but at one end its horizontal gravity was
deflected a trifle downwards, so that Mr. Cardan seemed to be for ever
in process of suppressing a wry smile that was for ever importunately
troubling his demureness. The hair was smooth, silvery and saintly. The
nose was short and straight, like a lion’s—but a lion’s that had become,
with time and good living, rather bottled. Looking out from the midst of
a web-work of fine wrinkles, the eyes were small, but bright and very
blue. As the result, perhaps, of an illness—or perhaps it was merely
under the weight of five and sixty years—one white eyebrow had settled
down permanently lower than the other. From the right side of his face
Mr. Cardan looked at you mysteriously and confidentially through the gap
in a kind of chronic wink. But from the left the glance was supercilious
and aristocratic, as though the western socket had been stretched by an
invisible monocle a size or so too large for it. An expression of
benevolence mingled with malice shone in his glance while he was
talking; and when he laughed, every polished red facet of his cudgel’s
face twinkled with mirth, as though suddenly illumined from within. Mr.
Cardan was neither a poet nor a philosopher; nor of a remarkably
brilliant family; but Mrs. Aldwinkle, who had known him intimately for
many years, justified his inclusion among her courtiers on the ground
that he was one of the obscure Great: potentially anything he chose to
be, but actually, through indolence, unknown.
Mr. Cardan took a couple of spoonfuls of soup before proceeding. “A very
interesting subject,” he repeated yet again. He had a melodious voice,
ripe, round, fruity and powdered, as it were, with a bloom of
huskiness—the faint hoarseness of those who have drunk well, eaten well
and copiously made love. “Formality, external pomp, etiquette—their
practical disappearance from modern life is really a most extraordinary
thing, when you come to think of it. Formality and pomp were one of the
essential features of ancient government. Tyranny tempered by
transformation scenes—that was the formula of all governments in the
seventeenth century, particularly in Italy. Provided you treated your
people to a procession or some similarly spectacular function once a
month or thereabouts, you could do whatever you pleased. It was the
papal method _par excellence_. But it was imitated by every grand
seigneur, down to the most piddling little count in the peninsula. Look
how all the architecture of the period is conditioned by the need for
display. The architect was there to make backgrounds for the incessant
amateur theatricals of his employers. Huge vistas of communicating
saloons to march down, avenues for processions, vast flights of steps to
do the Grand Monarch descent from the skies. No comfort—since comfort is
only private—but an immense amount of splendour to impress the spectator
from outside. Napoleon was the last ruler to practise it systematically
and scientifically on the grand scale. Those reviews, those triumphal
entries and exits, those coronations and weddings and christenings, all
those carefully prepared stage effects—why, they were half his secret.
And now these pomps are no more. Are our rulers so stupid and so
regardless of the lessons of history that they neglect these aids to
government? Or can it be that tastes have changed, that the public no
longer demands these shows and is no longer impressed by them? I put the
question to our political friends.” Mr. Cardan leaned forward and
looking past Miss Thriplow, who sat on his left, smiled at the young man
who sat beyond her and at the older man occupying the corresponding
place on the opposite side of the table, next to Irene Aldwinkle.
The young man, who looked even younger than he really was—and at best it
was only two or three months since Lord Hovenden had attained his
majority—smiled amiably at Mr. Cardan and shook his head, then turned
hopefully to the person who sat opposite him. “Ask me anover,” he said.
Lord Hovenden still found it difficult to pronounce a th. “What do you
say, Mr. Falx?” An expression of respectful attention appeared on his
boyish, freckled face as he waited for Mr. Falx’s answer. Whatever the
answer might be, it was obvious that Lord Hovenden would regard it as
oracular. He admired, he revered Mr. Falx.
Mr. Falx, indeed, invited admiration and respect. With his white beard,
his long and curly white hair, his large dark liquid eyes, his smooth
broad forehead and aquiline nose, he had the air of a minor prophet. Nor
were appearances deceptive. In another age, in other surroundings, Mr.
Falx would in all probability have been a minor prophet: a denouncer, a
mouthpiece of the Lord, a caller to salvation, a threatener of wrath to
come. Having been born in the middle of the nineteenth century and
having passed the years of his early manhood in the profession which,
between three and seven, every male child desires to embrace—that of the
engine driver—he had become not exactly a prophet, but a Labour leader.
Lord Hovenden, whose claim to figure in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s court was the
fact that she had known him since he was a baby, that he was descended
from Simon de Montfort, and that he was immensely rich, had added a
further merit: he had become an ardent Guild Socialist. An earnest young
schoolmaster had first apprised him of the fact—hitherto but very
imperfectly realised by Lord Hovenden—that there are a great many poor
people whose lives are extremely disagreeable and arduous and who, if
justice were done, would be better off than they are at present. His
generous impulses were stirred. Youthfully, he desired to precipitate an
immediate millennium. Perhaps, too, a certain egotistical ambition to
distinguish himself above his fellows had something to do with his
enthusiasm. Among persons born in privileged positions and in the midst
of wealth, snobbery often takes a form rather different from that which
it commonly assumes. Not always, indeed; for there are plenty of rich
and titled persons who regard wealth and title with the same abject
respect as is shown by those whose acquaintance with the nobility and
the plutocracy is only in fiction and the pages of the weekly papers.
But others, whose ambition it is to climb out of the familiar
surroundings into, at any rate intellectually, higher spheres, become
infected with a passionate snobbery in regard to the artistic or
political world. This snobbery—the snobbery of blood towards brain—had
mingled without his being conscious of it with Lord Hovenden’s purely
humanitarian ardour, and had given it added strength. Lord Hovenden’s
pleasure at being introduced to Mr. Falx had been enormous, and the
thought that he alone, of all his friends and relations, enjoyed the
privilege of Mr. Falx’s acquaintance, that he alone was free of the
exciting political world in which Mr. Falx lived, had made him more than
ever enthusiastic in the cause of justice. There had been occasions,
however—and they had become more frequent of late—when Lord Hovenden had
found that the demands made on him by a strenuous social life left him
very little time for Mr. Falx or Guild Socialism. For one who danced as
long and often as he did it was difficult to pay much attention to
anything else. In lulls between the merrymaking he remembered with shame
that he had not done his duty by his principles. It was to make up for
arrears in enthusiasm that he had cut short his grouse shooting to
accompany Mr. Falx to an International Labour Conference in Rome. The
conference was to be held towards the end of September; but Lord
Hovenden had sacrificed a month’s more shooting than was necessary by
suggesting that, before the conference, Mr. Falx and he should go to
stay for a few weeks with Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Come when you like and bring
whom you like.” Those were the words of Lilian’s invitation. He
telegraphed to Mrs. Aldwinkle to say that Mr. Falx needed a holiday and
that he proposed to bring him; Mrs. Aldwinkle replied that she would be
delighted to have him. There they were.
Mr. Falx paused for a moment before answering Mr. Cardan’s question. He
turned his bright dark eyes round the table as though collecting
everybody’s attention; then spoke in the penetrating, musical voice that
had stirred so many audiences to enthusiasm. “Twentieth-century rulers,”
he said, “respect the educated democracy too much to try to bamboozle it
and keep it falsely contented by mere shows. Democracies demand reason.”
“Oh, come,” protested Mr. Cardan. “What about Mr. Bryan’s agitation
against Evolution?”
“Moreover,” Mr. Falx went on, ignoring the point, “we in the twentieth
century have outgrown that sort of thing.”
“Perhaps we have,” said Mr. Cardan. “Though I can’t imagine how we
should have. Opinions change, of course, but the love of a show isn’t an
opinion. It’s founded on something deeper, something which has no
business to change.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It reminds me,” he went
on after a little pause, “of another, similarly deep-rooted change that
I can never account for: the change in our susceptibility to flattery.
It’s impossible to read any ancient moralist without finding copious
warnings against flatterers. ‘A flattering mouth worketh ruin’—it’s in
the Bible. And the reward of the flatterer is also specified there. ‘He
that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children
shall fail’—though one would have thought that the vicariousness of the
threatened punishment rendered it a little less formidable. But at any
rate, in ancient days the great and the prosperous seem to have been
fairly at the mercy of flatterers. And they laid it on so thick, they
did their job, from all accounts, so extremely coarsely! Can it be that
the educated plutocracy of those days was really taken in by that sort
of thing? It wouldn’t be now. The flattery would have to be a great deal
more subtle nowadays to produce the same effect. Moreover, I never find
in the works of the modern moralists any warnings against flatterers.
There’s been some sort of change; though how it has come about, I really
don’t quite know.”
“Perhaps there has been a moral progress,” suggested Mr. Falx.
Lord Hovenden turned his eyes from Mr. Falx’s face, on which, while he
was speaking, they had been reverently fixed, and smiled at Mr. Cardan
with an air of inquiring triumph that seemed to ask whether he had any
answer to make to that.
“Perhaps,” repeated Mr. Cardan, rather dubiously.
Calamy suggested another reason. “It’s surely due,” he said, “to the
change in the position of the great and the prosperous. In the past they
regarded themselves and were regarded by others as being what they were
by divine right. Consequently, the grossest flattery seemed to them only
their due. But now the right to be a prince or a millionaire seems a
little less divine than it did. Flattery which once seemed only an
expression of proper respect now sounds excessive; and what in the past
was felt to be almost sincere is now regarded as ironical.”
“I think you may be right,” said Mr. Cardan. “One result, at any rate,
of this slump in flattery has been a great alteration in the technique
of the parasite.”
“Has the technique of the parasite ever altered?” asked Mr. Falx. Lord
Hovenden passed on his question to Mr. Cardan in an interrogating smile.
“Hasn’t he always been the same—living on the labours of society without
contributing to the common stock?”
“We are speaking of different sorts of parasites,” Mr. Cardan explained,
twinkling genially at the minor prophet. “Your parasites are the idle
rich; mine are the idle poor who live on the idle rich. Big fleas have
little fleas; I was referring to the tapeworms of tapeworms. A most
interesting class, I assure you; and one that has never really had its
due from the natural historians of humanity. True, there’s Lucian’s
great work on the art of being a parasite, and a very fine work too; but
a little out of date, particularly where flattery is concerned. Better
than Lucian is Diderot. But the _Neveu de Rameau_ deals with only a
single type of parasite, and that not the most successful or the most
worthy of imitation. Mr. Skimpole in _Bleak House_ isn’t bad. But he
lacks subtlety; he’s not a perfect model for the budding tapeworm. The
fact is that no writer, so far as I’m aware, has really gone into the
question of parasites. I feel their remissness,” Mr. Cardan added,
twinkling first at Mrs. Aldwinkle, then round the table at her guests,
“almost as a personal affront. Professing as I do—or perhaps trying to
profess would be a more accurate description—the parasitical mystery, I
regard this conspiracy of silence as most insulting.”
“How absurd you are,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. The complacent references to
his own moral defects and weaknesses were frequent in Mr. Cardan’s
conversation. To disarm criticism by himself forestalling it, to shock
and embarrass those susceptible of embarrassment, to air his own freedom
from the common prejudices by lightly owning to defects which others
would desire to conceal—it was to achieve these ends that Mr. Cardan so
cheerfully gave himself away. “Absurd!” Mrs. Aldwinkle repeated.
Mr. Cardan shook his head. “Not at all absurd,” he said. “I’m only
telling the truth. For alas, it is true that I’ve never really been a
successful parasite. I could have been a pretty effective flatterer; but
unfortunately I happen to live in an age when flattery doesn’t work. I
might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider
and a little more high-spirited. But even if I could have been a
buffoon, I should certainly have thought twice before taking up that
branch of parasitism. It’s dangerous being a court fool, it’s most
precarious. You may please for a time; but in the end you either bore or
offend your patrons. Diderot’s _Neveu de Rameau_ is the greatest
literary specimen of the type; you know what a wretched sort of life he
led. No, your permanently successful parasite, at any rate in modern
times, belongs to an entirely different type—a type, alas, to which by
no possible ingenuity could I make myself conform.”
“I should hope not,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, standing up for Mr. Cardan’s
Better Self.
Mr. Cardan bowed his acknowledgments and continued. “All the really
successful parasites I have come across recently belong to the same
species,” he said. “They’re quiet, they’re gentle, they’re rather
pathetic. They appeal to the protective maternal instincts. They
generally have some charming talent—never appreciated by the gross
world, but recognised by the patron, vastly to his credit of course
(that flattery’s most delicate). They never offend, like the buffoon;
they don’t obtrude themselves, but gaze with dog-like eyes; they can
render themselves, when their presence would be tiresome, practically
non-existent. The protection of them satisfies the love of dominion and
the altruistic parental instinct that prompts us to befriend the weak.
You could write at length about all this,” went on Mr. Cardan, turning
to Miss Thriplow. “You could make a big deep book out of it. I should
have done it myself, if I had been an author; and but for the grace of
God, I might have been. I give you the suggestion.”
In words of one syllable Miss Thriplow thanked him. She had been very
mousey all through dinner. After all the risks she had run this
afternoon, the floaters she had stood on the brink of, she thought it
best to sit quiet and look as simple and genuine as possible. A few
slight alterations in her toilet before dinner had made all the
difference. She had begun by taking off the pearl necklace and even, in
spite of the chastity of its design, the emerald ring. That’s better,
she had said to herself as she looked at the obscure little person in
the simple black frock—without a jewel, and the hands so white and
frail, the face so pale and smooth—who stood opposite her in the
looking-glass. “How frankly and innocently she looks at you with those
big brown eyes!” She could imagine Calamy saying that to Mr. Cardan; but
what Mr. Cardan would answer she couldn’t quite guess; he was such a
cynic. Opening a drawer, she had pulled out a black silk shawl—not the
Venetian one with the long fringes, but the much less romantic
bourgeois, English shawl that had belonged to her mother. She draped it
over her shoulders and with her two hands drew it together across her
bosom. In the pier glass she seemed almost a nun; or better still, she
thought, a little girl in a convent school—one of a hundred
black-uniformed couples, with lace-frilled pantalettes coming down over
their ankles, walking in a long, long crocodile, graded from five foot
eight at the head to four foot nothing at the tail. But if she looped
the thing up, hood fashion, over her head, she’d be still more obscure,
still poorer and honester—she’d be a factory girl, click-clicking along
on her clogs to the cotton mill. But perhaps that would be carrying
things a little too far. After all, she wasn’t a Lancashire lass.
Awfully cultured, but not spoilt; clever, but simple and genuine. That
was what she was. In the end she had come down to dinner with the black
shawl drawn very tightly round her shoulders. Very small and mousey. The
head girl in the convent school had all the accomplishments; but, for
the present, wouldn’t speak unless she were spoken to. Modestly, then,
demurely, she thanked him.
“Meanwhile,” Mr. Cardan continued, “the sad fact remains that I have
never succeeded in persuading anybody to become completely responsible
for me. True, I’ve eaten quintals of other people’s food, drunk
hectolitres of their liquor”—he raised his glass and looking over the
top of it at his hostess, emptied it to her health—“for which I’m
exceedingly grateful. But I’ve never contrived to live permanently at
their expense. Nor have they, for their part, shown the slightest sign
of wanting to take me for ever to themselves. Mine’s not the right sort
of character, alas. I’m not pathetic. I’ve never struck the ladies as
being particularly in need of maternal ministrations. Indeed, if I ever
had any success with them—I trust I may say so without fatuity—it was
due to my strength rather than to my feebleness. At sixty-six,
however....” He shook his head sadly. “And yet one doesn’t, by
compensation, become any the more pathetic.”
Mr. Falx, whose moral ideas were simple and orthodox, shook his head; he
didn’t like this sort of thing. Mr. Cardan, moreover, puzzled him.
“Well,” he pronounced, “all that I can say is this: when we’ve been in
power for a little there won’t be any parasites of Mr. Cardan’s kind for
the simple reason that there won’t be any parasites of any kind. They’ll
all be doing their bit.”
“Luckily,” said Mr. Cardan, helping himself again to the mixed fry, “I
shall be dead by that time. I couldn’t face the world after Mr. Falx’s
friends have dosed it with Keating’s and vermifuge. Ah, all you young
people,” he went on, turning to Miss Thriplow, “what a fearful mistake
you made, being born when you were!”
“I wouldn’t change,” said Miss Thriplow.
“Nor would I,” Calamy agreed.
“Nor I,” Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed, ardently associating herself with the
party of youth. She felt as young as they did. Younger indeed; for
having been young when the world was younger, she had the thoughts and
the feelings of a generation that had grown up placidly in sheltered
surroundings—or perhaps had not grown up at all. The circumstances which
had so violently and unnaturally matured her juniors had left her,
stiffened as she already was by time into a definite mould, unchanged.
Spiritually, they were older than she.
“I don’t see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age,”
said Calamy. “The sense that everything’s perfectly provisional and
temporary—everything, from social institutions to what we’ve hitherto
regarded as the most sacred scientific truths—the feeling that nothing,
from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is
really safe, the intimate conviction that anything may happen, anything
may be discovered—another war, the artificial creation of life, the
proof of continued existence after death—why, it’s all infinitely
exhilarating.”
“And the possibility that everything may be destroyed?” questioned Mr.
Cardan.
“That’s exhilarating too,” Calamy answered, smiling.
Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It may be rather tame of me,” he said, “but
I confess, I prefer a more quiet life. I persist that you made a mistake
in so timing your entry into the world that the period of your youth
coincided with the war and your early maturity with this horribly
insecure and unprosperous peace. How incomparably better I managed my
existence! I made my entry in the late fifties—almost a twin to _The
Origin of Species_.... I was brought up in the simple faith of
nineteenth-century materialism; a faith untroubled by doubts and as yet
unsophisticated by that disquieting scientific modernism which is now
turning the staunchest mathematical physicists into mystics. We were all
wonderfully optimistic then; believed in progress and the ultimate
explicability of everything in terms of physics and chemistry, believed
in Mr. Gladstone and our own moral and intellectual superiority over
every other age. And no wonder. For we were growing richer and richer
every day. The lower classes, whom it was still permissible to call by
that delightful name, were still respectful, and the prospect of
revolution was still exceedingly remote. True, we were at the same time
becoming faintly but uncomfortably aware that these lower classes led a
rather disagreeable life, and that perhaps the economic laws were not
quite so unalterable by human agency as Mr. Buckle had so comfortingly
supposed. And when our dividends came rolling in—I still had dividends
at that time,” said Mr. Cardan parenthetically and sighed—“came rolling
in as regular as the solstices, we did, it is true, feel almost a twinge
of social conscience. But we triumphantly allayed those twinges by
subscribing to Settlements in the slums, or building, with a little of
our redundant cash, a quite superfluous number of white-tiled lavatories
for our workers. Those lavatories were to us what papal indulgences were
to the less enlightened contemporaries of Chaucer. With the bill for
those lavatories in our waistcoat pocket we could draw our next
quarter’s dividends with a conscience perfectly serene. It justified us,
too, even in our little frolics. And what frolics we had! Discreetly, of
course. For in those days we couldn’t do things quite as openly as you
do now. But it was very good fun, all the same. I seem to remember a
quite phenomenal number of bachelor dinner parties at which ravishing
young creatures used to come popping out of giant pies and dance _pas
seuls_ among the crockery on the table.” Mr. Cardan slowly shook his
head and was silent in an ecstasy of recollection.
“It sounds quite idyl‑lic,” said Miss Thriplow, drawlingly. She had a
way of lovingly lingering over any particularly rare or juicy word that
might find its way into her sentences.
“It was,” Mr. Cardan affirmed. “And the more so, I think, because it was
so entirely against the rules of those good old days, and because so
much discretion did have to be used. It may be merely that I’m old and
that my wits have thickened with my arteries; but it does seem to me
that love isn’t quite so exciting now as it used to be in my youth. When
skirts touch the ground, the toe of a protruding shoe is an allurement.
And there were skirts, in those days, draping everything. There was no
frankness, no seen reality; only imagination. We were powder magazines
of repression and the smallest hint was a spark. Nowadays, when young
women go about in kilts and are as bare-backed as wild horses, there’s
no excitement. The cards are all on the table, nothing’s left to fancy.
All’s above-board and consequently boring. Hypocrisy, besides being the
tribute vice pays to virtue, is also one of the artifices by which vice
renders itself more interesting. And between ourselves,” said Mr.
Cardan, taking the whole table into his confidence, “it can’t do without
those artifices. There’s a most interesting passage on this subject in
Balzac’s _Cousine Bette_. You remember the story?”
“Such a wonderful...!” exclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that large and
indistinct enthusiasm evoked in her by every masterpiece of art.
“It’s where Baron Hulot falls under the spell of Madame Marneffe: the
old beau of the empire and the young woman brought up on the Romantic
Revival and early Victorian virtues. Let me see if I can remember it.”
Mr. Cardan thoughtfully frowned, was silent for a moment, then proceeded
in an almost flawless French. “‘Cet homme de l’empire, habitué au genre
empire, devait ignorer absolument les façons de l’amour moderne, les
nouveaux scrupules, les différentes conversations inventées depuis 1830,
et où la “pauvre faible femme” finit par se faire considérer comme la
victime des désirs de son amant, comme une sœur de charité qui panse des
blessures, comme un ange qui se dévoue. Ce nouvel art d’aimer consomme
énormément de paroles évangéliques à l’œuvre du diable. La passion est
un martyre. On aspire à l’idéal, à l’infini de part et d’autre; l’on
veut devenir meilleur par l’amour. Toutes ces belles phrases sont un
prétexte à mettre encore plus d’ardeur dans la pratique, plus de rage
dans les chutes (Mr. Cardan rolled out these words with a particular
sonority) que par le passé. Cette hypocrisie, le caractère de notre
temps a gangrené la galanterie.’ How sharp that is,” said Mr. Cardan,
“how wide and how deep! Only I can’t agree with the sentiment expressed
in the last sentence. For if, as he says, hypocrisy puts more ardour
into the practice of love and more ‘rage in the chutes,’ then it cannot
be said to have gangrened gallantry. It has improved it, revivified it,
made it interesting. Nineteenth-century hypocrisy was a concomitant of
nineteenth-century literary romanticism: an inevitable reaction, like
that against the excessive classicism of the eighteenth century.
Classicism in literature is intolerable because there are too many
restrictive rules; it is intolerable in love because there are too few.
They have this in common, despite their apparent unlikeness, that they
are both matter-of-fact and unemotional. It is only by inventing rules
about it which can be broken, it is only by investing it with an almost
supernatural importance that love can be made interesting. Angels,
philosophers and demons must haunt the alcove; otherwise it is no place
for intelligent men and women. No such personages were to be found there
in classical times; still less in the neoclassic. The whole process was
as straightforward, prosaic, quotidian, and _terre-à-terre_ as it could
be. It must really have become very little more interesting than eating
dinner—not that I disparage that, mind you, particularly nowadays; but
in my youth—”
Mr. Cardan sighed, “I set less stock in those days by good food. Still,
even now, I have to admit, there’s not much excitement, not much poetry
in eating. It is, I suppose, only in countries where powerful taboos
about food prevail that the satisfaction of hunger takes on a romantic
aspect. I can imagine that a strictly-brought-up Jew in the time of
Samuel might sometimes have been seized by almost irresistible
temptations to eat a lobster or some similar animal that divides the
hoof but does not chew the cud. I can imagine him pretending to his wife
that he was going to the synagogue; but in reality he slinks
surreptitiously away down a sinister alley to gorge himself illicitly in
some house of ill fame on pork and lobster mayonnaise. Quite a drama
there. I give you the notion, gratis, as the subject for a story.”
“I’m most grateful,” said Miss Thriplow.
“And then, remember, the next morning, after the most portentous dreams
all the night through, he’ll wake up tremendously strict, a Pharisee of
the Pharisees, and he’ll send a subscription to the society for the
Protection of Public Morals and another to the Anti-Lobster League. And
he’ll write to the papers saying how disgraceful it is that young
novelists should be allowed to publish books containing revolting
descriptions of ham being eaten in mixed company, of orgies in oyster
shops, with other culinary obscenities too horrible to be mentioned.
He’ll do all that, won’t he, Miss Mary?”
“Most certainly. And you forgot to say,” added Miss Thriplow, forgetting
that she was the head girl in the convent school, “that he’ll insist
more strictly than ever on his daughters being brought up in perfect
ignorance of the very existence of sausages.”
“Quite right,” said Mr. Cardan. “All of which was merely meant to show
how exciting even eating might become if religion were brought into it,
if dinner were made a mystery and the imagination thoroughly stirred
every time the gong sounded. Conversely, how tedious love becomes when
it is taken as matter-of-factly as eating dinner. It was essential for
the men and women of 1830, if they didn’t want to die of pure boredom,
to invent the _pauvre faible femme_, the martyr, the angel, the sister
of charity, to talk like the Bible while they were consummating the
devil’s work. The sort of love that their predecessors of the eighteenth
century and the empire had made was too prosaic a business. They turned
to hypocrisy in mere self-preservation. But the present generation,
tired of playing at Madame Marneffe, has reverted to the empire notions
of Baron Hulot.... Emancipation is excellent, no doubt, in its way. But
in the end it defeats its own object. People ask for freedom; but what
they finally get turns out to be boredom. To those for whom love has
become as obvious an affair as eating dinner, for whom there are no
blushful mysteries, no reticences, no fancy-fostering concealments, but
only plain speaking and the facts of nature—how flat and stale the whole
business must become! It needs crinolines to excite the imagination and
dragonish duennas to inflame desire to passion. Too much light
conversation about the Oedipus complex and anal-erotism is taking the
edge off love. In a few years, I don’t mind prophesying, you young
people will be whispering to one another sublime things about angels,
sisters of charity and the infinite. You’ll be sheathed in Jaeger and
pining behind bars. And love, in consequence, will seem incomparably
more romantic, more alluring than it does in these days of
emancipation.” Mr. Cardan spat out the pips of his last grape, pushed
the fruit plate away from him, leaned back in his chair and looked about
him triumphantly.
“How little you understand women,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, shaking her
head. “Doesn’t he, Mary?”
“Some women, at any rate,” Miss Thriplow agreed. “You seem to forget,
Mr. Cardan, that Diana is quite as real a type as Venus.”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “You couldn’t have put it more
succinctly.” Eighteen years ago, she and Mr. Cardan had been lovers.
Elzevir, the pianist, had succeeded him—a short reign—to be followed
by Lord Trunion—or was it Dr. Lecoing?—or both? At the moment Mrs.
Aldwinkle had forgotten these facts. And when she did remember, it
was not quite in the way that other people—Mr. Cardan, for
example—remembered them. It was all wonderfully romantic, now; and
she had been Diana all the time.
“But I entirely agree with you,” said Mr. Cardan. “I unequivocally admit
the existence of Artemis. I could even prove it for you empirically.”
“That’s very good of you,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, trying to be sarcastic.
“The only figure on Olympus whom I have always regarded as being purely
mythical,” Mr. Cardan went on, “as having no foundation in the facts of
life, is Athena. A goddess of wisdom—a _goddess_!” he repeated with
emphasis. “Isn’t that a little too thick?”
Majestically Mrs. Aldwinkle rose from the table. “Let us go out into the
garden,” she said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Aldwinkle had even bought the stars.
“How bright they are!” she exclaimed, as she stepped out at the head of
her little troop of guests on to the terrace. “And how they twinkle! How
they palpitate! As though they were alive. They’re never like this in
England, are they, Calamy?”
Calamy agreed. Agreeing, he had found, was a labour-saving
device—positively a necessity in this Ideal Home. He always tried to
agree with Mrs. Aldwinkle.
“And how clearly one sees the Great Bear!” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on,
speaking almost perpendicularly upwards into the height of heaven. The
Bear and Orion were the only constellations she could recognise. “Such a
strange and beautiful shape, isn’t it?” It might almost have been
designed by the architect of the Malaspina palace.
“Very strange,” said Calamy.
Mrs. Aldwinkle dropped her eyes from the zenith, turned and smiled at
him, penetratingly, forgetting that in the profound and moonless
darkness her charm would be entirely wasted.
Miss Thriplow’s voice spoke softly, with a kind of childish drawl
through the darkness. “They might be Italian tenors,” she said,
“tremoloing away like that so passionately in the sky. No wonder, with
those stars overhead, no wonder life tends to become a bit operatic in
this country at times.”
Mrs. Aldwinkle was indignant. “How can you blaspheme like that against
the stars?” she said. Then, remembering that she had also bought Italian
music, not to mention the habits and customs of the whole Italian
people, she went on: “Besides, it’s such a cheap joke about the tenors.
After all, this is the only country where _bel canto_ is still....” She
waved her hand. “And you remember how much Wagner admired
what’s-his-name....”
“Bellini,” prompted the little niece as self-effacingly as possible. She
had heard her aunt speak of Wagner’s admiration before.
“Bellini,” repeated Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Besides, life isn’t operatic in
Italy. It’s genuinely passionate.”
Miss Thriplow was, for a moment, rather at a loss for an answer. She had
a faculty for making these little jokes; but at the same time she was so
very much afraid that people might regard her as merely clever and
unfeeling, a hard and glittering young woman. Half a dozen smart
repartees were possible, of course; but then she mustn’t forget that she
was fundamentally so simple, so Wordsworthian, such a violet by a mossy
stone—particularly this evening, in her shawl.
However much we should like to do so, however highly, in private, we
think of our abilities, we generally feel that it is bad form to boast
of our intelligence. But in regard to our qualities of heart we feel no
such shame; we talk freely of our kindness, bordering on weakness, of
our generosity carried almost to the point of folly (tempering our
boasting a little by making out that our qualities are so excessive as
to be defects). Miss Thriplow, however, was one of those rare people so
obviously and admittedly clever that there could be no objection to her
mentioning the fact as often as she liked; people would have called it
only justifiable self-esteem. But Miss Thriplow, perversely, did not
want to be praised or to praise herself for her intelligence. She was
chiefly anxious to make the world appreciative of her heart. When, as on
this occasion, she followed her natural bent towards smartness too far,
or when, carried away by the desire to make herself agreeable in
flashing company, she found herself saying something whose brilliance
was not in harmony with the possession of simple and entirely natural
emotions, she would recollect herself and hastily try to correct the
misapprehension she had created among her hearers. Now, therefore, at
the end of a moment’s lightning meditation, she managed to think of a
remark which admirably combined, she flattered herself, the most genuine
feeling for Nature with an elegantly recondite allusion—this last for
the benefit particularly of Mr. Cardan, who as a scholarly gentleman of
the old school was a great appreciator and admirer of learning.
“Yes, Bellini,” she said rapturously, picking up the reference from the
middle of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s last sentence. “What a wonderful gift of
melody! _Casta diva_—do you remember that?” And in a thin voice she sang
the first long phrase. “What a lovely line the melody traces out! Like
the line of those hills against the sky.” She pointed.
On the further side of the valley to westward of the promontory of hill
on which the palace stood, projected a longer and higher headland. From
the terrace one looked up at its huge impending mass.... It was at this
that Miss Thriplow now pointed. With her forefinger she followed the
scalloped and undulating outline of its silhouette.
“Even Nature, in Italy, is like a work of art,” she added.
Mrs. Aldwinkle was mollified. “That’s very true,” she said; and stepping
out, she began the evening’s promenading along the terrace. The train of
her velvet robe rustled after her over the dusty flagstones. Mrs.
Aldwinkle didn’t mind in the least if it got dirty. It was the general
effect that mattered; stains, dust, clinging twigs and millipedes—those
were mere details. She treated her clothes, in consequence, with a fine
aristocratic carelessness. The little troop followed her.
There was no moon; only stars in a dark blue firmament. Black and flat
against the sky, the Herculeses and the bowed Atlases, the kilted Dianas
and the Venuses who concealed their charms with a two-handed gesture of
alluring modesty, stood, like as many petrified dancers, on the piers of
the balustrade. The stars looked between them. Below, in the blackness
of the plain, burned constellations of yellow lights. Unremittingly, the
croaking of frogs came up, thin, remote, but very clear, from invisible
waters.
“Nights like this,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, halting and addressing herself
with intensity to Calamy, “make one understand the passion of the
South.” She had an alarming habit, when she spoke to any one at all
intimately or seriously, of approaching her face very close to that of
her interlocutor, opening her eyes to their fullest extent and staring
for a moment with the fixed penetrating stare of an oculist examining
his patient.
Like trucks at the tail of a suddenly braked locomotive, Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s guests came joltingly to a stop when she stopped.
Calamy nodded. “Quite,” he said, “quite.” Even in this faint starlight,
he noticed, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes glittered alarmingly as she approached
her face to his.
“In this horrible bourgeois age”—Mrs. Aldwinkle’s vocabulary (like Mr.
Falx’s, though for different reasons) contained no word of bitterer
disparagement than “bourgeois”—“it’s only Southern people who still
understand or even, I believe, feel passion.” Mrs. Aldwinkle believed in
passion, passionately.
From behind the glowing red end of his cigar Mr. Cardan began to speak.
In the darkness his voice sounded more than ever ripe and fruity.
“You’re quite right,” he assured Mrs. Aldwinkle, “quite right. It’s the
climate, of course. The warmth has a double effect on the inhabitants,
direct and indirect. The direct effect needs no explaining; warmth calls
to warmth. It’s obvious. But the indirect is fully as important. In a
hot country one doesn’t care to work too hard. One works enough to keep
oneself alive (and it’s tolerably easy to keep alive under these stars),
and one cultivates long leisures. Now it’s sufficiently obvious that
practically the only thing that anybody who is not a philosopher can do
in his leisure is to make love. No serious-minded, hard-working man has
the time, the spare energy or the inclination to abandon himself to
passion. Passion can only flourish among the well-fed unemployed.
Consequently, except among women and men of the leisured class, passion
in all its luxuriant intricacy hardly exists in the hard-working North.
It is only among those whose desires and whose native idleness are
fostered by the cherishing Southern heat that it has flourished and
continues to flourish, as you rightly point out, my dear Lilian, even in
this burgess age.”
Mr. Cardan had hardly begun to speak before Mrs. Aldwinkle indignantly
moved on again. He outraged all her feelings.
Mr. Cardan talking all the way, they passed the silhouettes of modest
Venus, of Diana and her attendant dog, of Hercules leaning on his club
and Atlas bending under the weight of his globe, of Bacchus lifting to
heaven the stump of a broken arm whose hand had once held the wine cup.
Arrived at the end of the terrace, they turned and walked back again
past the same row of symbols.
“It’s easy to talk like that,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when he had
finished. “But it doesn’t make any difference to the grandeur of
passion, to its purity and beauty and....” She faded out breathlessly.
“Wasn’t it Bossuet,” asked Irene timidly, but with determination, for
she felt that she owed it to Aunt Lilian to intervene; and besides, Aunt
Lilian liked her to take part in the conversation, “wasn’t it Bossuet
who said that there was something of the Infinite in passion?”
“Splendid, Irene,” Mr. Cardan cried encouragingly.
Irene blushed in the concealing darkness. “But I think Bossuet’s quite
right,” she declared. She could become a lioness, in spite of her
blushes, when it was a question of supporting Aunt Lilian. “I think he’s
absolutely right,” she confirmed, after a moment of recollection, out of
her own experience. She herself had felt most infinitely, more than
once—for Irene had run through a surprising number of passions in her
time. “I can’t think,” her Aunt Lilian used to say to her, when Irene
came in evenings to brush her hair before she went to bed, “I can’t
think how it is that you’re not wildly in love with Peter—or Jacques—or
Mario.” (The name might change as Mrs. Aldwinkle and her niece moved in
their seasonal wanderings, backwards and forwards across the map of
Europe; but, after all, what’s in a name?) “If I were your age I should
be quite bowled over by him.” And thinking more seriously now of Peter,
or Jacques, or Mario, Irene would discover that Aunt Lilian was quite
right; the young man was indeed a very remarkable young man. And for the
remainder of their stay at the Continental, the Bristol, the Savoia, she
would be in love—passionately. What she had felt on these occasions was
decidedly infinite. Bossuet, there was no doubt of it, knew what he was
talking about.
“Well, if _you_ think he’s right, Irene,” said Mr. Cardan, “why then,
there’s nothing for me to do but retire from the argument. I bow before
superior authority.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and bowed.
Irene felt herself blushing once more. “Now you’re making fun of me,”
she said.
Mrs. Aldwinkle put her arm protectively round the young girl’s
shoulders. “I won’t let you tease her, Cardan,” she said. “She’s the
only one of you all who has a real feeling for what is noble and fine
and grand.” She drew Irene closer to her, pressed her in a sidelong and
peripatetic embrace. Happily, devotedly, Irene abandoned herself. Aunt
Lilian was wonderful!
“Oh, I know,” said Mr. Cardan apologetically, “that I’m nothing but an
old capripede.”
Meanwhile Lord Hovenden, humming loudly and walking a little apart from
the rest of the company, was making it clear, he hoped, to every one
that he was occupied with his own thoughts and had not heard anything
that had been said for the last five minutes. What had been said
disturbed him none the less. How did Irene know so much about passion,
he wondered? Had there been, could there still be ... other people?
Painfully and persistently the question asked itself. With the idea of
dissociating himself still more completely from all that had been said,
he addressed himself to Mr. Falx.
“Tell me, Mr. Falx,” he said in a pensive voice, as though he had been
thinking about the subject for some time before he spoke, “what do you
think of the Fascist Trades Unions?”
Mr. Falx told him.
Passion, Calamy was thinking, passion.... One could have enough of it,
good Lord! He sighed. If one could say: Never again, and be sure of
meaning what one said, it would be a great comfort. Still, he reflected,
there was something rather perversely attractive about this Thriplow
woman.
Miss Thriplow meanwhile would have liked to say something showing that
she too believed in passion—but in a passion of a rather different brand
from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s; in a natural, spontaneous and almost childish
kind of passion, not the hot-house growth that flourishes in
drawing-rooms. Cardan was right in not thinking very seriously of that.
But he could hardly be expected to know much about the simple and dewy
loves that she had in mind. Nor Mrs. Aldwinkle, for that matter. She
herself understood them perfectly. On second thoughts, however, Miss
Thriplow decided that they were too tenuous and delicate—these gossamer
passions of hers—to be talked of here, in the midst of unsympathetic
listeners.
Casually, as she passed, she plucked a leaf from one of the overhanging
trees. Absent-mindedly she crushed it between her fingers. From the
bruised leaf a fragrance mounted to her nostrils. She lifted her hand
towards her face, she sniffed, once, again. And suddenly she was back in
the barber’s shop at Weltringham, waiting there while her cousin Jim had
his hair cut. Mr. Chigwell, the barber, had just finished with the
revolving brush. The shaft of the machine was still turning, the elastic
driving band went round and round over the wheel, writhing from side to
side as it went round, like a dying snake suspended, dangerously, above
Jim’s cropped head.
“A little brilliantine, Mr. Thriplow? Hair’s rather dry, you know,
rather dry, I’m afraid. Or the usual bay rum?”
“Bay rum,” said Jim in the gruffest, most grown-up voice he could get
out of his chest.
And Mr. Chigwell would pick up a vaporiser and squirt Jim’s hair with
clouds made out of a clear brown liquid. And the air in the shop was
filled with a fragrance which was the fragrance of this leaf, this leaf
from Apollo’s tree, that she held in her hand. It all happened years ago
and Jim was dead. They had loved one another childishly, with that
profound and delicate passion of which she could not speak—not here, not
now.
The others went on talking. Miss Thriplow sniffed at her crushed bay
leaf and thought of her girlhood, of the cousin who had died. Darling,
darling Jim, she said to herself; darling Jim! Again and again. How much
she had loved him, how terribly unhappy she had been when he died. And
she still suffered; still, after all these years. Miss Thriplow sighed.
She was proud of being able to suffer so much; she encouraged her
suffering. This sudden recollection of Jim, when he was a little boy, in
the barber’s shop, this vivid remembrance conjured up by the smell of a
crushed leaf, was a sign of her exquisite sensibility. Mingled with her
grief there was a certain sense of satisfaction. After all, this had
happened quite by itself, of its own accord, and spontaneously. She had
always told people that she was sensitive, had a deep and quivering
heart. This was a proof. Nobody knew how much she suffered, underneath.
How could people guess what lay behind her gaiety? “The more sensitive
one is,” she used to tell herself, “the more timid and spiritually
chaste, the more necessary it is for one to wear a mask.” Her laughter,
her little railleries were the mask that hid from the outside world what
was in her soul; they were her armour against a probing and wounding
curiosity. How could they guess, for example, what Jim had meant to her,
what he still meant—after all these years? How could they imagine that
there was a little holy of holies in her heart where she still held
communion with him? Darling Jim, she said to herself, darling, darling
Jim. The tears came into her eyes. With a finger that still smelt of
crushed bay leaves she brushed them away.
It suddenly occurred to her that this would make a splendid short story.
There would be a young man and a young girl walking like this under the
stars—the huge Italian stars, tremoloing away like tenors (she would
remember to bring that into the description) overhead in the velvet sky.
Their conversation edges nearer and nearer to the theme of love. He’s
rather a timid young man. (His name, Miss Thriplow decided, would be
Belamy.) One of those charming young men who adore at long range, feel
that the girl’s too good for them, daren’t hope that she might stoop
from her divinity, and all that. He’s afraid of saying definitely that
he loves her for fear of being ignominiously rejected. She, of course,
likes him most awfully and her name is Edna. Such a delicate, sensitive
creature; his gentleness and diffidence are the qualities in him that
particularly charm her.
The conversation gets nearer and nearer to love; the stars palpitate
more and more ecstatically. Edna picks a leaf from the fragrant laurel
as she passes. “What must be so wonderful about love,” the young man is
just saying (it’s a set speech and he’s been screwing up his courage to
get it out for the last half hour), “about real love, I mean, is the
complete understanding, the fusion of spirits, the ceasing to be oneself
and the becoming some one else, the....” But sniffing at the crushed
leaf, she suddenly cries out, uncontrollably (impulsiveness is one of
Edna’s charms), “Why, it’s the barber’s shop at Weltringham! Funny
little Mr. Chigwell with the squint! And the rubber band still going
round and round over the wheel, wriggling like a snake.” But the poor
young man, poor Belamy, is most dreadfully upset. If that’s the way
she’s going to respond when he talks about love, he may as well be
silent.
There’s a long pause; then he begins talking about Karl Marx. And of
course she somehow can’t explain—it’s a psychological impossibility—that
the barber’s shop at Weltringham is a symbol of her childhood and that
the smell of the crushed laurel leaf brought back her dead brother—in
the story it would be a brother—to her. She simply can’t explain that
her apparently heartless interruption was prompted by a sudden anguish
of recollection. She longs to, but somehow she can’t bring herself to
begin. It’s too difficult and too elusive to be talked about, and when
one’s heart is so sensitive, how can one uncover it, how can one probe
the wound? And besides he ought somehow to have guessed, he ought to
have loved her enough to understand; she has her pride too. Every second
she delays, the explanation becomes more impossible. In a flat,
miserable voice he goes on talking about Karl Marx. And suddenly,
unrestrainedly, she begins sobbing and laughing at the same time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
The black silhouette that on the terrace had so perfunctorily symbolised
Mr. Cardan transformed itself as he entered the lamp-lit saloon into the
complete and genial man. His red face twinkled in the light; he was
smiling.
“I know Lilian,” he was saying. “She’ll sit out there under the stars,
feeling romantic and getting colder and colder, for hours. There’s
nothing to be done, I assure you. To-morrow she’ll have rheumatism. We
can only resign ourselves and try to bear her sufferings in patience.”
He sat down in an arm-chair in front of the enormous empty hearth.
“That’s better,” he said, sighing. Calamy and Miss Thriplow followed his
example.
“But don’t you think I’d better bring her a shawl?” suggested Miss
Thriplow after a pause.
“She’d only be annoyed,” Mr. Cardan answered. “If Lilian has said that
it’s warm enough to sit out of doors, then it _is_ warm enough. We’ve
already proved ourselves fools by wanting to go indoors; if we brought
her a shawl, we should become something worse than fools: we should be
rude and impertinent, we should be giving her the lie. ‘My dear Lilian,’
we’d be as good as saying, ‘it isn’t warm. And when you say that it is,
you’re talking nonsense. So we have brought you your shawl.’ No, no,
Miss Mary. You must surely see yourself that it wouldn’t do.”
Miss Thriplow nodded. “How diplomatic!” she said. “You’re obviously
right. We’re all children compared to you, Mr. Cardan. Only so high,”
she added irrelevantly—but it was all in the childish part—reaching down
her hand to within a foot or two of the floor. Childishly she smiled at
him.
“Only _so_,” said Mr. Cardan ironically; and lifting his right hand to
the level of his eyes, he measured between his thumb and forefinger a
space of perhaps half an inch. With his winking eye he peeped at her
through the gap. “I’ve seen children,” he went on, “compared to whom
Miss Mary Thriplow would be....” He threw up his hands and let them fall
with a clap on to his thighs, leaving the sentence to conclude itself in
the pregnant silence.
Miss Thriplow resented this denial of her child-like simplicity. Of such
is the Kingdom of Heaven. But circumstances did not permit her to insist
on the fact too categorically in Mr. Cardan’s presence. The history of
their friendship was a little unfortunate. At their first meeting, Mr.
Cardan, summing her up at a glance (wrongly, Miss Thriplow insisted),
had taken her into a kind of cynical and diabolic confidence, treating
her as though she were a wholly “modern” and unprejudiced young woman,
one of those young women who not only _do_ what they like (which is
nothing; for the demurest and the most “old-fashioned” can and do act),
but who also airily and openly talk of their diversions. Inspired by her
desire to please, and carried away by her facility for adapting herself
to her spiritual environment, Miss Thriplow had gaily entered into the
part assigned to her. How brilliant she had been, how charmingly and
wickedly daring! until finally, twinkling benevolently all the time, Mr.
Cardan had led the conversation along such strange and such outrageous
paths that Miss Thriplow began to fear that she had put herself in a
false position. Goodness only knew what mightn’t, with such a man,
happen next. By imperceptible degrees Miss Thriplow transformed herself
from a salamander, sporting gaily among the flames, into a primrose by
the river’s brim. Henceforward, whenever she talked to Mr. Cardan, the
serious young female novelist—so cultured and intelligent, but so
unspoiled—put in an appearance. For his part, with that tact which
distinguished him in all his social negotiations, Mr. Cardan accepted
the female novelist without showing the least astonishment at the
change. At most, he permitted himself from time to time to look at her
through his winking eye and smile significantly. Miss Thriplow on these
occasions pretended not to notice. In the circumstances, it was the best
thing she could do.
“People always seem to imagine,” said Miss Thriplow with a martyr’s
sigh, “that being educated means being sophisticated. And what’s more,
they never seem to be able to give one credit for having a good heart as
well as a good head.”
And she had _such_ a good heart. Any one can be clever, she used to say.
But what matters is being kind and good, and having nice feelings. She
felt more than ever pleased about that bay-leaf incident. That was
having nice feelings.
“They always seem entirely to misunderstand what one writes,” Miss
Thriplow went on. “They like my books because they’re smart and
unexpected and rather paradoxical and cynical and elegantly brutal. They
don’t see how serious it all is. They don’t see the tragedy and the
tenderness underneath. You see,” she explained, “I’m trying to do
something new—a chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and
tragedy and loveliness and wit and fantasy and realism and irony and
sentiment all combined. People seem to find it merely amusing, that’s
all.” She threw out her hands despairingly.
“It’s only to be expected,” said Mr. Cardan comfortingly. “Any one who
has anything to say can’t fail to be misunderstood. The public only
understands the things with which it is perfectly familiar. Something
new makes it lose its orientation. And then think of the
misunderstandings between even intelligent people, people who know one
another personally. Have you ever corresponded with a distant lover?”
Miss Thriplow slightly nodded; she was familiar, professionally, with
every painful experience. “Then you must know how easy it is for your
correspondent to take the expression of one of your passing
moods—forgotten long before the arrival of the letter at its
destination—as your permanent spiritual condition. Haven’t you been
shocked to receive, by the returning post, a letter rejoicing with you
in your gaiety, when in fact, at the moment, you are plunged in gloom;
or astonished, when you come whistling down to breakfast, to find beside
your plate sixteen pages of sympathy and consolation? And have you ever
had the misfortune to be loved by somebody you do not love? Then you
know very well how expressions of affection which must have been written
with tears in the eyes and from the depth of the heart seem to you not
merely silly and irritating, but in the worst possible bad taste.
Positively vulgar, like those deplorable letters that are read in the
divorce courts. And yet these are precisely the expressions that you
habitually use when writing to the person you yourself are in love with.
In the same way, the reader of a book who happens to be out of tune with
the author’s prevailing mood will be bored to death by the things that
were written with the greatest enthusiasm. Or else, like the far-away
correspondent, he may seize on something which for you was not
essential, to make of it the core and kernel of the whole book. And
then, you admitted it yourself, you make it very hard for your readers.
You write sentimental tragedies in terms of satire and they see only the
satire. Isn’t it to be expected?”
“There’s something in that, of course,” said Miss Thriplow. But not
everything, she added to herself.
“And then you must remember,” Mr. Cardan went on, “that most readers
don’t really read. When you reflect that the pages which cost a week of
unremitting and agonising labour to write are casually read through—or,
more likely, skipped through—in a few minutes, you cannot be surprised
if little misunderstandings between author and reader should happen from
time to time. We all read too much nowadays to be able to read properly.
We read with the eyes alone, not with the imagination; we don’t take the
trouble to reconvert the printed word into a living image. And we do
this, I may say, in sheer self-defence. For though we read an enormous
number of words, nine hundred and ninety out of every thousand of them
are not worth reading properly, are not even susceptible of being read
except superficially, with the eye alone. Our perfunctory reading of
nonsense habituates us to be careless and remiss with all our reading,
even of good books. You may take endless pains with your writing, my
dear Miss Mary; but out of every hundred of your readers, how many, do
you suppose, ever take the pains to read what you write—and when I say
read,” Mr. Cardan added, “I mean really _read_—how many, I repeat?”
“Who knows?” said Miss Thriplow. But even if they did read properly, she
was thinking, would they really unearth that Heart? That was the vital
question.
“It’s this mania for keeping up to date,” said Mr. Cardan, “that has
killed the art of reading. Most of the people I know read three or four
daily newspapers, look at half a dozen weeklies between Saturday and
Monday, and a dozen reviews at the end of every month. And the rest of
the time, as the Bible with justifiable vigour would put it, the rest of
the time, they are whoring after new fiction, new plays and verses and
biographies. They’ve no time to do anything but skim along
uncomprehendingly. If you must complicate the matter by writing tragedy
in terms of farce you can only expect confusion. Books have their
destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers,
are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their
authors. _Gulliver’s Travels_, with a minimum of expurgation, has become
a children’s book; a new illustrated edition is produced every
Christmas. That’s what comes of saying profound things about humanity in
terms of a fairy story. The publications of the Purity League figure
invariably under the heading ‘Curious’ in the booksellers’ catalogues.
The theological and, to Milton himself, the fundamental and essential
part of _Paradise Lost_ is now so ludicrous that we ignore it
altogether. When somebody speaks of Milton, what do we call to mind? A
great religious poet? No. Milton means for us a collection of isolated
passages, full of bright light, colour and thunderous harmony, hanging
like musical stars in the lap of nothing. Sometimes the adult
masterpieces of one generation become the reading of schoolboys in the
next. Does any one over sixteen now read the poems of Sir Walter Scott?
or his novels, for that matter? How many books of piety and morality
survive only for their fine writing! and how our interest in the merely
aesthetic qualities of these books would have scandalised their authors!
No, at the end of the account it is the readers who make the book what
it ultimately is. The writer proposes, the readers dispose. It’s
inevitable, Miss Mary. You must reconcile yourself to fate.”
“I suppose I must,” said Miss Thriplow.
Calamy broke silence for the first time since they had entered the room.
“But I don’t know why you complain of being misunderstood,” he said,
smiling. “I should have thought that it was much more disagreeable to be
understood. One can get annoyed with imbeciles for failing to understand
what seems obvious to oneself; one’s vanity may be hurt by their
interpretation of you—they make you out to be as vulgar as themselves.
Or you may feel that you have failed as an artist, in so far as you
haven’t managed to make yourself transparently plain. But what are all
these compared to the horrors of being understood—completely understood?
You’ve given yourself away, you’re known, you’re at the mercy of the
creatures into whose keeping you have committed your soul—why, the
thought’s terrifying. If I were you,” he went on, “I’d congratulate
myself. You have a public which likes your books, but for the wrong
reasons. And meanwhile you’re safe, you’re out of their reach, you
possess yourself intact.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Miss Thriplow. Mr. Cardan understood her,
she reflected, or at least understood part of her—an unreal, superficial
part, it was true; but still, she had to admit, a part. And it certainly
wasn’t agreeable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
To be torn between divided allegiances is the painful fate of almost
every human being. Pull devil, pull baker; pull flesh, pull spirit; pull
love, pull duty; pull reason and pull hallowed prejudice. The conflict,
in its various forms, is the theme of every drama. For though we have
learnt to feel disgust at the spectacle of a bull-fight, an execution or
a gladiatorial show, we still look on with pleasure at the contortions
of those who suffer spiritual anguish. At some distant future date, when
society is organised in a rational manner so that every individual
occupies the position and does the work for which his capacities really
fit him, when education has ceased to instil into the minds of the young
fantastic prejudices instead of truths, when the endocrine glands have
been taught to function in perfect harmony and diseases have been
suppressed, all our literature of conflict and unhappiness will seem
strangely incomprehensible; and our taste for the spectacle of mental
torture will be regarded as an obscene perversion of which decent men
should feel ashamed. Joy will take the place of suffering as the
principal theme of art; in the process, it may be, art will cease to
exist. A happy people, we now say, has no history; and we might add that
happy individuals have no literature. The novelist dismisses in a
paragraph his hero’s twenty years of happiness; over a week of misery
and spiritual debate he will linger through twenty chapters. When there
is no more misery, he will have nothing to write about. Perhaps it will
be all for the best.
The conflict which had raged during the last few months within Irene’s
spirit, though not so serious as some of the inward battles that have
distracted strong men in their search for the salvation of integrity,
was still for her a painful one. Put baldly in its most concrete form,
the question at issue was this: should she paint pictures and write? or
should she make her own underclothing?
But for Aunt Lilian the conflict would never have become serious;
indeed, it would never, in all probability, have begun at all. For if it
had not been for Aunt Lilian, the Natural Woman in Irene would have
remained undisputed mistress of the field, and she would have passed her
days in a placid contentment over the lacy intricacies of her
undergarments. Aunt Lilian, however, was on the side of the Unnatural
Woman; it was she who had practically called the writer and the painter
of pictures into existence, had invented Irene’s higher talents and
ranged them against the homelier.
Mrs. Aldwinkle’s enthusiasm for the arts was such that she wanted every
one to practise one or other of them. It was her own greatest regret
that she herself had no aptitude for any of them. Nature had endowed her
with no power of self-expression; even in ordinary conversation she
found it difficult to give utterance to what she wanted to say. Her
letters were made up of the fragments of sentences; it was as though her
thoughts had been blown to ungrammatical pieces by a bomb and scattered
themselves on the page. A curious clumsiness of hand united with her
native impatience to prevent her from drawing correctly or even doing
plain sewing. And though she listened to music with an expression of
rapture, she had an ear that could not distinguish a major from a minor
third. “I’m one of those unfortunate people,” she used to say, “who have
an artistic temperament without an artist’s powers.” She had to content
herself with cultivating her own temperament and developing other
people’s capacities. She never met a young person of either sex without
encouraging him or her to become a painter, a novelist, a poet or a
musician. It was she who had persuaded Irene that her little dexterity
with camel’s hair brushes was a talent and that she ought on the
strength of her amusing letters to write lyrics. “How can you spend your
time so stupidly and frivolously?” she used to ask, whenever she found
Irene busy at her underlinen. And Irene, who adored her Aunt Lilian with
the dog-like devotion that is only possible when one is eighteen, and
rather young for one’s age at that, put her sewing away and devoted all
her energy to portraying in water-colours and describing in rhyme the
landscape and the flowers of the garden. But the underclothing remained,
none the less, a permanent temptation. She found herself wondering
whether her chain-stitch wasn’t better than her painting, her
button-holing superior to her verse. She asked herself whether
nightdresses weren’t more useful than water-colours. More useful—and
besides she was so awfully particular about what she wore next her skin;
and she adored pretty things. So did Aunt Lilian, who used to laugh at
her when she wore ugly, dowdy ones. At the same time Aunt Lilian didn’t
give her much of an allowance. For thirty shillings Irene could make a
garment that it would have cost her five or six guineas to buy in a
shop....
Underclothing became for Irene the flesh, became illicit love and
rebellious reason; poetry and water-colour painting, invested by her
adoration of Aunt Lilian with a quality of sacredness, became spirit,
duty and religion. The struggle between her inclination and what Aunt
Lilian considered good was prolonged and distressing.
On nights like this, however, the Natural Woman faded completely out.
Under the stars, in the solemn darkness, how could one think of
underclothing? And Aunt Lilian was being so affectionate. Still, it
certainly _was_ rather cool.
“Art’s the great thing,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying earnestly, “the thing
that really makes life worth living and justifies one’s existence.” When
Mr. Cardan was away she let herself go more confidently on her favourite
themes.
And Irene, sitting at her feet, leaning against her knee, couldn’t help
agreeing. Mrs. Aldwinkle stroked the girl’s soft hair, or with combing
fingers disordered its sleek surface. Irene shut her eyes; happily,
drowsily, she listened. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s talk came to her in gusts—here
a phrase, there a phrase.
“Disinterested,” she was saying, “disinterested....” Mrs. Aldwinkle had
a way, when she wanted to insist on an idea, of repeating the same word
several times. “Disinterested....” It saved her the trouble of looking
for phrases which she could never find, of making explanations which
always turned out, at the best, rather incoherent. “Joy in the work for
its own sake.... Flaubert spent days over a single sentence....
Wonderful....”
“Wonderful!” Irene echoed.
A little breeze stirred among the bay trees. Their stiff leaves rattled
dryly together, like scales of metal. Irene shivered a little; it was
downright cold.
“It’s the only really creative....” Mrs. Aldwinkle couldn’t think of the
word “activity” and had to content herself with making a gesture with
her free hand. “Through art man comes nearest to being a god ... a
god....”
The night wind rattled more loudly among the bay leaves. Irene crossed
her arms over her chest, hugging herself to keep warm. Unfortunately,
this boa of flesh and blood was itself sensitive. Her frock was
sleeveless. The warmth of her bare arms drifted off along the wind; the
temperature of the surrounding atmosphere rose by a hundred-billionth of
a degree.
“It’s the highest life,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s the only life.”
Tenderly she rumpled Irene’s hair. And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was
meditating, at this very moment, on tram-cars in the Argentine, among
Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African
waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton,
in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on
the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican
oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea—at this very
moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to
supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy
thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People
worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only,
they—albeit unconscious of the privilege—for art in her.
Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were
playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful
waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more
he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian.
“Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?” Mrs.
Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with
the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was
going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about
political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something
half-way between Shelley and Walt Whitman.
“Me!” said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha!
It was a jarring note.
Mrs. Aldwinkle drew back, pained. “I don’t know why you should think the
idea so impossibly comic,” she said.
“Perhaps he has other work to do,” said Mr. Falx out of the darkness.
“More important work.” And at the sound of that thrilling, deep,
prophetical voice Lord Hovenden felt that, indeed, he had.
“More important?” queried Mrs. Aldwinkle. “But can anything be more
important? When one thinks of Flaubert....” One thought of
Flaubert—working through all a fifty-four hour week at a relative
clause. But Mrs. Aldwinkle was too enthusiastic to be able to say what
followed when one had thought of Flaubert.
“Think of coal-miners for a change,” said Mr. Falx in answer. “That’s
what I suggest.”
“Yes,” Lord Hovenden agreed, gravely nodding. A lot of his money came
from coal. He felt particularly responsible for miners when he had time
to think of them.
“Think,” said Mr. Falx in his deep voice; and he relapsed into a silence
more eloquently prophetical than any speech.
For a long time nobody spoke. The wind came draughtily and in ever
chillier gusts. Irene clasped her arms still tightlier over her breast;
she shivered, she yawned with cold. Mrs. Aldwinkle felt the shaking of
the young body that leaned against her knees. She herself was cold too;
but after what she had said to Cardan and the others it was impossible
for her to go indoors yet awhile. She felt, in consequence, annoyed with
Irene for shivering. “Do stop,” she said crossly. “It’s only a stupid
habit. Like a little dog that shivers even in front of the fire.”
“All ve same,” said Lord Hovenden, coming to Irene’s defence, “it is
getting raver cold.”
“Well, if you find it so,” retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle, with overwhelming
sarcasm, “you’d better go in and ask them to light a fire.”
It was nearly midnight before Mrs. Aldwinkle finally gave the word to go
indoors.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
To say good-night definitely and for the last time was a thing which
Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words
she pronounced sentence of death on yet another day (on yet another, and
the days were so few now, so agonisingly brief), she pronounced it also,
temporarily at least, on herself. For, the formula once finally uttered,
there was nothing for her to do but creep away out of the light and bury
herself in the black unconsciousness of sleep. Six hours, eight hours
would be stolen from her and never given back. And what marvellous
things might not be happening while she was lying dead between the
sheets! Extraordinary happinesses might present themselves and, finding
her asleep and deaf to their calling, pass on. Or some one, perhaps,
would be saying the one supremely important, revealing, apocalyptic
thing that she had been waiting all her life to hear. “There!” she could
imagine somebody winding up, “that’s the secret of the Universe. What a
pity poor Lilian should have gone to bed. She would have loved to hear
it.” Good-night—it was like parting with a shy lover who had not yet
ventured to declare himself. A minute more and he would speak, would
reveal himself the unique soul-mate. Good-night, and he would remain for
ever merely diffident little Mr. Jones. Must she part with this day too,
before it was transfigured?
Good-night. Every evening she put off the saying of it as long as she
possibly could. It was generally half-past one or two before she could
bring herself to leave the drawing-room. And even then the words were
not finally spoken. For on the threshold of her bed-chamber she would
halt, desperately renewing the conversation with whichever of her guests
had happened to light her upstairs. Who knew? Perhaps in these last five
minutes, in the intimacy, in the nocturnal silence, the important thing
really would be said. The five minutes often lengthened themselves out
to forty, and still Mrs. Aldwinkle stood there, desperately putting off
and putting off the moment when she would have to pronounce the sentence
of death.
When there was nobody else to talk to, she had to be content with the
company of Irene, who always, when she herself had undressed, came back
in her dressing-gown to help Mrs. Aldwinkle—since it would have been
unfair to keep a maid up to such late hours—make ready for the night.
Not that little Irene was particularly likely to utter the significant
word or think the one apocalyptic thought. Though of course one never
knew: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.... And in any case,
talking with Irene, who was a dear child and so devoted, was better than
definitely condemning oneself to bed.
To-night, it was one o’clock before Mrs. Aldwinkle made a move towards
the door. Miss Thriplow and Mr. Falx, protesting that they too were
sleepy, accompanied her. And like an attendant shadow, Irene silently
rose when her aunt rose and silently walked after her. Half-way across
the room Mrs. Aldwinkle halted and turned round. Formidable she was, a
tragedy queen in coral-red velvet. Her little white muslin mirage halted
too. Less patient, Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow moved on towards the door.
“You must all come to bed soon, you know,” she said, addressing herself
to the three men who remained at the further end of the room in a tone
at once imperious and cajoling. “I simply won’t allow you, Cardan, to
keep those poor young men out of their beds to all hours of the night.
Poor Calamy has been travelling all day. And Hovenden needs all the
sleep, at his age, that he can get.” Mrs. Aldwinkle took it hardly that
any of her guests should be awake and talking while she was lying dead
in the tomb of sleep. “_Poor_ Calamy!” she pathetically exclaimed, as
though it were a case of cruelty to animals. She felt herself filled,
all at once, with an enormous and maternal solicitude for this young
man.
“Yes, poor Calamy!” Mr. Cardan repeated, twinkling. “Out of pure
sympathy I was suggesting that we should drink a pint or two of red wine
before going to bed. There’s nothing like it for making one sleep.”
Mrs. Aldwinkle turned her bright blue eyes on Calamy, smiled her
sweetest and most piercing smile. “Do come,” she said. “Do.” She
extended her hand in a clumsy and inexpressive gesture. “And you,
Hovenden,” she added, almost despairingly.
Hovenden looked uncomfortably from Mr. Cardan to Calamy, hoping that one
or other of them would answer for him.
“We shan’t be long,” said Calamy. “The time to drink a glass of wine,
that’s all. I’m not a bit tired, you know. And Cardan’s suggestion of
Chianti is very tempting.”
“Ah well,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, “if you prefer a glass of wine....” She
turned away with a sad indignation and rustled off towards the door,
sweeping the tiled floor with the train of her velvet dress. Mr. Falx
and Miss Thriplow, who had been lingering impatiently near the door,
drew back in order that she might make her exit in full majesty. With a
face that looked very gravely out of the little window in her bell of
copper hair, Irene followed. The door closed behind them.
Calamy turned to Mr. Cardan. “If I prefer a glass of wine?” he repeated
on a note of interrogation. “But prefer it to what? She made it sound as
if I had had to make a momentous and eternal choice between her and a
pint of Chianti—and had chosen the Chianti. It passes my understanding.”
“Ah, but then you don’t know Lilian as well as I do,” said Mr. Cardan.
“And now, let’s go and hunt out that flask and some glasses in the
dining-room.”
Half-way up the stairs—they were a grand and solemn flight sloping
gradually upwards under a slanting tunnel of barrel vaulting—Mrs.
Aldwinkle paused. “I always think of them,” she said ecstatically,
“going up, coming down. Such a spectacle!”
“Who?” asked Mr. Falx.
“Those grand old people.”
“Oh, the tyrants.”
Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled pityingly. “And the poets, the scholars, the
philosophers, the painters, the musicians, the beautiful women. You
forget those, Mr. Falx.” She raised her hand, as though summoning their
spirits from the abyss. Psychical eyes might have seen a jewelled prince
with a nose like an ant-eater’s slowly descending between obsequious
human hedges. Behind him a company of buffoons and little hunch-backed
dwarfs, stepping cautiously, sidelong, from stair to stair....
“I forget nothing,” said Mr. Falx. “But I think tyrants are too high a
price to pay.”
Mrs. Aldwinkle sighed and resumed her climbing. “What a queer fellow
Calamy is, don’t you think?” she said, addressing herself to Miss
Thriplow. Mrs. Aldwinkle, who liked discussing other people’s characters
and who prided herself on her perspicacity and her psychological
intuition, found almost everybody “queer,” even, when she thought it
worth while discussing her, little Irene. She liked to think that every
one she knew was tremendously complicated; had strange and improbable
motives for his simplest actions, was moved by huge, dark passions;
cultivated secret vices; in a word, was larger than life and a good deal
more interesting. “What did you think of him, Mary?”
“Very intelligent,” thought Miss Thriplow.
“Oh, of course, of course,” Mrs. Aldwinkle agreed almost impatiently;
that wasn’t anything much to talk about. “But one hears odd stories of
his amorous tastes, you know.” The party halted at the door of Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s room. “Perhaps that was one of the reasons,” she went on
mysteriously, “why he went travelling all that time—right away from
civilisation....” On such a theme a conversation might surely be almost
indefinitely protracted; the moment for uttering the final, fatal
good-night had not yet come.
Downstairs in the great saloon the three men were sitting over their red
wine. Mr. Cardan had already twice refilled his glass. Calamy was within
sight of the bottom of his first tumbler; young Lord Hovenden’s was
still more than half full. He was not a very accomplished drinker and
was afraid of being sick if he swallowed too much of this young and
generous brew.
“Bored, you’re just bored. That’s all it is,” Mr. Cardan was saying. He
looked at Calamy over the top of his glass and took another sip, as
though to his health. “You haven’t met any one of late who took your
fancy; that’s all. Unless, of course, it’s a case of catarrh in the bile
ducts.”
“It’s neither,” said Calamy, smiling.
“Or perhaps it’s the first great climacteric. You don’t happen to be
thirty-five, I suppose? Five times seven—a most formidable age. Though
not quite so serious as sixty-three. That’s the grand climacteric.” Mr.
Cardan shook his head. “Thank the Lord, I got past it without dying, or
joining the Church of Rome, or getting married. Thank the Lord; but
you?”
“I’m thirty-three,” said Calamy.
“A most harmless time of life. Then it’s just boredom. You’ll meet some
little ravishment and all the zest will return.”
Young Lord Hovenden laughed in a very ventriloquial, man-of-the-worldly
fashion.
Calamy shook his head. “But I don’t really want it to return,” he said.
“I don’t want to succumb to any more little ravishments. It’s too
stupid; it’s too childish. I used to think that there was something
rather admirable and enviable about being an _homme à bonnes fortunes_.
Don Juan has an honoured place in literature; it’s thought only natural
that a Casanova should complacently boast of his successes. I accepted
the current view and when I was lucky in love—and I’ve always been only
too deplorably fortunate—I used to think the more highly of myself.”
“We have all thought the same,” said Mr. Cardan. “The weakness is a
pardonable one.”
Lord Hovenden nodded and took a sip of wine to show that he entirely
agreed with the last speaker.
“Pardonable, no doubt,” said Calamy. “But when one comes to think it
over, not very reasonable. For, after all, there’s nothing really to be
very proud of, there’s nothing very much to boast about. Consider first
of all the other heroes who have had the same sort of successes—more
notable, very probably, and more numerous than one’s own. Consider them.
What do you see? Rows of insolent grooms and pugilists; leather-faced
ruffians and disgusting old satyrs; louts with curly hair and no brains,
and cunning little pimps like weasels; soft-palmed young epicenes and
hairy gladiators—a vast army composed of the most odious specimens of
humanity. Is one to be proud of belonging to their numbers?”
“Why not?” asked Mr. Cardan. “One should always thank God for whatever
native talents one possesses. If your talent happens to lie in the
direction of higher mathematics, praise God; and if in the direction of
seduction, praise God just the same. And thanking God, when one comes to
examine the process a little closely, is very much the same as boasting
or being proud. I see no harm in boasting a little of one’s Casanovesque
capacities. You young men are always so damned intolerant. You won’t
allow any one to go to heaven, or hell, or nowhere, whichever the case
may be, by any road except the one you happen to approve of.... You
should take a leaf out of the Indians’ book. The Indians calculate that
there are eighty-four thousand different types of human beings, each
with its own way of getting through life. They probably underestimate.”
Calamy laughed. “I only speak for my type,” he said.
“And Hovenden and I for ours,” said Mr. Cardan. “Don’t we, Hovenden?”
“Oh yes. Yes, of course,” Lord Hovenden answered; and for some reason he
blushed.
“Proceed,” said Mr. Cardan, refilling his glass.
“Well then,” Calamy went on, “belonging to the species I do belong to, I
can’t take much satisfaction in these successes. The more so when I
consider their nature. For either you’re in love with the woman or you
aren’t; either you’re carried away by your inflamed imagination (for,
after all, the person you’re really violently in love with is always
your own invention and the wildest of fancies) or by your senses and
your intellectual curiosity. If you aren’t in love, it’s a mere
experiment in applied physiology, with a few psychological
investigations thrown in to make it a little more interesting. But if
you are, it means that you become enslaved, involved, dependent on
another human being in a way that’s positively disgraceful, and the more
disgraceful the more there is in you to be enslaved and involved.”
“It wasn’t Browning’s opinion,” said Mr. Cardan.
“The woman yonder, there’s no use in life
But just to obtain her.”
“Browning was a fool,” said Calamy.
But Lord Hovenden was silently of opinion that Browning was quite right.
He thought of Irene’s face, looking out of the little window in the
copper bell.
“Browning belonged to another species,” Mr. Cardan corrected.
“A foolish species, I insist,” said Calamy.
“Well, to tell the truth,” Mr. Cardan admitted, closing his winking eye
a little further, “I secretly agree with you about that. I’m not really
as entirely tolerant as I should like to be.”
Calamy was frowning pensively over his own affairs, and without
discussing the greater or less degree of Mr. Cardan’s tolerance he went
on. “The question is, at the end of it all: what’s the way out? what’s
to be done about it? For it’s obvious, as you say, that the little
ravishments will turn up again. And appetite grows with fasting. And
philosophy, which knows very well how to deal with past and future
temptations, always seems to break down before the present, the
immediate ones.”
“Happily,” said Mr. Cardan. “For, when all is said, is there a better
indoor sport? Be frank with me; _is_ there?”
“Possibly not,” said Calamy, while young Lord Hovenden smiled at Mr.
Cardan’s last remark, but unenthusiastically, in a rather painful
indecision between amusement and horror. “But the point is, aren’t there
better occupations for a man of sense than indoor sports, even the best
of indoor sports?”
“No,” said Mr. Cardan, with decision.
“For you, perhaps, there mayn’t be. But it seems to me,” Calamy went on,
“that I’m beginning to have had enough of sports, whether indoor or
out-of-door. I’d like to find some more serious occupation.”
“But that’s easier said than done.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “For
members of our species it’s precious hard to find any occupation that
seems entirely serious. Eh?”
Calamy laughed, rather mournfully. “That’s true,” he said. “But at the
same time the sports begin to seem rather an outrage on one’s human
dignity. Rather immoral, I would say, if the word weren’t so absurd.”
“Not at all absurd, I assure you, when used as you use it.” Mr. Cardan
twinkled more and more genially over the top of his glass. “As long as
you don’t talk about moral laws and all that sort of thing there’s no
absurdity. For, it’s obvious, there are no moral laws. There are social
customs on the one hand, and there are individuals with their individual
feelings and moral reactions on the other. What’s immoral in one man may
not matter in another. Almost nothing, for example, is immoral for me.
Positively, you know, I can do anything and yet remain respectable in my
own eyes, and in the eyes of others not merely wonderfully decent, but
even noble.
“Ah, what avail the loaded dice?
Ah, what the tubs of wine?
What every weakness, every vice?
Tom Cardan, all were thine.
I won’t bore you with the rest of this epitaph which I composed for
myself some little time ago. Suffice to say that I point out in the two
subsequent stanzas that these things availed absolutely nothing and
that, _malgré tout_, I remained the honest, sober, pure and high-minded
man that every one always instinctively recognises me to be.” Mr. Cardan
emptied his glass and reached out once more for the fiasco.
“You’re fortunate,” said Calamy. “It’s not all of us whose personalities
have such a natural odour of sanctity that they can disinfect our septic
actions and render them morally harmless. When I do something stupid or
dirty I can’t help feeling that it is stupid or dirty. My soul lacks
virtues to make it wise or clean. And I can’t dissociate myself from
what I do. I wish I could. One does such a devilish number of stupid
things. Things one doesn’t want to do. If only one could be a hedonist
and only do what was pleasant! But to be a hedonist one must be wholly
rational; there’s no such thing as a genuine hedonist, there never has
been. Instead of doing what one wants to do or what would give one
pleasure, one drifts through existence doing exactly the opposite, most
of the time—doing what one has no desire to do, following insane
promptings that lead one, fully conscious, into every sort of
discomfort, misery, boredom and remorse. Sometimes,” Calamy went on,
sighing, “I positively regret the time I spent in the army during the
war. Then, at any rate, there was no question of doing what one liked;
there was no liberty, no choice. One did what one was told and that was
all. Now I’m free; I have every opportunity for doing exactly what I
like—and I consistently do what I don’t like.”
“But do you know exactly what you do like?” asked Mr. Cardan.
Calamy shrugged his shoulders. “Not exactly,” he said. “I suppose I
should say reading, and satisfying my curiosity about things, and
thinking. But about what, I don’t feel perfectly certain. I don’t like
running after women, I don’t like wasting my time in futile social
intercourse, or in the pursuit of what is technically known as pleasure.
And yet for some reason and quite against my will I find myself passing
the greater part of my time immersed in precisely these occupations.
It’s an obscure kind of insanity.”
Young Lord Hovenden, who knew that he liked dancing and desired Irene
Aldwinkle more than anything in the world, found all this a little
incomprehensible. “I can’t see what vere is to prevent a man from doing
what he wants to do. Except,” he qualified, remembering the teaching of
Mr. Falx, “economic necessity.”
“And himself,” added Mr. Cardan.
“And what’s the most depressing of all,” Calamy went on, without paying
attention to the interruption, “is the feeling that one will go on like
this for ever, in the teeth of every effort to stop. I sometimes wish I
weren’t externally free. For then at any rate I should have something to
curse at, for getting in my way, other than my own self. Yes,
positively, I sometimes wish I were a navvy.”
“You wouldn’t if you had ever been one,” said Lord Hovenden, gravely and
with a knowing air of speaking from personal experience.
Calamy laughed. “You’re perfectly right,” he said, and drained his
glass. “Shouldn’t we think of going to bed?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
To Irene fell the privilege every evening of brushing her aunt’s hair.
For her these midnight moments were the most precious in the day. True,
it was sometimes an agony for her to keep awake and the suppression of
yawns was always painful; three years of incessant practice had not yet
accustomed her to her Aunt Lilian’s late hours. Aunt Lilian used to twit
her sometimes on her childish longing for sleep; at other times she used
to insist, very solicitously, that Irene should rest after lunch and go
to bed at ten. The teasing made Irene feel ashamed of her babyishness;
the solicitude made her protest that she wasn’t a baby, that she was
never tired and could easily do with five or six hours’ sleep a night.
The important thing, she had found, was not to be seen yawning by Aunt
Lilian and always to look fresh and lively. If Aunt Lilian noticed
nothing there was neither teasing nor solicitude.
But in any case, every inconvenience was paid for a thousand times by
the delights of these confidential conversations in front of the
dressing-table mirror. While the young girl brushed and brushed away at
the long tresses of pale golden-brown hair, Mrs. Aldwinkle, her eyes
shut, and with an expression of beatitude on her face—for she took a
cat’s pleasure in the brushing—would talk, spasmodically, in broken
sentences, of the events of the day, of her guests, of the people they
had met; or of her own past, of plans for the future—hers or Irene’s—of
love. On all these subjects Mrs. Aldwinkle spoke intimately,
confidentially, without reserve. Feeling that she was being treated by
her Aunt Lilian as entirely grown-up and almost as an equal, Irene was
proud and grateful. Without deliberately setting out to complete the
subjugation of her niece, Mrs. Aldwinkle had discovered, in those
midnight conversations, the most perfect means for achieving this end.
If she talked like this to Irene, it was merely because she felt the
need of talking intimately to some one, and because there was nobody
else to talk to. Incidentally, however, she had contrived in the process
to make the girl her slave. Made her Aunt Lilian’s confidant, invested,
so to speak, with a title of honour, Irene felt a gratitude which
strengthened her original childish attachment to her aunt.
Meanwhile, she had learned to talk with an airy familiarity of many
things concerning which young girls are supposed to be ignorant, and of
which, indeed, she herself knew, except intellectually and at second
hand, nothing. She had learned to be knowing and worldly wise, in the
void, so to speak, and with no personal knowledge of the world. Gravely,
ingenuously, she would say things that could only be uttered out of the
depths of the profoundest innocence, amplifying and making
embarrassingly explicit in public things that Mrs. Aldwinkle had only
fragmentarily hinted at in the confidential small hours. She regarded
herself as immensely mature.
To-night Mrs. Aldwinkle was in a rather gloomy, complaining mood.
“I’m getting old,” she said, sighing, and opening her eyes for a moment
to look at her image in the glass that confronted her. The image did not
deny the statement. “And yet I always feel so young.”
“That’s what really matters,” Irene declared. “And besides, it’s
nonsense; you’re not old; you don’t look old.” In Irene’s eyes,
moreover, she really didn’t look old.
“People don’t like one any more when one gets old,” Mrs. Aldwinkle
continued. “Friends are terribly faithless. They fall away.” She sighed.
“When I think of all the friends....” She left the sentence unfinished.
All her life long Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a peculiar genius for breaking
with her friends and lovers. Mr. Cardan was almost the sole survivor
from an earlier generation of friends. From all the rest she had parted,
and she had parted with a light heart. It had seemed easy to her, when
she was younger, to make new friends in place of the old. Potential
friends, she thought, were to be found everywhere, every day. But now
she was beginning to doubt whether the supply was, after all, so
inexhaustible as she had once supposed. People of her own age, she
found, were already set fast in the little social worlds they had made
for themselves. And people of the younger generation seemed to find it
hard to believe that she felt, in her heart, just as young as they did.
They mostly treated her with the rather distant politeness which one
accords to a stranger and an elder person.
“I think people are horrid,” said Irene, giving a particularly violent
sweep with the hair-brush to emphasise her indignation.
“You won’t be faithless?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.
Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs.
Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling,
as she did so, that Siren smile that, for Irene, was still as
fascinating as it had ever been.
“If only everybody were like my little Irene!” Mrs. Aldwinkle let her
head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence.
“What are you sighing about in that heart-breaking way?” she suddenly
asked.
Irene’s blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the
copper-coloured fringe. “Oh, nothing,” she said, with an off-handedness
that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake
of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a
sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut.
But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect
the truth. “Nothing, indeed!” she echoed incredulously. “Why, it was the
noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never
heard such a sigh.” She looked at the reflection of Irene’s face in the
mirror. “And you’re blushing like a peony. What is it?”
“But it’s nothing, I tell you,” Irene declared, speaking almost in a
tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so
ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She
immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and
praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject.
But Mrs. Aldwinkle was implacable in her tactlessness. “I never heard
anything that sounded so love-sick,” she said, smiling archly into the
looking-glass. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s humorous sallies had a way of falling
ponderously, like bludgeon strokes, on the objects of her raillery. One
never knew, when she was being sprightly, whether to feel sorrier for
the victim or for Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. For though the victim might
get hard knocks, the spectacle of Mrs. Aldwinkle laboriously exerting
herself to deliver them was sadly ludicrous; one wished, for her sake,
for the sake of the whole human race, that she would desist. But she
never did. Mrs. Aldwinkle always carried all her jokes to the foreseen
end, and generally far further than was foreseeable by any one less
ponderously minded than herself. “It was like a whale sighing!” she went
on with a frightful playfulness. “It must be a grand passion of the
largest size. Who is it? Who is it?” She raised her eyebrows, she smiled
with what seemed to her, as she studied it in the glass, a most wickedly
sly but charming smile—like a smile in a comedy by Congreve, it occurred
to her.
“But, Aunt Lilian,” protested Irene, almost in despair, almost in tears,
“it was nothing, I tell you.” At moments like this she could almost find
it in her to hate Aunt Lilian. “As a matter of fact, I was only....” She
was going to blurt it out courageously; she was just going to tell Aunt
Lilian—at the risk of a teasing or an almost equally unwelcome
solicitude: either were better than this—that she had been merely
yawning. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, still relentlessly pursuing her fun,
interrupted her.
“But I guess who it is,” she said, wagging a forefinger at the glass. “I
guess. I’m not such a blind stupid old auntie as you think. You imagine
I haven’t noticed. Silly child! Did she think I didn’t see that he was
very assiduous and that she rather liked it? Did she think her stupid
old auntie was blind?”
Irene blushed again; the tears came into her eyes. “But who are you
talking about?” she said in a voice that she had to make a great effort
to keep from breaking and trembling out of control.
“What an innocent!” mocked Mrs. Aldwinkle, still very Congreve. And at
this point—earlier than was usual with her on these occasions—she had
mercy and consented to put poor Irene out of her agony. “Why, Hovenden,”
she said. “Who else should it be?”
“Hovenden?” Irene repeated with genuine surprise.
“Injured innocence!” Mrs. Aldwinkle momentarily renewed her trampling
fun. “But it’s sufficiently obvious,” she went on in a more natural
voice. “The poor boy follows you like a dog.”
“Me?” Irene had been too much preoccupied in following her Aunt Lilian
to notice that she in her turn was being followed.
“Now don’t pretend,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s so stupid pretending.
Much better to be frank and straightforward. Admit, now, that you like
him.”
Irene admitted. “Yes, of course I like him. But not ... not in any
special way. I’d really not thought of him like that.”
A shade contemptuously, benevolently amused, Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled. She
forgot her depression, forgot her causes of personal complaint against
the universal order of things. Absorbed in the uniquely interesting
subject, in the sole and proper study of mankind, she was once more
happy. Love—it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly
existed. Mrs. Aldwinkle was almost as much interested in other people’s
love as in her own. She wanted every one to love, constantly and
complicatedly. She liked to bring people together, to foster tender
feelings, to watch the development of passion, to assist—when it
happened; and Mrs. Aldwinkle was always rather disappointed when it did
not—at the tragic catastrophe. And then, when the first love, growing
old, had lingeringly or violently died, there was the new love to think
of, to arrange, to foster, to watch; and then the third, the fourth....
One must always follow the spontaneous motions of the heart; it is the
divine within us that stirs in the heart. And one must worship Eros so
reverently that one can never be content with anything but the most
poignant, most passionate manifestations of his power. To be content
with a love that has turned in the course of time to mere affection,
kindliness and quiet comprehension is almost to blaspheme against the
name of Eros. Your true lover, thought Mrs. Aldwinkle, leaves the old,
paralytic love and turns whole-heartedly to the young passion.
“What a goose you are!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I sometimes wonder,” she
went on, “whether you’re capable of being in love at all, you’re so
uncomprehending, so cold.”
Irene protested with all the energy of which she was capable. One could
not have lived as long as she had in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s company without
regarding the imputation of coldness, of insensitiveness to passion, as
the most damning of all possible impeachments. It was better to be
accused of being a murderess—particularly if it were a case of _crime
passionel_. “I don’t know how you say that,” she said indignantly. “I’m
always in love.” Had there not been Peter, and Jacques, and Mario?
“You may think you have,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle contemptuously, forgetting
that it was she herself who had persuaded Irene that she was in love.
“But it was more imagination than the real thing. Some women are born
like that.” She shook her head. “And they die like that.” One might have
inferred from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s words and the tone of her voice that
Irene was a superannuated spinster of forty, proved conclusively, after
twenty years of accumulated evidence, to be incapable of anything
remotely resembling an amorous passion.
Irene made no answer, but went on brushing her aunt’s hair. Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s aspersions were particularly wounding to her. She wished
that she could do something startling to prove their baselessness.
Something spectacular.
“And I’ve always thought Hovenden an extremely nice boy,” Mrs. Aldwinkle
continued, with the air of pursuing an argument. She talked on. Irene
listened and went on brushing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
In the silence and solitude of her room, Miss Thriplow sat up for a long
time, pen in hand, in front of an open note-book. “Darling Jim,” she
wrote, “darling Jim. To-day you came back to me so suddenly and
unexpectedly that I could almost have cried aloud in front of all those
people. Was it an accident that I picked that stiff leaf from Apollo’s
tree and crushed it to fragrance between my fingers? Or were you there?
was it you who secretly whispered to the unconscious part of me, telling
me to pick that leaf? I wonder; oh, I wonder and wonder. Sometimes I
believe that there are no accidents, that we do nothing by chance.
To-night I felt sure of it.
“But I wonder what made you want to remind me of Mr. Chigwell’s little
shop at Weltringham. Why did you want to make me see you sitting in the
barber’s chair, so stiff and grown-up, with the wheel of the mechanical
brush still turning overhead and Mr. Chigwell saying, ‘Hair’s very dry,
Mr. Thriplow’? And the rubber driving band used always to remind me....”
Miss Thriplow recorded the simile of the wounded snake which had first
occurred to her this evening. There was no particular reason why she
should have antedated the conceit and attributed its invention to her
childhood. It was just a question of literary tact; it seemed more
interesting if one said that it had been made up when one was a child;
that was all. “I ask myself whether there is any particular significance
in this reminder. Or perhaps it’s just that you find me neglectful and
unremembering—poor darling, darling Jim—and take whatever opportunity
offers of reminding me that you existed, that you still exist. Forgive
me, Jim. Everybody forgets. We should all be kind and good and unselfish
if we always remembered—remembered that other people are just as much
alive and individual and complicated as we are, remembered that
everybody can be just as easily hurt, that everybody needs love just as
much, that the only visible reason why we exist in the world is to love
and be loved. But that’s no excuse for me. It’s no excuse for any one to
say that other people are just as bad. I ought to remember more. I
oughtn’t to let my mind be choked with weeds. It’s not only the memory
of you that the weeds choke; it’s everything that’s best and most
delicate and finest. Perhaps you reminded me of Mr. Chigwell and the bay
rum in order to remind me at the same time to love more, and admire
more, and sympathise more, and be more aware. Darling Jim.”
She put down her pen, and looking out through the open window at the
starry sky she tried to think of him, tried to think of death. But it
was difficult to think of death. It was difficult, she found, to keep
the mind uninterruptedly on the idea of extinction, of non-life instead
of life, of nothingness. In books one reads about sages meditating. She
herself had often tried to meditate. But somehow it never seemed to come
to much. All sorts of little irrelevant thoughts kept coming into her
head. There was no focussing death, no keeping it steadily under the
mind’s eye. In the end she found herself reading through what she had
written, putting in a stop here and there, correcting slips in the
style, where it seemed to be too formal, too made-up, insufficiently
spontaneous and unsuitable to the secret diary.
At the end of the last paragraph she added another “darling Jim,” and
she repeated the words to herself, aloud, again and again. The exercise
produced its usual effect; she felt the tears coming into her eyes.
The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved
by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly
churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshippers
with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels.
“Darling Jim, darling Jim.” Miss Thriplow had found the form of words
for her worship. “Darling Jim.” The tears did her good; she felt better,
kinder, softer. And then, suddenly, she seemed to be listening to
herself from outside. “Darling Jim.” But did she really care at all?
Wasn’t it all a comedy, all a pretence? He had died so long ago; he had
nothing to do with her now. Why should she care or remember? And all
this systematic thinking about him, this writing of things in a secret
diary devoted to his memory—wasn’t all that merely for the sake of
keeping her emotions in training? Wasn’t she deliberately scratching her
heart to make it bleed, and then writing stories with the red fluid?
Miss Thriplow put away the thoughts as soon as they occurred to her: put
them aside indignantly. They were monstrous thoughts, lying thoughts.
She picked up her pen again and wrote, very quickly, as though she were
writing an exorcising spell and the sooner it had been put on paper the
sooner the evil thoughts would vanish.
“Do you remember, Jim, that time we went out in the canoe together and
nearly got drowned?...”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II: FRAGMENTS FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FRANCIS CHELIFER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II: Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer
CHAPTER I
Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along
the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated
face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on me,
turning the drops on my face and chest to salt. My head was pillowed in
the unruffled water; my limbs and body dimpled the surface of a pellucid
mattress thirty feet thick and cherishingly resilient through all its
thickness, down to the sandy bed on which it was spread. One might lie
paralysed here for a lifetime and never get a bedsore.
The sky above me was filmy with the noonday heat. The mountains, when I
turned towards the land to look for them, had almost vanished behind a
veil of gauze. But the Grand Hotel, on the other hand, though not
perhaps quite so grand as it appeared in its illustrated prospectus—for
there the front door was forty feet high and four tall acrobats standing
on one another’s shoulders could not have reached to the sills of the
ground-floor windows—the Grand Hotel made no attempt to conceal itself;
the white villas glared out unashamedly from their groves of pines; and
in front of them, along the tawny beach, I could see the bathing huts,
the striped umbrellas, the digging children, the bathers splashing and
wallowing in the hot shallows—half-naked men like statues of copper,
girls in bright tunics, little boiled shrimps instead of little boys,
and sleek ponderous walruses with red heads, who were the matrons in
their rubber caps and their wet black bathing garments. Here and there
over the surface of the sea moved what the natives called
_patini_—catamarans made of a pair of boxed-in pontoons joined together
near the ends and with a high seat for the rower in the middle. Slowly,
trailing behind them as they went loud wafts of Italian gallantry,
giggles and song, they crawled across the flat blueness. Sometimes, at
the head of its white wake, its noise and its stink, a motor boat would
pass, and suddenly my transparent mattress would rock beneath me, as the
waves of its passage lifted me and let me drop and lifted me up again,
more and ever more languidly, till all was once more smooth.
So much for that. The description, as I see now that I come to re-read
it, is not inelegant. For though I may not have played a hand of Bridge
since I was eight and have never learned Mah Jong, I can claim at least
to have studied the rules of style. I have learned the art of writing
well, which is the art of saying nothing elaborately. I have acquired
all the literary accomplishments. But then, if I may say so without
fatuity, I also have a talent. “Nothing profits more than self-esteem
founded on just and right.” I have Milton on my side to justify me in my
assertion. When I write well, it is not merely another way of writing
badly about nothing. In this respect my effusions differ a little from
those of my cultured colleagues. I occasionally have something to say,
and I find that the elegant but florid saying of it is as easy to me as
walking. Not, of course, that I attach the slightest importance to that.
I might have as much to say as La Rochefoucauld and as much facility for
saying it as Shelley. But what of that? It would be great art, you say.
No doubt; but what of _that_? It’s a queer prejudice, this one of ours
in favour of art. Religion, patriotism, the moral order,
humanitarianism, social reform—we have all of us, I imagine, dropped all
those overboard long ago. But we still cling pathetically to art. Quite
unreasonably; for the thing has far less reason for existence than most
of the objects of worship we have got rid of, is utterly senseless,
indeed, without their support and justification. Art for art’s
sake—halma for halma’s sake. It is time to smash the last and silliest
of the idols. My friends, I adjure you, put away the ultimate and
sweetest of the inebriants and wake up at last completely sober—among
the dustbins at the bottom of the area steps.
This little digression will suffice, I hope, to show that I labour,
while writing, under no illusions. I do not suppose that anything I do
has the slightest importance, and if I take so much pains in imparting
beauty and elegance to these autobiographical fragments, it is chiefly
from force of habit. I have practised the art of literature so long that
it comes natural to me to take the pains I have always taken. You may
ask why I write at all, if I regard the process as being without
importance? It is a pertinent question. Why do you do this inconsistent
thing? I can only plead weakness in justification. On principle I
disapprove of writing; on principle I desire to live brutishly like any
other ordinary human being. The flesh is willing, but the spirit is
weak. I confess I grow bored. I pine for amusements other than those
legitimate distractions offered by the cinema and the Palais de Danse. I
struggle, I try to resist the temptation; but in the end I succumb. I
read a page of Wittgenstein, I play a little Bach; I write a poem, a few
aphorisms, a fable, a fragment of autobiography. I write with care,
earnestly, with passion even, just as if there were some point in what I
were doing, just as if it were important for the world to know my
thoughts, just as if I had a soul to save by giving expression to them.
But I am well aware, of course, that all these delightful hypotheses are
inadmissible. In reality I write as I do merely to kill time and amuse a
mind that is still, in spite of all my efforts, a prey to intellectual
self-indulgence. I look forward to a placid middle age when, having
finally overcome the old Adam in me, finally quenched all the
extravagant spiritual cravings, I shall be able to settle down in
tranquillity to that life of the flesh, that natural human existence
which still, I fear, seems to me so forbidding, so austerely monotonous,
so tedious. I have not yet attained to that blessed state. Hence these
divagations into art; let me beg forgiveness for them. And above all,
let me implore you once more not to imagine that I attach the slightest
importance to them. My vanity would be hurt if I thought you did.
Poor Mrs. Aldwinkle, for example—there was some one who could never
believe that I was not an art-for-arter. “But, Chelifer,” she used to
say to me in her aimed, intent, breathless way, “how _can_ you blaspheme
like that against your own talent?” And I would put on my most Egyptian
air—I have always been accused of looking like an Egyptian sculpture—my
most Sphingine smile, and say: “But I am a democrat; how can I allow my
talent to blaspheme against my humanity?”—or something enigmatic of that
kind. Poor Mrs. Aldwinkle! But I run on too fast. I have begun to talk
of Mrs. Aldwinkle and you do not know who Mrs. Aldwinkle is. Nor did I,
for that matter, as I reclined that morning along the soft resilient
water—I knew no more, then, than her name; who does not? Mrs. Aldwinkle
the salonnière, the hostess, the giver of literary parties and agapæ of
lions—is she not classical? a household word? a familiar quotation? Of
course. But in the flesh, till that moment, I had never seen her. Not
through any lack of exertions on her part. For only a few months before,
a telegram had arrived for me at my publisher’s: “PRINCE
PAPADIAMANTOPOULOS JUST ARRIVED MOST ANXIOUS TO KNOW BEST LITERARY
ARTISTIC INTELLECTUAL SOCIETY IN LONDON COULD YOU DINE MEET HIM THURSDAY
EIGHT FIFTEEN 112 BERKELEY SQUARE LILIAN ALDWINKLE.” In this telegraphic
form, and couched in those terms, the invitation had certainly seemed
alluring. But a little judicious inquiry showed me that the prospect was
not really quite so attractive as it appeared. For Prince
Papadiamantopoulos turned out, in spite of his wonderfully promising
title and name, to be a perfectly serious intellectual like the rest of
us. More serious indeed; for I discovered, to my horror, that he was a
first-class geologist and could understand the differential calculus.
Among the other guests were to be at least three decent writers and one
painter. And Mrs. Aldwinkle herself was rumoured to be quite well
educated and not entirely a fool. I filled up the reply-paid form and
took it to the nearest post office. “MUCH REGRET NEVER DINE OUT EXCEPT
IN LENT FRANCIS CHELIFER.” During Lent I confidently expected to receive
another invitation. I was relieved, however, and a little disappointed,
to hear no more from Mrs. Aldwinkle. I should have liked her to make, in
vain, a further effort to lure me from my allegiance to Lady Giblet.
Ah, those evenings at Lady Giblet’s—I never miss a single one if I can
help it. The vulgarity, ignorance and stupidity of the hostess, the
incredible second-rateness of her mangy lions—these are surely unique.
And then those camp-followers of the arts, those delicious Bohemians who
regard their ability to appreciate the paintings of the cubists and the
music of Stravinsky as a sufficient justification for helping themselves
freely to one another’s wives—nowhere can you see such brilliant
specimens of the type as at Lady Giblet’s. And the conversations one
hears within those marble halls—nowhere, surely, are pretensions
separated from justifying facts by a vaster gulf. Nowhere can you hear
the ignorant, the illogical, the incapable of thought talking so glibly
about things of which they have not the slightest understanding. And
then you should hear them boasting parenthetically, as they express an
imbecile’s incoherent opinion, of their own clear-headedness, their
modern outlook, their ruthless scientific intelligence. Surely you can
find nothing so perfect in its kind as at Lady Giblet’s—I at least know
of nothing more complete. At Mrs. Aldwinkle’s one might very likely hear
a serious conversation; never by any chance in the salon of _my_ choice.
But that morning in the blue Tyrrhenian was the last of my life to be
passed beyond the pale of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s acquaintanceship; it was also
as nearly as possible the first of my future life. Fate seemed that
morning to be in doubt whether to extinguish me completely or merely to
make me acquainted with Mrs. Aldwinkle. Fortunately, as I like to think,
it chose the latter alternative. But I anticipate.
I first saw Mrs. Aldwinkle on this particular morning without knowing
who she was. From where I was lying on my mattress of blue brine I
noticed a heavily laden _patino_ bearing slowly down upon me from the
shore. Perched high on the rower’s bench a tall young man was toiling
languidly at the oars. His back against the bench, his hairy legs
stretched out along the prow of one of the pontoons, sat a thick-set
oldish man with a red face and short white hair. The bow of the other
pontoon accommodated two women. The elder and larger of them sat in
front, trailing her legs in the water; she was dressed in a kilted
bathing costume of flame-coloured silk and her hair was tied up in a
pink bandana handkerchief. Immediately behind her there squatted, her
knees drawn up to her chin, a very youthful slender little creature in a
black maillot. In one of her hands she held a green parasol with which
she kept off the sunlight from her elder companion. Within the cylinder
of greenish shadow the pink and flame-coloured lady, whom I afterwards
learnt to be Mrs. Aldwinkle herself, looked like a Chinese lantern
lighted in a conservatory; and when an accidental movement of the young
girl’s umbrella allowed the sunlight for a moment to touch her face, one
could imagine that the miracle of the raising of Lazarus was being
performed before one’s eyes—for the green and corpse-like hue suddenly
left the features, the colours of health, a little inflamed by the
reflections from the bathing dress, seemed to rush back. The dead lived.
But only for an instant; for the solicitous care of the young girl soon
reversed the miracle. The sunshade swung back into position, the
penumbra of the greenhouse enveloped the glowing lamp and the living
face once more became ghastly, as though it belonged to some one who had
lain for three days in the tomb.
At the stern, seen clearly only when the ponderous boat was already
beginning to pass me, sat another young woman with a pale face and large
dark eyes. A tendril of almost black hair escaped from under her bathing
cap and fell, like a curling whisker, down her cheek. A handsome young
man with a brown face and brown muscular arms and legs sprawled along
the stern of the other pontoon, smoking a cigarette.
The voices that faintly came to me from the approaching boat sounded,
somehow, more familiar than those I had heard from other _patini_. I
became aware, all at once, that they were speaking English.
“The clouds,” I heard the old red-faced gentleman saying (he had just
turned round, in obedience to a gesture from the Chinese lantern in the
conservatory, to look at the piled-up masses of vapour that hung like
another fantastic range above the real mountains), “the clouds you so
much admire are only made possible by the earth’s excrementitious dust
hanging in the air. There are thousands of particles to every cubic
centimetre. The water vapour condenses round them in droplets
sufficiently large to be visible. Hence the clouds—marvellous and
celestial shapes, but with a core of dust. What a symbol of human
idealism!” The melodious voice grew louder and louder as the young man
dipped and dipped his oars. “Earthy particles transfigured into heavenly
forms. The heavenly forms are not self-existent, not absolute. Dust
writes these vast characters across the sky.”
Preserve me, I thought. Did I come to Marina di Vezza to listen to this
sort of thing?
In a voice loud but indistinct, and strangely unmusical, the Chinese
lantern lady began to quote Shelley, incorrectly. “‘From peak to peak in
a bridge-like ...’” she began, and relapsed into silence, clawing the
air in search of the synonym for shape which ought to rhyme with peak.
“‘Over a something sea.’ I think _The Cloud_ is almost the loveliest of
all. It’s wonderful to think that Shelley sailed in this sea. And that
he was burnt only a little way off, down there.” She pointed down the
coast to where, behind the haze, the interminable sea-front of Viareggio
stretched away mile after mile. Faintly now one might discern the ghost
of its nearest outskirts. But at evening it would emerge; clear and
sharp in the sloping light, as though they had been cut from gems,
Palace and Grande Bretagne, Europe (_già_ Aquila Nera) and Savoia would
twinkle there, majestic toys, among the innumerable lesser inns and
boarding-houses, reduced at this distance to an exquisite loveliness and
so pathetically small and delicate that one could almost have wept over
them. At this very moment, on the other side of the curtain of haze, a
hundred thousand bathers were thronging the empty beaches where
Shelley’s body had been committed to the fire. The pinewoods in which,
riding out from Pisa, he hunted lovely thoughts through the silence and
the fragrant shadows teemed now with life. Unnumbered country
copulatives roamed at this moment through those glades.... And so forth.
Style pours out of my fountain pen. In every drachm of blue-black ink a
thousand _mots justes_ are implicit, like the future characteristics of
a man in a piece of chromosome. I apologise.
Youth, then, at the prow and pleasure at the helm—and the flesh was so
glossy under the noonday sun, the colours so blazingly bright, that I
was really reminded of Etty’s little ravishment—the laden boat passed
slowly within a few yards of me. Stretched like a live cross on my
mattress of brine I looked at them languidly through half-closed eyes.
They looked at me; a blank incuriosity was on their faces—for a glimpse
only, then they averted their eyes as though I had been one of those
exhausted frogs one sees, after the breeding season, floating belly
upwards on the surface of a pond. And yet I was what is technically
known as an immortal soul. It struck me that it would have been more
reasonable if they had stopped their boat and hailed me across the
water. “Good morning, stranger. How goes your soul? And what shall we do
to be saved?” But on the other hand, our habit of regarding strangers as
being nothing more to us than exhausted frogs probably saves a good deal
of trouble.
“From cape to cape,” emended the red-faced gentleman, as they receded
from me.
And very diffidently, in a soft shy voice, the solicitous young creature
suggested that the something sea was a torrent sea.
“Whatever vat may be,” said the young rower, whose exertions under the
broiling sun entitled him to take the professionally nautical,
commonsense view about the matter.
“But it’s obvious what it is,” said the Chinese lantern lady, rather
contemptuously. The young man at the stern threw away his cigarette and
started meditatively whistling the tune of “_Deh, vieni alla finestra_”
from _Don Giovanni_.
There was a silence; the boat receded, stroke after stroke. The last
words I heard were uttered, drawlingly and in a rather childish voice,
by the young woman in the stern. “I wish I could get brown more
quickly,” she said, lifting one foot out of the water and looking at the
white bare leg. “One might have been living in a cellar. Such a
dreadfully unwholesome look of blanched asparagus. Or even mushrooms,”
she added pensively.
The Chinese lantern lady said something, then the red-faced man. But the
conversation had ceased to be articulately audible. Soon I could hear no
more; they had gone, leaving behind them, however, the name of Shelley.
It was here, along these waters, that he had sailed his flimsy boat. In
one hand he held his Sophocles, with the other the tiller. His eyes
looked now at the small Greek letters, now to the horizon, or landwards
towards the mountains and clouds. “Port your helm, Shelley,” Captain
Williams would shout. And the helm went hard over to starboard; the ship
staggered, almost capsised. Then, one day, flash! the black opaque sky
split right across; crash and rumble! the thunder exploded overhead and
with the noise of boulders being trundled over the surface of the metal
clouds, the echoes rolled about the heavens and among the
mountains—“from peak to peak,” it occurred to me, adopting the Chinese
lantern lady’s emendation, “from peak to peak with a gong-like squeak.”
(What an infamy!) And then, with a hiss and a roar, the whirl-blast was
upon them. It was all over.
Even without the Chinese lantern lady’s hint I should probably have
started thinking of Shelley. For to live on this coast, between the sea
and the mountains, among alternate flawless calms and shattering sudden
storms, is like living inside one of Shelley’s poems. One walks through
a transparent and phantasmagorical beauty. But for the hundred thousand
bathers, the jazz band in the Grand Hotel, the unbroken front which
civilisation, in the form of boarding-houses, presents for miles at a
time to the alien and empty sea, but for all these, one might seriously
lose one’s sense of reality and imagine that fancy had managed to
transform itself into fact. In Shelley’s days, when the coast was all
but uninhabited, a man might have had some excuse for forgetting the
real nature of things. Living here in an actual world practically
indistinguishable from one of imagination, a man might almost be
justified for indulging his fancy to the extravagant lengths to which
Shelley permitted his to go.
But a man of the present generation, brought up in typical contemporary
surroundings, has no justifications of this sort. A modern poet cannot
permit himself the mental luxuries in which his predecessors so freely
wallowed. Lying there on the water, I repeated to myself a copy of
verses, inspired by reflections like these, which I had written some few
months before.
The Holy Ghost comes sliding down
On Ilford, Golders Green and Penge.
His hosts infect him as they rot;
The victims take their just revenge.
For if of old the sons of squires
And livery stable keepers turned
To flowers and hope, to Greece and God,
We in our later age have learned
That we are native where we walk
Through the dim streets of Camden Town.
But hopeful still through twice-breathed air
The Holy Ghost comes shining down.
I wrote these lines, I remember, one dark afternoon in my office in
Gog’s Court, Fetter Lane. It is in the same office, on an almost
perfectly similar afternoon, that I am writing now. The reflector
outside my window reflects a faint and muddy light that has to be
supplemented by electricity from within. An inveterate smell of
printer’s ink haunts the air. From the basement comes up the thudding
and clanking of presses; they are turning out the weekly two hundred
thousand copies of the “Woman’s Fiction Budget.” We are at the heart,
here, of our human universe. Come, then, let us frankly admit that we
are citizens of this mean city, make the worst of it resolutely and not
try to escape.
To escape, whether in space or in time, you must run a great deal
further now than there was any need to do a hundred years ago when
Shelley boated on the Tyrrhenian and conjured up millennial visions. You
must go further in space, because there are more people, more and faster
vehicles. The Grand Hotel, the hundred thousand bathers, the jazz bands
have introduced themselves into that Shelleian poem which is the
landscape of Versilia. And the millennium which seemed in the days of
Godwin not so very remote has receded further and further from us, as
each Reform Bill, each victory over entrenched capitalism dashed yet
another illusion to the ground. To escape, in 1924, one must go to
Tibet, one must look forward to at least the year 3000; and who knows?
they are probably listening-in in the Dalai Lama’s palace; and it is
probable that the millennial state of a thousand years hence will be
millennial only because it has contrived to make slavery, for the first
time, really scientific and efficient.
An escape in space, even if one contrives successfully to make one, is
no real escape at all. A man may live in Tibet or among the Andes; but
he cannot therefore deny that London and Paris actually exist, he cannot
forget that there are such places as New York and Berlin. For the
majority of contemporary human beings, London and Manchester are the
rule; you may have fled to the eternal spring of Arequipa but you are
not living in what is, for the mass of human consciousness, reality.
An escape in time is no more satisfactory. You live in the radiant
future, live for the future. You console yourself for the spectacle of
things as they are by the thought of what they will be. And you work,
perhaps, to make them be what you think they ought to be. I know all
about it, I assure you. I have done it all myself—lived in a state of
permanent intoxication at the thought of what was to come, working
happily for a gorgeous ideal of happiness. But a little reflection
suffices to show how absurd these forward lookings, these labours for
the sake of what is to be, really are. For, to begin with, we have no
reason to suppose that there is going to be a future at all, at any rate
for human beings. In the second place we do not know whether the ideal
of happiness towards which we are striving may not turn out either to be
totally unrealisable or, if realisable, utterly repellent to humanity.
Do people want to be happy? If there were a real prospect of achieving a
permanent and unvarying happiness, wouldn’t they shrink in horror from
the boring consummation? And finally, the contemplation of the future,
the busy working for it, does not prevent the present from existing. It
merely partially blinds us to the present.
The same objections apply with equal force to the escapes which do not
launch out into space or time, but into Platonic eternity, into the
ideal. An escape into mere fancy does not prevent facts from going on;
it is a disregarding of the facts.
Finally there are those people, more courageous than the escapers, who
actually plunge into the real contemporary life around them, and are
consoled by finding in the midst of its squalor, its repulsiveness and
stupidity, evidences of a widespread kindliness, of charity, pity and
the like. True, these qualities exist and the spectacle of them is
decidedly cheering; in spite of civilisation, men have not fallen below
the brutes. Parents, even in human society, are devoted to their
offspring; even in human society the weak and the afflicted are
sometimes assisted. It would be surprising, considering the origins and
affinities of man, if this were not the case. Have you ever read an
obituary notice of which the subject did not possess, under his rough
exterior and formidable manner, a heart of gold? And the obituarists,
however cloying their literary productions, are perfectly right. We all
have hearts of gold, though we are sometimes, it is true, too much
preoccupied with our own affairs to remember the fact. The really cruel,
the fundamentally evil man is as rare as the man of genius or the total
idiot. I have never met a man with a really bad heart. And the fact is
not surprising; for a man with a really bad heart is a man with certain
instincts developed to an abnormal degree and certain others more or
less completely atrophied. I have never met a man like Mozart for that
matter.
Charles Dickens, it is true, managed to feel elated and chronically
tearful over the existence of virtues among the squalor. “He shows,” as
one of his American admirers so fruitily puts it, “that life in its
rudest forms may wear a tragic grandeur; that amidst follies and
excesses the moral feelings do not wholly die, and that the haunts of
the blackest crime are sometimes lighted up by the presence of the
noblest souls.” And very nice too. But is there any great reason to feel
elated by the emergence of virtues in human society? We are not
specially elated by the fact that men have livers and pancreases.
Virtues are as natural to man as his digestive organs; any sober
biologist, taking into consideration his gregarious instincts, would
naturally expect to find them.
This being the case, there is nothing in these virtues _à la_ Dickens to
“write home about”—as we used to say at a time when we were remarkably
rich in such virtues. There is no reason to be particularly proud of
qualities which we inherit from our animal forefathers and share with
our household pets. The gratifying thing would be if we could find in
contemporary society evidences of peculiarly human virtues—the conscious
rational virtues that ought to belong by definition to a being calling
himself Homo Sapiens. Open-mindedness, for example, absence of
irrational prejudice, complete tolerance and a steady, reasonable
pursuit of social goods. But these, alas, are precisely what we fail to
discover. For to what, after all, are all this squalor, this confusion
and ugliness due but to the lack of the human virtues? The fact is
that—except for an occasional sport of Nature, born now here, now there,
and always out of time—we sapient men have practically no human virtues
at all. Spend a week in any great town, and the fact is obvious. So
complete is this lack of truly human qualities that we are reduced, if
we condescend to look at reality at all, to act like Charles Dickens and
congratulate the race on its merely animal virtues. The jolly,
optimistic fellows who assure us that humanity is all right, because
mothers love their children, poor folk pity and help one another, and
soldiers die for a flag, are comforting us on the grounds that we
resemble the whales, the elephants and the bees. But when we ask them to
adduce evidence of human sapience, to give us a few specimens of
conscious and reasonable well-doing, they rebuke us for our intellectual
coldness and our general “inhumanity”—which means our refusal to be
content with the standards of the animals. However grateful we may feel
for the existence in civilised society of these homely jungle virtues,
we cannot justifiably set them off against the horrors and squalors of
civilised life. The horrors and squalors arise from men’s lack of
reason—from their failure to be completely and sapiently human. The
jungle virtues are merely the obverse of this animalism, whose Heads is
instinctive kindliness and whose Tails is stupidity and instinctive
cruelty.
So much for the last consolation of philosophy. We are left with
reality. My office in Gog’s Court is situated, I repeat, at the very
heart of it, the palpitating heart.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
Gog’s Court, the navel of reality! Repeating those verses of mine in the
silence, I intimately felt the truth of it.
For if of old the sons of squires
And livery stable keepers turned
To flowers and hope, to Greece and God,
We, in our later age have learned
That we are native where we walk.
My voice boomed out oracularly across the flat sea. Nothing so richly
increases the significance of a statement as to hear it uttered by one’s
own voice, in solitude. “Resolved, so help me God, never to touch
another drop!” Those solemn words, breathed out in a mist of whiskey—how
often, in dark nights, on icy mornings, how often have they been
uttered! And the portentous imprecation seems to engage the whole
universe to do battle on behalf of the Better Self against its besetting
vice. Thrilling and awful moment! Merely for the sake of living through
it again, for the sake of once more breaking the empty silence with the
reverberating Stygian oath, it is well worth neglecting the good
resolution. I say nothing of the pleasures of inebriation.
My own brief recital served to confirm for me the truth of my
speculations. For not only was I uttering the substance of my thoughts
aloud; I was voicing it in terms of a formula that had an element, I
flatter myself, of magic about it. What is the secret of these verbal
felicities? How does it come about that a commonplace thought embodied
by a poet in some abracadabrical form seems bottomlessly profound, while
a positively false and stupid notion may be made by its expression to
seem true? Frankly, I don’t know. And what is more, I have never found
any one who could give an answer to the riddle. What is it that makes
the two words “defunctive music” as moving as the dead march out of the
_Eroica_ and the close of _Coriolan_? Why should it be somehow more
profoundly comic to “call Tullia’s ape a marmosite” than to write a
whole play of Congreve? And the line, “Thoughts that do often lie too
deep for tears”—why should it in effect lie where it does? Mystery. This
game of art strangely resembles conjuring. The quickness of the tongue
deceives the brain. It has happened, after all, often enough. Old
Shakespeare, for example. How many critical brains have been deceived by
the quickness of _his_ tongue! Because he can say “Shoughs, water-rugs
and demi-wolves,” and “defunctive music,” and “the expense of spirit in
a waste of shame” and all the rest of it, we credit him with philosophy,
a moral purpose and the most penetrating psychology. Whereas his
thoughts are incredibly confused, his only purpose is to entertain and
he has created only three characters. One, Cleopatra, is an excellent
copy from the life, like a character out of a good realistic novel, say
one of Tolstoy’s. The other two—Macbeth and Falstaff—are fabulous
imaginary figures, consistent with themselves but not real in the sense
that Cleopatra is real. My poor friend Calamy would call them more real,
would say that they belong to the realm of Absolute Art. And so forth. I
cannot go into poor Calamy’s opinions, at any rate in this context;
later on, perhaps. For me, in any case, Macbeth and Falstaff are
perfectly genuine and complete mythological characters, like Jupiter or
Gargantua, Medea or Mr. Winkle. They are the only two well-invented
mythological monsters in the whole of Shakespeare’s collection; just as
Cleopatra is the only well-copied reality. His boundless capacity for
abracadabra has deceived innumerable people into imagining that all the
other characters are as good.
But the Bard, heaven help me, is not my theme. Let me return to my
recitation on the face of the waters. As I have said, my conviction
“that we are native where we walk” was decidedly strengthened by the
sound of my own voice pronouncing the elegant formula in which the
notion was embalmed. Repeating the words, I thought of Gog’s Court, of
my little room with the reflector at the window, of the light that burns
in winter even at noon, of the smell of printer’s ink and the noise of
the presses. I was back there, out of this irrelevant poem of a sunshiny
landscape, back in the palpitating heart of things. On the table before
me lay a sheaf of long galleys; it was Wednesday; I should have been
correcting proofs, but I was idle that afternoon! On the blank six
inches at the bottom of a galley I had been writing those lines: “For if
of old the sons of squires....” Pensively, a halma player contemplating
his next move, I hung over them. What were the possible improvements?
There was a knock at the door. I drew a sheet of blotting paper across
the bottom of the galley—“Come in”—and went on with my interrupted
reading of the print. “... Since Himalayans were made to breed true to
colour, no event has aroused greater enthusiasm in the fancier’s world
than the fixation of the new Flemish-Angora type. Mr. Spargle’s
achievement is indeed a nepoch-making one....” I restored the n of
nepoch to its widowed a, and looked up. Mr. Bosk, the sub-editor, was
standing over me.
“Proof of the leader, sir,” he said, bowing with that exquisitely
contemptuous politeness which characterised all his dealings with me,
and handed me another galley.
“Thank you, Mr. Bosk,” I said.
But Mr. Bosk did not retire. Standing there in his favourite and
habitual attitude, the attitude assumed by our ancestors (of whom,
indeed, old Mr. Bosk was one) in front of the half-draped marble column
of the photographer’s studio, he looked at me, faintly smiling through
his thin white beard. The third button of his waistcoat was undone and
his right hand, like a half-posted letter, was inserted in the orifice.
He rested his weight on a rigid right leg. The other leg was slightly
bent and the heel of one touching the toe of the other, his left foot
made with his right a perfect right angle. I could see that I was in for
a reproof.
“What is it, Mr. Bosk?” I asked.
Among the sparse hairs Mr. Bosk’s smile became piercingly sweet. He put
his head archly on one side. His voice when he spoke was mellifluous. On
these occasions when I was to be dressed down and put in my place his
courtesy degenerated into a kind of affected girlish coquetry. “If you
don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Chelifer,” he said mincingly, “I think
you’ll find that _rabear_ in Spanish does not mean ‘to wag the tail,’ as
you say in your leader on the derivation of the word ‘rabbit,’ so much
as ‘to wag the hind quarters.’”
“Wag the hind quarters, Mr. Bosk?” I said. “But that sounds to me a very
difficult feat.”
“Not in Spain, apparently,” said Mr. Bosk, almost giggling.
“But this is England, Mr. Bosk.”
“Nevertheless, my authority is no less than Skeat himself.” And
triumphantly, with the air of one who, at a critical moment of the game,
produces a fifth ace, Mr. Bosk brought forward his left hand, which he
had been keeping mysteriously behind his back. It held a dictionary; a
strip of paper marked the page. Mr. Bosk laid it, opened, on the table
before me; with a thick nail he pointed “‘... or possibly,’ I read
aloud, ‘from Spanish _Rabear_, to wag the hind quarters.’ Right as
usual, Mr. Bosk. I’ll alter it in the proof.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Mr. Bosk with a mock humility. Inwardly he was
exulting in his triumph. He picked up his dictionary, repeated his
contemptuously courteous bow and walked with a gliding noiseless motion
towards the door. On the threshold he paused. “I remember that the
question arose once before, sir,” he said; his voice was poisonously
honied. “In Mr. Parfitt’s time,” and he slipped out, closing the door
quietly behind him.
It was a Parthian shot. The name of Mr. Parfitt was meant to wound me to
the quick, to bring the blush of shame to my cheek. For had not Mr.
Parfitt been the perfect, complete and infallible editor? Whereas I....
Mr. Bosk left it to my own conscience to decide what I was.
And indeed I was well aware of my short-comings. “The Rabbit Fanciers’
Gazette,” with which, as every schoolboy knows, is incorporated “The
Mouse Breeders’ Record,” could hardly have had a more unsuitable editor
than I. To this day, I confess, I hardly know the right end of a rabbit
from the wrong. Mr. Bosk was a survivor from the grand old days of Mr.
Parfitt, the founder and for thirty years the editor of the Gazette.
“Mr. Parfitt, sir,” he used to tell me every now and then, “was a _real_
fancier.” His successor, by implication, was not.
It was at the end of the war. I was looking for a job—a job at the heart
of reality. The illusory nature of the position had made me decline my
old college’s offer of a fellowship. I wanted something—how shall I put
it?—more palpitating. And then in _The Times_ I found what I had been
looking for. “Wanted Editor of proved literary ability for livestock
trade paper. Apply Box 92.” I applied, was interviewed, and conquered.
The directors couldn’t finally resist my testimonial from the Bishop of
Bosham. “A life-long acquaintance with Mr. Chelifer and his family
permits me confidently to assert that he is a young man of great ability
and high moral purpose. (signed) Hartley Bosh.” I was appointed for a
probationary period of six months.
Old Mr. Parfitt, the retiring editor, stayed on a few days at the office
to initiate me into the secrets of the work. He was a benevolent old
gentleman, short, thick and with a very large head. His square face was
made to seem even broader than it was by the grey whiskers which ran
down his cheeks to merge imperceptibly into the ends of his moustache.
He knew more about mice and rabbits than any man in the country; but
what he prided himself on was his literary gift. He explained to me the
principles on which he wrote his weekly leaders.
“In the fable,” he told me, smiling already in anticipation of the end
of this joke which he had been elaborating and polishing since 1892, “in
the fable it is the mountain which, after a long and, if I may say so,
geological labour, gives birth to the mouse. My principle, on the
contrary, has always been, wherever possible, to make my mice parturiate
mountains.” He paused expectantly. When I had laughed, he went on. “It’s
astonishing what reflections on life and art and politics and philosophy
and what not you can get out of a mouse or a rabbit. Quite astonishing!”
The most notable of Mr. Parfitt’s mountain thoughts still hangs, under
glass and in an Oxford frame, on the wall above the editorial desk. It
was printed in the Rabbit Fancier for August 8, 1914.
“It is not the readers of the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette,” Mr. Parfitt had
written on that cardinal date, “who have made this war. No Mouse
Breeder, I emphatically proclaim, has desired it. No! Absorbed in their
harmless and indeed beneficent occupations, they have had neither the
wish nor the leisure to disturb the world’s peace. If all men
whole-heartedly devoted themselves to avocations like ours, there would
be no war. The world would be filled with the innocent creators and
fosterers of life, not, as at present, with its tigerish destroyers. Had
Kaiser William the Second been a breeder of rabbits or mice, we should
not find ourselves to-day in a world whose very existence is threatened
by the unimaginable horrors of modern warfare.”
Noble words! Mr. Parfitt’s righteous indignation was strengthened by his
fears for the future of his paper. The war, he gloomily foreboded, would
mean the end of rabbit breeding. But he was wrong. Mice, it is true,
went rather out of fashion between 1914 and 1918. But in the lean years
of rationing, rabbits took on a new importance. In 1917 there were ten
fanciers of Flemish Giants to every one there had been before the war.
Subscriptions rose, advertisements were multiplied.
“Rabbits,” Mr. Parfitt assured me, “did a great deal to help us win the
war.”
And conversely, the war did so much to help rabbits that Mr. Parfitt was
able to retire in 1919 with a modest but adequate fortune. It was then
that I took over control. And in spite of Mr. Bosk’s contempt for my
ignorance and incompetence, I must in justice congratulate myself on the
way in which I piloted the concern through the evil times which
followed. Peace found the English people at once less prosperous and
less hungry than they had been during the war. The time had passed when
it was necessary for them to breed rabbits; and they could not afford
the luxury of breeding them for pleasure. Subscriptions declined,
advertisements fell off. I averted an impending catastrophe by adding to
the paper a new section dealing with goats. Biologically, no doubt, as I
pointed out to the directors in my communication on the subject, this
mingling of ruminants with rodents was decidedly unsound. But
commercially, I felt sure, the innovation would be justified. It was.
The goats brought half a dozen pages of advertisements in their train
and several hundred new subscribers. Mr. Bosk was furious at my success;
but the directors thought very highly of my capacities.
They did not, it is true, always approve of my leading articles.
“Couldn’t you try to make them a little more popular,” suggested the
managing director, “a little more practical too, Mr. Chelifer? For
instance,” and clearing his throat, he unfolded the typewritten sheet of
complaints which he had had prepared and had brought with him to the
board meeting, “for instance, what’s the practical value of this stuff
about the use of the word ‘cony’ as a term of endearment in the
Elizabethan dramatists? And this article on the derivation of
‘rabbit’”—he looked at his paper again and coughed. “Who wants to know
that there’s a Walloon word ‘robett’? Or that our word may have
something to do with the Spanish _rabear_, to wag the hind quarters? And
who, by the way,” he added, looking up at me over his pince-nez with an
air—prematurely put on—of triumph, “who ever heard of an animal wagging
its hind quarters?” “Nevertheless,” I said, apologetically, but firmly,
as befits a man who knows that he is right, “my authority is no less
than Skeat himself.”
The managing director, who had hoped to score a point, went on,
defeated, to the next count in the indictment. “And then, Mr. Chelifer,”
he said, “we don’t very much like, my fellow directors and I, we don’t
much like what you say in your article on ‘Rabbit Fancying and its
Lesson to Humanity.’ It may be true that breeders have succeeded in
producing domesticated rabbits that are four times the weight of wild
rabbits and possess only half the quantity of brains—it may be true.
Indeed, it is true. And a very remarkable achievement it is, Mr.
Chelifer, very remarkable indeed. But that is no reason for upholding,
as you do, Mr. Chelifer, that the ideal working man, at whose production
the eugenist should aim, is a man eight times as strong as the
present-day workman, with only a sixteenth of his mental capacity. Not
that my fellow directors and I entirely disagree with what you say, Mr.
Chelifer; far from it. All right-thinking men must agree that the modern
workman is too well educated. But we have to remember, Mr. Chelifer,
that many of our readers actually belong to that class.”
“Quite.” I acquiesced in the reproof.
“And finally, Mr. Chelifer, there is your article on the ‘Symbology of
the Goat.’ We feel that the facts you have there collected, however
interesting to the anthropologist and the student of folk-lore, are
hardly of a kind to be set before a mixed public like ours.”
The other directors murmured their assent. There was a prolonged
silence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
I remember an advertisement—for some sort of cough drops I think it
was—which used to figure very largely in my boyhood on the back covers
of the illustrated weeklies. Over the legend, “A Pine Forest in every
Home,” appeared a picture of three or four magnificent Norway spruces
growing out of the drawing-room carpet, while the lady of the house, her
children and guests took tea, with a remarkable air of unconcern and as
though it was quite natural to have a sequoia sprouting out of the
hearth-rug, under their sanitary and aromatic shade. A Pine Forest in
every Home.... But I have thought of something even better. A Luna Park
in every Office. A British Empire Exhibition Fun Fair in every Bank. An
Earl’s Court in every Factory. True, I cannot claim to bring every
attraction of the Fun Fair into your place of labour—only the
switchback, the water-shoot and the mountain railway. Merry-go-round,
wiggle-woggle, flip-flap and the like are beyond the power of my magic
to conjure up. Horizontal motion and a rotary giddiness I cannot claim
to reproduce; my speciality is headlong descents, breathlessness and
that delicious sickening feeling that your entrails have been left
behind on an upper storey. Those who chafe at the tameness and sameness
of office life, who pine for a little excitement to diversify the
quotidian routine, should experiment with this little recipe of mine and
bring the water-shoot into the counting-house. It is quite simple. All
you have got to do is to pause for a moment in your work and ask
yourself: Why am I doing this? What is it all for? Did I come into the
world, supplied with a soul which may very likely be immortal, for the
sole purpose of sitting every day at this desk? Ask yourself these
questions thoughtfully, seriously. Reflect even for a moment on their
significance—and I can guarantee that, firmly seated though you may be
in your hard or your padded chair, you will feel all at once that the
void has opened beneath you, that you are sliding headlong, fast and
faster, into nothingness.
For those who cannot dispense with formularies and fixed prayers, I
recommend this little catechism, to be read through in office hours
whenever time hangs a little heavy.
_Q._ Why am I working here?
_A._ In order that Jewish stockbrokers may exchange their Rovers for
Armstrong-Siddeleys, buy the latest jazz records and spend the week-end
at Brighton.
_Q._ Why do I go on working here?
_A._ In the hope that I too may some day be able to spend the week-end
at Brighton.
_Q._ What is progress?
_A._ Progress is stockbrokers, more stockbrokers and still more
stockbrokers.
_Q._ What is the aim of social reformers?
_A._ The aim of social reformers is to create a state in which every
individual enjoys the greatest possible amount of freedom and leisure.
_Q._ What will the citizens of this reformed state do with their freedom
and leisure?
_A._ They will do, presumably, what the stockbrokers do with these
things to-day, _e.g._ spend the week-end at Brighton, ride rapidly in
motor vehicles and go to the theatre.
_Q._ On what condition can I live a life of contentment?
_A._ On the condition that you do not think.
_Q._ What is the function of newspapers, cinemas, radios, motor-bikes,
jazz bands, etc.?
_A._ The function of these things is the prevention of thought and the
killing of time. They are the most powerful instruments of human
happiness.
_Q._ What did Buddha consider the most deadly of the deadly sins?
_A._ Unawareness, stupidity.
_Q._ And what will happen if I make myself aware, if I actually begin to
think?
_A._ Your swivel chair will turn into a trolley on the mountain railway,
the office floor will gracefully slide away from beneath you and you
will find yourself launched into the abyss.
Down, down, down! The sensation, though sickening, is really delightful.
Most people, I know, find it a little too much for them and consequently
cease to think, in which case the trolley reconverts itself into the
swivel chair, the floor closes up and the hours at the desk seem once
more to be hours passed in a perfectly reasonable manner; or else, more
rarely, flee in panic horror from the office to bury their heads like
ostriches in religion or what not. For a strong-minded and intelligent
person both courses are inadmissible; the first because it is stupid and
the second because it is cowardly. No self-respecting man can either
accept unreflectingly or, having reflected upon it, irresponsibly run
away from the reality of human life. The proper course, I flatter
myself, is that which I have adopted. Having sought out the heart of
reality—Gog’s Court, to be explicit—I have taken up my position there;
and though fully aware of the nature of the reality by which I am
surrounded, though deliberately keeping myself reminded of the complete
imbecility of what I am doing, I yet remain heroically at my post. My
whole time is passed on the switchback; all my life is one unceasing
slide through nothing.
All my life, I insist; for it is not merely into Gog’s Court that I
magically introduce the fun of the fair. I so arrange my private life
that I am sliding even out of office hours. My heart, to borrow the
poetess’s words, is like a singing bird whose nest is permanently in a
water-shoot. Miss Carruthers’s boarding-house in Chelsea is, I assure
you, as suitable a place to slither in as any east of Temple Bar. I have
lived there now for four years. I am a pillar of the establishment and
every evening, when I sit down to dinner with my fellow guests, I feel
as though I were taking my place in a specially capacious family trolley
on the switchback railway. All aboard! and away we go. With gathering
momentum the trolley plunges down into vacancy.
Let me describe an evening on the Domestic water-shoot. At the head of
the table sits Miss Carruthers herself; thirty-seven, plump though
unmarried, with a face broadening towards the base and very flabby about
the cheeks and chin—bull-doggy, in a word; and the snub nose, staring at
you out of its upward-tilted nostrils, the small brown eyes do not belie
the comparison. And what activity! never walks, but runs about her
establishment like a demoniac, never speaks but shrilly shouts, carves
the roast beef with scientific fury, laughs like a giant woodpecker. She
belongs to a distinguished family which would never, in its days of
glory, have dreamed of allowing one of its daughters to become what Miss
Carruthers calls, applying to herself the most humiliating of titles and
laughing as she does so, to emphasise the picturesque contrast between
what she is by birth and what circumstance has reduced her to becoming,
“a common lodging-house keeper.” She is a firm believer in her class and
to her more distinguished guests deplores the necessity under which she
labours to admit into her establishment persons not really, really....
She is careful not to mix people of different sorts together. Her most
genteel guests sit the closest to her at table; it is implied that, in
the neighbourhood of Miss Carruthers, they will feel at home. For years
I have had the honour of sitting at her left hand; for if less
prosperous than Mrs. Cloudesley Shove, the broker’s widow (who sits in
glory on the right), I have at least attended in my youth an ancient
seat of learning.
The gong reverberates; punctually I hurry down to the dining-room. With
fury and precision, like a conductor immersed in a Wagner overture, Miss
Carruthers is carving the beef.
“Evening, Mr. Chelifer,” she loudly calls, without interrupting her
labours. “What news have you brought back with you from the city
to-day?”
Affably I smile, professionally I rub the hands. “Well, I don’t know
that I can think of any.”
“Evening, Mrs. Fox. Evening, Mr. Fox.” The two old people take their
places near the further end of the table. They are not quite, quite....
“Evening, Miss Monad.” Miss Monad does responsible secretarial work and
sits next to the Foxes. “Evening, Mr. Quinn. Evening, Miss Webber.
Evening, Mrs. Crotch.” But the tone in which she responds to Mr. Dutt’s
courteous greeting is much less affable. Mr. Dutt is an Indian—a black
man, Miss Carruthers calls him. Her “Evening, Mr. Dutt” shows that she
knows her place and hopes that the man of the inferior race knows his.
The servant comes in with a steaming dish of greens. _Crambe
repetita_—inspiring perfume! Mentally I burst into song.
These like remorse inveterate memories,
Being of cabbage, are prophetic too
Of future feasts, when Mrs. Cloudesley Shove
Will still recall lamented Cloudesley.
Still
Among the moonlit cedars Philomel
Calls back to mind, again, again,
The ancient pain, the everlasting pain;
And still inveterately the haunted air
Remembers and foretells that roses were
Red and to-morrow will again be red,
But, “Cloudesley, Cloudesley!” Philomel in vain
Sobs on the night; for Cloudesley Shove is dead....
And in the flesh, as though irresistibly summoned by my incantation,
Mrs. Cloudesley Shove blackens the doorway with her widowhood.
“Not a very naice day,” says Mrs. Cloudesley, as she sits down.
“Not at all,” Miss Carruthers heartily agrees. And then, without turning
from the beef, without abating for an instant the celerity of her
carving, “Fluffy!” she shouts through the increasing din, “don’t giggle
like that.”
Politely Mr. Chelifer half raises himself from his chair as Miss Fluffy
comes tumbling, on the tail end of her giggle, into the chair next to
his. Always the perfect gent.
“I wasn’t giggling, Miss Carruthers,” Fluffy protests. Her smile reveals
above the roots of her teeth a line of almost bloodless gums.
“Quite true,” says young Mr. Brimstone, following her less tumultuously
from the door and establishing himself in the seat opposite, next to
Mrs. Cloudesley. “She wasn’t giggling. She was merely cachinnating.”
Everybody laughs uproariously, even Miss Carruthers, though she does not
cease to carve. Mr. Brimstone remains perfectly grave. Behind his
rimless pince-nez there is hardly so much as a twinkle. As for Miss
Fluffy, she fairly collapses.
“What a horrible man!” she screams through her laughter, as soon as she
has breath enough to be articulate. And picking up her bread, she makes
as though she were going to throw it across the table in Mr. Brimstone’s
face.
Mr. Brimstone holds up a finger. “Now you be careful,” he admonishes.
“If you don’t behave, you’ll be put in the corner and sent to bed
without your supper.”
There is a renewal of laughter.
Miss Carruthers intervenes. “Now don’t tease her, Mr. Brimstone.”
“Tease?” says Mr. Brimstone, in the tone of one who has been misjudged.
“But I was only applying moral suasion, Miss Carruthers.”
Inimitable Brimstone! He is the life and soul of Miss Carruthers’s
establishment. So serious, so clever, such an alert young city man—but
withal so exquisitely waggish, so gallant! To see him with Fluffy—it’s
as good as a play.
“There!” says Miss Carruthers, putting down her carving tools with a
clatter. Loudly, energetically, she addresses herself to her duties as a
hostess. “I went to Buszard’s this afternoon,” she proclaims, not
without pride. We old county families have always bought our chocolate
at the best shops. “But it isn’t what it used to be.” She shakes her
head; the high old feudal times are past. “It isn’t the same. Not since
the A B C took it over.”
“Do you see,” asks Mr. Brimstone, becoming once more his serious self,
“that the new Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly Circus will be able to
serve fourteen million meals a year?” Mr. Brimstone is always a mine of
interesting statistics.
“No, really?” Mrs. Cloudesley is astonished.
But old Mr. Fox, who happens to have read the same evening paper as Mr.
Brimstone, takes almost the whole credit of Mr. Brimstone’s erudition to
himself by adding, before the other has time to say it: “Yes, and that’s
just twice as many meals as any American restaurant can serve.”
“Good old England!” cried Miss Carruthers patriotically. “These Yanks
haven’t got us beaten in everything yet.”
“So naice, I always think, these Corner Houses,” says Mrs. Cloudesley.
“And the music they play is really quite classical, you know,
sometimes.”
“Quite,” says Mr. Chelifer, savouring voluptuously the pleasure of
dropping steeply from the edge of the convivial board into interstellar
space.
“And so sumptuously decorated,” Mrs. Cloudesley continues.
But Mr. Brimstone knowingly lets her know that the marble on the walls
is less than a quarter of an inch thick.
And the conversation proceeds. “The Huns,” says Miss Carruthers, “are
only shamming dead.” Mr. Fox is in favour of a business government. Mr.
Brimstone would like to see a few strikers shot, to encourage the rest;
Miss Carruthers agrees. From below the salt Miss Monad puts in a word
for the working classes, but her remark is treated with the contempt it
deserves. Mrs. Cloudesley finds Charlie Chaplin so vulgar, but likes
Mary Pickford. Miss Fluffy thinks that the Prince of Wales ought to
marry a nice simple English girl. Mr. Brimstone says something rather
cutting about Mrs. Asquith and Lady Diana Manners. Mrs. Cloudesley, who
has a profound knowledge of the Royal Family, mentions the Princess
Alice. Contrapuntally to this, Miss Webber and Mr. Quinn have been
discussing the latest plays and Mr. Chelifer has engaged Miss Fluffy in
a conversation which soon occupies the attention of all the persons
sitting at the upper end of the table—a conversation about flappers.
Mrs. Cloudesley, Miss Carruthers and Mr. Brimstone agree that the modern
girl is too laxly brought up. Miss Fluffy adheres in piercing tones to
the opposite opinion. Mr. Brimstone makes some splendid jokes at the
expense of co-education, and all concur in deploring cranks of every
variety. Miss Carruthers, who has a short way with dissenters, would
like to see them tarred and feathered—all except pacifists who, like
strikers, could do with a little shooting. Lymphatic Mrs. Cloudesley,
with sudden and surprising ferocity, wants to treat the Irish in the
same way. (Lamented Cloudesley had connections with Belfast.) But at
this moment a deplorable incident occurs. Mr. Dutt, the Indian, who
ought never, from his lower sphere, even to have listened to the
conversation going on in the higher, leans forward and speaking loudly
across the intervening gulf ardently espouses the Irish cause. His
eloquence rolls up the table between two hedges of horrified silence.
For a moment nothing can be heard but ardent nationalistic sentiments
and the polite regurgitation of prune stones. In the presence of this
shocking and unfamiliar phenomenon nobody knows exactly what to do. But
Miss Carruthers rises, after the first moment, to the occasion.
“Ah, but then, Mr. Dutt,” she says, interrupting his tirade about
oppressed nationalities, “you must remember that Mrs. Cloudesley Shove
is English. _You_ can hardly expect to understand what _she_ feels. Can
you?”
We all feel inclined to clap. Without waiting to hear Mr. Dutt’s reply,
and leaving three prunes uneaten on her plate, Miss Carruthers gets up
and sweeps with dignity towards the door. Loudly, in the corridor, she
comments on the insolence of black men. And what ingratitude, too!
“After I had made a special exception in his case to my rule against
taking coloured people!”
We all sympathise. In the drawing-room the conversation proceeds.
Headlong the trolley plunges.
A home away from home—that was how Miss Carruthers described her
establishment in the prospectus. It was the awayness of it that first
attracted me to the place. The vast awayness from what I had called home
up till the time I first stayed there—that was what made me decide to
settle for good at Miss Carruthers’s. From the house where I was born
Miss Carruthers’s seemed about as remote as any place one could
conveniently find.
“I remember, I remember....” It is a pointless and futile occupation,
difficult none the less not to indulge in. I remember. Our house at
Oxford was dark, spiky and tall. Ruskin himself, it was said, had
planned it. The front windows looked out on to the Banbury Road. On
rainy days, when I was a child, I used to spend whole mornings staring
down into the thoroughfare. Every twenty minutes a tram-car drawn by two
old horses, trotting in their sleep, passed with an undulating motion
more slowly than a man could walk. The little garden at the back once
seemed enormous and romantic, the rocking-horse in the nursery a beast
like an elephant. The house is sold now and I am glad of it. They are
dangerous, these things and places inhabited by memory. It is as though,
by a process of metempsychosis, the soul of dead events goes out and
lodges itself in a house, a flower, a landscape, in a group of trees
seen from the train against the sky-line, an old snapshot, a broken
penknife, a book, a perfume. In these memory-charged places, among these
things haunted by the ghosts of dead days, one is tempted to brood too
lovingly over the past, to live it again, more elaborately, more
consciously, more beautifully and harmoniously, almost as though it were
an imagined life in the future. Surrounded by these ghosts one can
neglect the present in which one bodily lives. I am glad the place is
sold; it was dangerous. _Evviva_ Miss Carruthers!
Nevertheless my thoughts, as I lay on the water that morning, reverted
from the Home Away to the other home from which it was so distant. I
recalled the last visit I had paid to the old house, a month or two
since, just before my mother finally decided herself to move out.
Mounting the steps that led up to the ogival porch I had felt like an
excavator on the threshold of a tomb. I tugged at the wrought-iron bell
pull; joints creaked, wires wheezily rattled and far off, as though
accidentally, by an afterthought, tinkled the cracked bell. In a moment
the door would open, I should walk in, and there, there in the unrifled
chamber the royal mummy would be lying—my own.
Nothing within those Gothic walls ever changed. Imperceptibly the
furniture grew older; the wall-papers and the upholstery recalled with
their non-committal russets and sage-greens the refinements of another
epoch. And my mother herself, pale and grey-haired, draped in the
dateless dove-grey dresses she had always worn, my mother was still the
same. Her smile was the same dim gentle smile; her voice still softly
modulated, like a studied and cultured music, from key to key. Her hair
was hardly greyer—for it had whitened early and I was a late-born
child—than I always remember it to have been. Her face was hardly more
deeply wrinkled. She walked erect, seemed still as active as ever, she
had grown no thinner and no stouter.
And she was still surrounded by those troops of derelict dogs, so
dreadfully profuse, poor beasts! in their smelly gratitude. There were
still the same moth-eaten cats picked up starving at a street corner to
be harboured in luxury—albeit on a diet that was, on principle, strictly
vegetarian—in the best rooms of the house. Poor children still came for
buns and tea and traditional games in the garden—so traditional, very
often, that nobody but my mother had ever heard of them; still came,
when the season happened to be winter, for gloves and woolly stockings
and traditional games indoors. And the writing-table in the drawing-room
was piled high, as it had always been piled, with printed appeals for
some deserving charity. And still in her beautiful calligraphy my mother
addressed the envelopes that were to contain them, slowly, one after
another—and each a little work of art, like a page from a mediaeval
missal, and each destined, without reprieve, to the waste-paper basket.
All was just as it had always been. Ah, but not quite, all the same! For
though the summer term was in full swing and the afternoon bright, the
little garden behind the house was deserted and unmelodious. Where were
the morris dancers, where the mixolydian strains? And remembering that
music, those dances, those distant afternoons, I could have wept.
In one corner of the lawn my mother used to sit at the little harmonium;
I sat beside her to turn the pages of the music. In the opposite corner
were grouped the dancers. My mother looked up over the top of the
instrument; melodiously she inquired:
“Which dance shall we have next, Mr. Toft? ‘Trenchmore’? Or ‘Omnium
Gatherum’? Or ‘John, come kiss me now’? Or what do you say to ‘Up tails
all’? Or ‘Rub her down with straw’? Or ‘An old man’s a bed full of
bones’? Such an _embarras de richesse_, isn’t there?”
And Mr. Toft would break away from his little company of dancers and
come across the lawn wiping his face—for “Hoite-cum-Toite” a moment
before had been a most furious affair. It was a grey face with vague
indeterminate features and a bright almost clerical smile in the middle
of it. When he spoke it was in a very rich voice.
“Suppose we try ‘Fading,’ Mrs. Chelifer,” he suggested. “‘Fading is a
fine dance’—you remember the immortal words of the Citizen’s Wife in the
_Knight of the Burning Pestle_? Ha ha!” And he gave utterance to a
little laugh, applausive of his own wit. For to Mr. Toft every literary
allusion was a joke and the obscurer the allusion the more exquisite the
waggery. It was rarely, alas, that he found any one to share his
merriment. My mother was one of the few people who always made a point
of smiling whenever Mr. Toft laughed at himself. She smiled even when
she could not track the allusion to its source. Sometimes she even went
so far as to laugh. But my mother had no facility for laughter; by
nature she was a grave and gentle smiler.
And so “Fading” it would be. My mother touched the keys and the gay, sad
mixolydian air came snoring out of the harmonium like a strangely
dissipated hymn tune. “One, two, three ...” called Mr. Toft richly. And
then in unison all five—the don, the two undergraduates, the two young
ladies from North Oxford—would beat the ground with their feet, would
prance and stamp till the garters of little bells round the gentlemen’s
grey flannel trousers (it went without saying, for some reason, that the
ladies should not wear them) jingled like the bells of a runaway
hansom-cab horse. One, two, three.... The Citizen’s Wife (ha ha!) was
right. Fading is a fine dance indeed. Everybody dances Fading. Poor Mr.
Toft had faded out of Oxford, had danced completely out of life, like
Lycidas (tee-hee!) before his prime. Influenza had faded him. And of the
undergraduates who had danced here, first and last, with Mr. Toft—how
many of them had danced Fading under the German barrage? Young Flint,
the one who used always to address his tutor as “Mr. Toft—oh, I mean
Clarence” (for Mr. Toft was one of those genial boyish dons who insisted
on being called by their Christian names), young Flint was dead for
certain. And Ramsden too, I had a notion that Ramsden too was dead.
And then there were the young women from North Oxford. What, for
example, of Miss Dewball’s cheeks? How had those cabbage roses weathered
the passage of the years? But for Miss Higlett, of course, there could
be no more fading, no further desiccation. She was already a harebell
baked in sand. Unwithering Higlett, blowsy Dewball....
And I myself, I too had faded. The Francis Chelifer who, standing by the
dissipated harmonium, had turned the pages of his mother’s music, was as
wholly extinct as Mr. Toft. Within this Gothic tomb reposed his mummy.
My week-end visits were archaeological expeditions.
“Now that poor Mr. Toft’s dead,” I asked as we walked, my mother and I,
that afternoon, up and down the little garden behind the house, “isn’t
there any one else here who’s keen on morris dancing?” Or were those
folky days, I wondered, for ever past?
My mother shook her head. “The enthusiasm for it is gone,” she said
sadly. “This generation of undergraduates doesn’t seem to take much
interest in that kind of thing. I don’t really know,” she added, “what
it _is_ interested in.”
What indeed, I reflected. In my young days it had been Social Service
and Fabianism; it had been long hearty walks in the country at four and
a half miles an hour, with draughts of Five X beer at the end of them,
and Rabelaisian song and conversations with yokels in incredibly
picturesque little wayside inns; it had been reading parties in the
Lakes and climbing in the Jura; it had been singing in the Bach Choir
and even—though somehow I had never been able quite to rise to that—even
morris dancing with Mr. Toft.... But Fading is a fine dance, and all
these occupations seemed now a little queer. Still, I caught myself
envying the being who had lived within my skin and joined in these
activities.
“Poor Toft!” I meditated. “Do you remember the way he had of calling
great men by little pet names of his own? Just to show that he was on
terms of familiarity with them, I suppose. Shakespeare was always
Shake-bake, which was short, in its turn, for Shake-Bacon. And Oven,
_tout court_, was Beethoven.”
“And always J. S. B. for Bach,” my mother continued, smiling
elegiacally.
“Yes, and Pee Em for Philipp Emanuel Bach. And Madame Dudevant for
George Sand, or, alternatively, I remember ‘The Queen’s Monthly
Nurse’—because Dickens thought she looked like that the only time he saw
her.” I recalled the long-drawn and delighted laughter which used to
follow that allusion.
“You were never much of a dancer, dear boy.” My mother sadly shook her
head over the past.
“Ah, but at any rate,” I answered, “at any rate I was a Fabian. And I
went for hearty long walks in the country. I drank my pint of Five X at
the Red Lion.”
“I wish you could have gone without the beer,” said my mother. That I
had not chosen to be a total abstainer had always a little distressed
her. Moreover, I had a taste for beefsteaks.
“It was my substitute for morris dancing, if you follow me.”
But I don’t think she did follow me. We took two or three turns up and
down the lawn in silence.
“How is your paper doing?” she asked at last.
I told her with a great show of enthusiasm about the cross between
Angoras and Himalayans which we had just announced.
“I often wish,” she said after a pause, “that you had accepted the
college’s offer. It would have been so good to have you here, filling
the place your dear father occupied.”
She looked at me sadly. I smiled back at her as though from across a
gulf. The child, I thought, grows up to forget that he is of the same
flesh with his parents; but they do not forget. I wished, for her sake,
that I were only five years old.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
At five years old, among other things, I used to write poems which my
mother thoroughly and whole-heartedly enjoyed. There was one about larks
which she still preserves, along with the locks of my pale childish
hair, the faded photographs, the precocious drawings of railway trains
and all the other relics of the period.
Oh, lark, how you do fly
Right up into the sky.
How loud he sings
And quickly wags his wings.
The sun does shine,
The weather is fine.
Father says, Hark,
Do you hear the lark?
My mother likes that poem better, I believe, than anything I have
written since. And I daresay that my father, if he had lived, would have
shared her opinion. But then he was an ardent Wordsworthian. He knew
most of the _Prelude_ by heart. Sometimes, unexpectedly breaking that
profound and god-like silence with which he always enveloped himself, he
would quote a line or two. The effect was always portentous; it was as
though an oracle had spoken.
I remember with particular vividness one occasion when Wordsworth broke
my father’s prodigious silence. It was one Easter time, when I was about
twelve. We had gone to North Wales for the holidays; my father liked
walking among hills and even amused himself occasionally with a little
mild rock climbing. Easter was early that year, the season backward and
inclement; there was snow on all the hills. On Easter Sunday my father,
who considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of
church-going, suggested that we should climb to the top of Snowdon. We
started early; it was cold; white misty clouds shut off the distant
prospects. Silently we trudged upwards through the snow. Like the page
of King Wenceslas I followed in my father’s footsteps, treading in the
holes he had kicked in the snow. Every now and then he would look round
to see how I was getting on. Icy dewdrops hung in his brown beard.
Gravely he smiled down on me as I came panting up, planting my small
feet in his large tracks. He was a huge man, tall and broad-shouldered,
with a face that might have been the curly-bearded original of one of
those Greek busts of middle-aged statesmen or philosophers. Standing
beside him, I always felt particularly small and insignificant. When I
had come up with him, he would pat me affectionately on the shoulder
with his large heavy hand, then turning his face towards the heights he
addressed himself once more to the climb. Not a word was spoken.
As the sun mounted higher, the clouds dispersed. Through the rifted mist
we saw the sky. Great beams of yellow light went stalking across the
slopes of snow. By the time we reached the summit the sky was completely
clear; the landscape opened out beneath us. The sun was shining
brightly, but without heat; the sky was pale blue, remote and icy. Every
northern slope of the glittering hills was shadowed with transparent
blues or purples. Far down, to the westward, was the scalloped and
indented coast, and seeming in its remoteness utterly calm, the grey sea
stretched upwards and away towards the horizon. We stood there for a
long time in silence, gazing at the astonishing landscape. Sometimes, I
remember, I stole an anxious look at my father. What was he thinking
about? I wondered. Huge and formidable he stood there, leaning on his
ice-axe, turning his dark bright eyes slowly and meditatively this way
and that. He spoke no word. I did not dare to break the silence. In the
end he straightened himself up. He raised his ice-axe and with an
emphatic gesture dug the pointed ferrule into the snow. “Bloody fine!”
he said slowly in his deep, cavernous voice. He said no more. In silence
we retraced our steps towards the Pen-y-pass Hotel.
But my father had not, as I supposed, spoken his last word. When we were
about half-way down I was startled and a little alarmed to hear him
suddenly begin to speak. “For I have learned,” he began abruptly (and he
seemed to be speaking less for my benefit than to himself) “to look on
nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
the still sad music of humanity, not harsh, nor grating, but of ample
power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me
with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more
deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the
round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the minds of
men.” I listened to him with a kind of terror. The strange words (I had
no idea at that time whence they came) reverberated mysteriously in my
mind. It seemed an oracle, a divine revelation. My father ceased
speaking as abruptly as he had begun. The words hung, as it were,
isolated in the midst of his portentous silence. We walked on. My father
spoke no more till on the threshold of the inn, sniffing the frozen air,
he remarked with a profound satisfaction: “Onions!” And then, after a
second sniff: “Fried.”
“A sense of something far more deeply interfused.” Ever since that day
those words, pronounced in my father’s cavernous voice, have rumbled
through my mind. It took me a long time to discover that they were as
meaningless as so many hiccoughs. Such is the nefarious influence of
early training.
My father, however, who never contrived to rid himself of the prejudices
instilled into him in childhood, went on believing in his Wordsworthian
formulas till the end. Yes, he too, I am afraid, would have preferred
the precocious larks to my maturer lucubrations. And yet, how
competently I have learned to write! In mere justice to myself I must
insist on it. Not, of course, that it matters in the least. The larks
might be my masterpiece; it would not matter a pin. Still, I insist. I
insist....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
“Quite the little poet”—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark.
Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all,
was that strange, unhappy chimaera—a little artist and a large man.
Between the writer of the Odes and the writer of the letters there is
all the gulf that separates a halma player from a hero.
Personally, I do not go in for heroic letters. I only modestly lay claim
to being a competent second-class halma player—but a good deal more
competent, I insist (though of course it doesn’t matter), than when I
wrote about the larks. “Quite the little poet”—always and, alas,
incorrigibly I am that.
Let me offer you a specimen of my matured competence. I select it at
random, as the reviewers say, from my long-projected and
never-to-be-concluded series of poems on the first six Caesars. My
father, I flatter myself, would have liked the title. That, at any rate,
is thoroughly Wordsworthian; it is in the great tradition of that
immortal “Needle Case in the form of a Harp.” “Caligula crossing the
bridge of boats between Baiae and Puteoli. By Peter Paul Rubens (b.
1577: d. 1640).” The poem itself, however, is not very reminiscent of
the Lake District.
Prow after prow the floating ships
Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid.
Caesar on a piebald horse
Prances with all his cavalcade.
Drunk with their own quick blood they go.
The waves flash as with seeing eyes;
The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed,
And they have filled the vacant skies
With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set
The Sea Winds singing with their shout,
Made Vesta’s temple on the headland
Spin like a twinkling roundabout.
The twined caduceus in his hand,
And having golden wings for spurs,
Young Caesar dressed as God looks on
And cheers his jolly mariners;
Cheers as they heave from off the bridge
The trippers from the seaside town;
Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads
And shove them bubbling down to drown.
There sweeps a spiral whirl of gesture
From the allegoric sky:
Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs
Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,
Slides down the flank of Mars and takes
From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,
Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops
Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.
A burgess tumbles from the bridge
Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips
From Caesar through the plunging legs
To the blue sea between the ships.
Reading it through, I flatter myself that this is very nearly up to
international halma form. A little more, and I shall be playing in
critical test-matches against Monsieur Cocteau and Miss Amy Lowell.
Enormous honour! I shrink from beneath its impendence.
But ah! those Caesars. They have haunted me for years. I have had such
schemes for putting half the universe into two or three dozen poems
about those monsters. All the sins, to begin with, and complementarily
all the virtues.... Art, science, history, religion—they too were to
have found their place. And God knows what besides. But they never came
to much, these Caesars. The notion, I soon came to see, was too large
and pretentious ever to be realised. I began (deep calls to deep) with
Nero, the artist. “Nero and Sporus walking in the gardens of the Golden
House.”
Dark stirrings in the perfumed air
Touch your cheeks, lift your hair.
With softer fingers I caress,
Sporus, all your loveliness.
Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shines
The moon; and fire-flies in the vines,
Like stars in a delirious sky,
Gleam and go out. Unceasingly
The fountains fall, the nightingales
Sing. But time flows and love avails
Nothing. The Christians smoulder red;
Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead.
And you, sweet Sporus, you and I,
We too must die, we too must die.
But the soliloquy which followed was couched in a more philosophic key.
I set forth in it all the reasons for halma’s existence—reasons which,
at the time when I composed the piece, I almost believed in still. One
lives and learns. Meanwhile, here it is.
The Christians by whose muddy light
Dimly, dimly I divine
Your eyes and see your pallid beauty
Like a pale night-primrose shine
Colourless in the dark, revere
A God who slowly died that they
Might suffer the less; who bore the pain
Of all time in a single day,
The pain of all men in a single
Wounded body and sad heart.
The yellow marble smooth as water
Builds me a Golden House; and there
The marble gods sleep in their strength
And the white Parian girls are fair.
Roses and waxen oleanders,
Green grape bunches and the flushed peach,—
All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,
Knowing, loving, becoming each.
The ship went down, my mother swam:
I wedded and myself was wed;
Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:
Old Seneca too slowly bled.
The wild beast and the victim both,
The ravisher and the wincing bride;
King of the world and a slave’s slave,
Terror-haunted, deified—
An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist,
All these I am and needs must be.
Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.
And you have heard my symphony
Of wailing voices and clashed brass,
With long shrill flutings that suspend
Pain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors,
And piercing breathless joys that end
In agony—could I have made
My song of Furies were the bane
Still sap within the hemlock stalk,
The red swords virgin bright again?
Or take a child’s love that is all
Worship, all tenderness and trust,
A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—take
And with the violence of lust
Tear and defile it. You shall hear
The breaking dumbness and the thin
Harsh crying that is the very music
Of shame and the remorse of sin.
Christ died; the artist lives for all;
Loves, and his naked marbles stand
Pure as a column on the sky,
Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand
Not our humiliation, not
The shuddering of an after shame;
And of his agonies men know
Only the beauty born of them.
Christ died, but living Nero turns
Your mute remorse to song; he gives
To idiot fate eyes like a lover’s,
And while his music plays, God lives.
Romantic and noble sentiments! I protest, they do me credit.
And then there are the fragments about Tiberius; Tiberius, need I add,
the representative in my symbolic scheme of love. Here is one. “In the
gardens at Capri.” (All my scenes are laid in gardens, I notice, at
night, under the moon. Perhaps the fact is significant. Who knows?)
Hour after hour the stars
Move, and the moon towards remoter night
Averts her cheek.
Blind now, these gardens yet remember
That there were crimson petals glossy with light,
And their remembrance is this scent of roses.
Hour after hour the stars march slowly on,
And year by year mysteriously the flowers
Unfold the same bright pattern towards the sky.
Incurious under the streaming stars,
Breathing this new yet immemorial perfume
Unmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed;
And the two women who are my bedfellows,
Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodies
Still hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side.
Commendable, I should now think, this fixture of the attention upon the
relevant, the human reality in the centre of the pointless landscape. It
was just at the time I wrote this fragment that I was learning the
difficult art of this exclusive concentration on the relevant. They were
painful lessons. War had prepared me to receive them; Love was the
lecturer.
Her name was Barbara Waters. I saw her first when I was about fourteen.
She was a month or two older than I. It was at one of those enormous
water picnics on the Cherwell that were organised from time to time
during the summer vacation by certain fiery and energetic spirits among
the dons’ wives. We would start out at seven, half a dozen punt-loads of
us, from the most northerly of the Oxford boat-houses and make our way
up-stream for an hour or so until night had fairly set in. Then,
disembarking in some solitary meadow, we would spread cloths, unpack
hampers, eat hilariously. And there were so many midges that even the
schoolboys were allowed to smoke cigarettes to keep them off—even the
schoolgirls. And how knowingly and with what a relish we, the boys,
puffed away, blowing the smoke through our noses, opening our mouths
like frogs to make rings! But the girls always managed to make their
cigarettes come to pieces, got the tobacco into their mouths and, making
faces, had to pick the bitter-tasting threads of it from between their
lips. In the end, after much giggling, they always threw their
cigarettes away, not half smoked; the boys laughed, contemptuously and
patronisingly. And finally we packed ourselves into the punts again and
floated home, singing; our voices across the water sounded
praeternaturally sweet. A yellow moon as large as a pumpkin shone
overhead; there were gleamings on the crests of the ripples and in the
troughs of the tiny waves, left in the wake of the punts, shadows of
almost absolute blackness. The leaves of the willow trees shone like
metal. A white mist lay along the meadows. Corncrakes incessantly ran
their thumbs along the teeth of combs. A faint weedy smell came up from
the river; the aroma of tobacco cut violently across it in pungent
gusts; sometimes the sweet animal smell of cows insinuated itself into
the watery atmosphere, and looking between the willows, we would see a
company of the large and gentle beasts kneeling in the grass, their
heads and backs projecting like the crests of mountains above the mist,
still hard at work, though the laborious day was long since over,
chewing and chewing away at a green breakfast that had merged into
luncheon, at the tea that had become in due course a long-drawn-out
vegetarian dinner. Munchily, squelchily, they moved their indefatigable
jaws. The sound came faintly to us through the silence. Then a small
clear voice would begin singing “Drink to me only with thine eyes” or
“Greensleeves.”
Sometimes, for the fun of the thing, though it was quite unnecessary,
and if the weather happened to be really warm, positively disagreeable,
we would light a fire, so that we might have the pleasure of eating our
cold chicken and salmon mayonnaise with potatoes baked—or generally
either half baked or burnt—in their jackets among the glowing cinders.
It was by the light of one of these fires that I first saw Barbara. The
punt in which I came had started some little time after the others; we
had had to wait for a late arrival. By the time we reached the appointed
supping place the others had disembarked and made all ready for the
meal. The younger members of the party had collected materials for a
fire, which they were just lighting as we approached. A group of
figures, pale and colourless in the moonlight, were standing or sitting
round the white cloth. In the black shadow of a huge elm tree a few
yards further off moved featureless silhouettes. Suddenly a small flame
spurted from a match and was shielded between a pair of hands that were
transformed at once into hands of transparent coral. The silhouettes
began to live a fragmentary life. The fire-bearing hands moved round the
pyre; two or three new little flames were born. Then, to the sound of a
great hurrah, the bonfire flared up. In the heart of the black shadow of
the elm tree a new small universe, far vivider than the ghostly world of
moonlight beyond, was suddenly created. By the light of the bright
flames I saw half a dozen familiar faces belonging to the boys and girls
I knew. But I hardly noticed them; I heeded only one face, a face I did
not know. The leaping flame revealed it apocalyptically. Flushed, bright
and with an air of being almost supernaturally alive in the quivering,
changing light of the flames, it detached itself with an incredible
clarity and precision from against a background of darkness which the
fire had made to seem yet darker. It was the face of a young girl. She
had dark hair with ruddy golden lights in it. The nose was faintly
aquiline. The openings of the eyes were narrow, long and rather
slanting, and the dark eyes looked out through them as though through
mysterious loopholes, brilliant, between the fringed eyelids, with an
intense and secret and unutterable happiness.
The mouth seemed to share in the same exquisite secret. Not full, but
delicately shaped, the unparted lips were curved into a smile that
seemed to express a delight more piercing than any laughter, any
outburst of joy could give utterance to. The corners of the mouth were
drawn upwards so that the line of the meeting of the lips was parallel
with her tilted eyes. And this slanting close-lipped smile seemed as
though suspended on two little folds that wrinkled the cheeks at the
corners of the mouth. The face, which was rather broad across the
cheek-bones, tapered away to a pointed chin, small and firm. Her neck
was round and slender; her arms, which were bare in her muslin dress,
very thin.
The punt moved slowly against the current. I gazed and gazed at the face
revealed by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to me that I had
never seen anything so beautiful and wonderful. What was the secret of
that inexpressible joy? What nameless happiness dwelt behind those
dark-fringed eyes, that silent, unemphatic, close-lipped smile?
Breathlessly I gazed. I felt the tears coming into my eyes—she was so
beautiful. And I was almost awed, I felt something that was almost fear,
as though I had suddenly come into the presence of more than a mere
mortal being, into the presence of life itself. The flame leapt up. Over
the silent, secret-smiling face the tawny reflections came and went, as
though wild blood were fluttering deliriously beneath the skin. The
others were shouting, laughing, waving their arms. She remained
perfectly still, close-lipped and narrow-eyed, smiling. Yes, life itself
was standing there.
The punt bumped against the bank. “Catch hold,” somebody shouted, “catch
hold, Francis.”
Reluctantly I did as I was told; I felt as though something precious
were being killed within me.
In the years that followed I saw her once or twice. She was an orphan, I
learned, and had relations in Oxford with whom she came occasionally to
stay. When I tried to speak to her, I always found myself too shy to do
more than stammer or say something trivial or stupid. Serenely, looking
at me steadily between her eyelids, she answered. I remember not so much
what she said as the tone in which she spoke—cool, calm, assured, as
befitted the embodiment of life itself.
“Do you play tennis?” I would ask in desperation—and I could have wept
at my own stupidity and lack of courage. Why are you so beautiful? What
do you think about behind your secret eyes? Why are you so inexplicably
happy? Those were the questions I wanted to ask her.
“Yes, I love tennis,” she gravely answered.
Once, I remember, I managed to advance so far along the road of coherent
and intelligent conversation as to ask her what books she liked best.
She looked at me unwaveringly while I spoke. It was I who reddened and
turned away. She had an unfair advantage over me—the advantage of being
able to look out from between her narrowed eyelids as though from an
ambush. I was in the open and utterly without protection.
“I don’t read much,” she said at last, when I had finished. “I don’t
really very much like reading.”
My attempt to approach, to make contact, was baffled. At the same time I
felt that I ought to have known that she wouldn’t like reading. After
all, what need was there for her to read? When one is life itself, one
has no use for mere books. Years later she admitted that she had always
made an exception for the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter. When I was
seventeen she went to live with another set of relations in South
Africa.
Time passed. I thought of her constantly. All that I read of love in the
poets arranged itself significantly round the memory of that lovely and
secretly smiling face. My friends would boast about their little
adventures. I smiled unenviously, knowing not merely in theory but by
actual experience that that sort of thing was not love. Once, when I was
a freshman at the university, I myself, at the end of a tipsy evening in
a night club, lapsed from the purity in which I had lived up till then.
Afterwards, I was horribly ashamed. And I felt that I had made myself
unworthy of love. In consequence—the link of cause and effect seems to
me now somewhat difficult to discover, but at the time, I know, I found
my action logical enough—in consequence I overworked myself, won two
university prizes, became an ardent revolutionary and devoted many hours
of my leisure to “social service” in the college Mission. I was not a
good social servant, got on only indifferently well with fierce young
adolescents from the slums and thoroughly disliked every moment I spent
in the Mission. But it was precisely for that reason that I stuck to the
job. Once or twice, even, I consented to join in the morris dancing in
my mother’s garden. I was making myself worthy—for what? I hardly know.
The possibility of marriage seemed almost infinitely remote; and somehow
I hardly desired it. I was fitting myself to go on loving and loving,
and incidentally to do great things.
Then came the war. From France I wrote her a letter, in which I told her
all the things I had lacked the power to say in her presence. I sent the
letter to the only address I knew—she had left it years before—not
expecting, not even hoping very much, that she would receive it. I wrote
it for my own satisfaction, in order to make explicit all that I felt. I
had no doubt that I should soon be dead. It was a letter addressed not
so much to a woman as to God, a letter of explanation and apology posted
to the universe.
In the winter of 1916 I was wounded. At the end of my spell in hospital
I was reported unfit for further active service and appointed to a post
in the contracts department of the Air Board. I was put in charge of
chemicals, celluloid, rubber tubing, castor oil, linen and balloon
fabrics. I spent my time haggling with German Jews over the price of
chemicals and celluloid, with Greek brokers over the castor oil, with
Ulstermen over the linen. Spectacled Japanese came to visit me with
samples of crêpe de Chine which they tried to persuade me—and they
offered choice cigars—would be both better and cheaper than cotton for
the manufacture of balloons. Of every one of the letters I dictated
first eleven, then seventeen, and finally, when the department had
flowered to the height of its prosperity, twenty-two copies were made,
to be noted and filed by the various sub-sections of the ministry
concerned. The Hotel Cecil was filled with clerks. In basements two
stories down beneath the surface of the ground, in attics above the
level of the surrounding chimney-pots, hundreds of young women tapped
away at typewriters. In a subterranean ball-room, that looked like the
setting for Belshazzar’s feast, a thousand cheap lunches were daily
consumed. In the hotel’s best bedrooms overlooking the Thames sat the
professional civil servants of long standing with letters after their
names, the big business men who were helping to win the war, the staff
officers. A fleet of very large motor cars waited for them in the
courtyard. Sometimes, when I entered the office of a morning, I used to
imagine myself a visitor from Mars....
One morning—it was after I had been at the Air Board for several
months—I found myself faced with a problem which could only be solved
after consultation with an expert in the Naval Department. The naval
people lived in the range of buildings on the opposite side of the
courtyard from that in which our offices were housed. It was only after
ten minutes of labyrinthine wanderings that I at last managed to find
the man I was looking for. He was a genial fellow, I remember; asked me
how I liked Bolo House (which was the nickname among the knowing of our
precious Air Board office), gave me an East Indian cheroot and even
offered whiskey and soda. After that we settled down to a technical chat
about non-inflammable celluloid. I left him at last, much enlightened.
“So long,” he called after me. “And if ever you want to know any mortal
thing about acetone or any other kind of bloody dope, come to me and
I’ll tell you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And if by any chance you should happen to want to
know about Apollonius Rhodius, shall we say, or Chaucer, or the history
of the three-pronged fork....”
He roared very heartily. “I’ll come to you,” he concluded.
Still laughing, I shut the door behind me and stepped out into the
corridor. A young woman was hurrying past with a thick bundle of papers
in her hand, humming softly as she went. Startled by my sudden
emergence, she turned and looked at me. As though with fear, my heart
gave a sudden thump, then seemed to stop for a moment altogether, seemed
to drop down within me.
“Barbara!”
At the sound of the name she halted and looked at me with that steady
unwavering gaze between the narrowed eyelids that I knew so well. A
little frown appeared on her forehead; puzzled, she pursed her lips.
Then all at once her face brightened, she laughed; the light in the dark
eyes joyously quivered and danced.
“Why, it’s Francis Chelifer,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know you for the
first minute. You’ve changed.”
“You haven’t,” I said. “You’re just the same.”
She said nothing, but smiled, close-lipped, and from between her lashes
looked at me as though from an ambush. In her young maturity she was
more beautiful than ever. Whether I was glad or sorry to see her again,
I hardly know. But I do know that I was moved, profoundly; I was shaken
and troubled out of whatever equanimity I possessed. That memory of a
kind of symbolic loveliness for which and by which I had been living all
these years was now reincarnated and stood before me, no longer a
symbol, but an individual; it was enough to make one feel afraid.
“I thought you were in South Africa,” I went on. “Which is almost the
same as saying I thought you didn’t exist.”
“I came home a year ago.”
“And you’ve been working here ever since?”
Barbara nodded.
“And you’re working in Bolo House too?” she asked.
“For the last six months.”
“Well I never! And to think we never met before! But how small the world
is—how absurdly small.”
We met for luncheon.
“Did you get my letter?” I summoned up courage to ask her over the
coffee.
Barbara nodded. “It was months and months on its way,” she said; and I
did not know whether she made the remark deliberately, in order to stave
off for a moment the inevitable discussion of the letter, or if she made
it quite spontaneously and without afterthought, because she found it
interesting that the letter should have been so long on its way. “It
went to South Africa and back again,” she explained.
“Did you read it?”
“Of course.”
“Did you understand what I meant?” As I asked the question I wished that
I had kept silence. I was afraid of what the answer might be.
She nodded and said nothing, looking at me mysteriously, as though she
had a secret and profound comprehension of everything.
“It was something almost inexpressible,” I said. Her look encouraged me
to go on. “Something so deep and so vast that there were no words to
describe it. You understood? You really understood?”
Barbara was silent for some time. Then with a little sigh she said: “Men
are always silly about me. I don’t know why.”
I looked at her. Could she really have uttered those words? She was
still smiling as life itself might smile. And at that moment I had a
horrible premonition of what I was going to suffer. Nevertheless I asked
how soon I might see her again. To-night? Could she dine with me
to-night? Barbara shook her head; this evening she was engaged. What
about lunch to-morrow? “I must think.” And she frowned, she pursed her
lips. No, she remembered in the end, to-morrow was no good. Her first
moment of liberty was at dinner-time two days later.
I returned to my work that afternoon feeling particularly Martian. Eight
thick files relating to the Imperial Cellulose Company lay on my desk.
My secretary showed me the experts’ report on proprietary brands of
castor oil, which had just come in. A rubber tubing man was particularly
anxious to see me. And did I still want her to get a trunk call through
to Belfast about that linen business? Pensively I listened to what she
was saying. What was it all for?
“Are men often silly about you, Miss Masson?” it suddenly occurred to me
to ask. I looked up at my secretary, who was waiting for me to answer
her questions and tell her what to do.
Miss Masson became surprisingly red and laughed in an embarrassed,
unnatural way. “Why, no,” she said. “I suppose I’m an ugly duckling.”
And she added: “It’s rather a relief. But what makes you ask?”
She had reddish hair, bobbed and curly, a very white skin and brown
eyes. About twenty-three, I supposed; and she wasn’t an ugly duckling at
all. I had never talked to her except about business, and seldom looked
at her closely, contenting myself with being merely aware that she was
there—a secretary, most efficient.
“What makes you ask?” A strange expression that was like a look of
terror came into Miss Masson’s eyes.
“Oh, I don’t know. Curiosity. Perhaps you’ll see if you can get me
through to Belfast some time in the afternoon. And tell the rubber
tubing man that I can’t possibly see him.”
Miss Masson’s manner changed. She smiled at me efficiently,
secretarially. Her eyes became quite impassive. “You can’t possibly see
him,” she repeated. She had a habit of repeating what other people had
just said, even reproducing like an echo opinions or jokes uttered an
instant before as though they were her own. She turned away and walked
towards the door. I was left alone with the secret history of the
Imperial Cellulose Company, the experts’ report on proprietary brands of
castor oil, and my own thoughts.
Two days later Barbara and I were dining very expensively at a
restaurant where the diners were able very successfully to forget that
the submarine campaign was in full swing and that food was being
rationed.
“I think the decorations are so pretty,” she said, looking round her.
“And the music.” (Mrs. Cloudesley Shove thought the same of the Corner
Houses.)
While she looked round at the architecture, I looked at her. She was
wearing a rose-coloured evening dress, cut low and without sleeves. The
skin of her neck and shoulders was very white. There was a bright rose
in the opening of her corsage. Her arms without being bony were still
very slender, like the arms of a little girl; her whole figure was slim
and adolescent.
“Why do you stare at me like that?” she asked, when the fascination of
the architecture was exhausted. She had heightened the colour of her
cheeks and faintly smiling lips. Between the darkened eyelids her eyes
looked brighter than usual.
“I was wondering why you were so happy. Secretly happy, inside, all by
yourself. What’s the secret? That’s what I was wondering.”
“Why shouldn’t I be happy?” she asked. “But, as a matter of fact,” she
added an instant later, “I’m not happy. How can one be happy when
thousands of people are being killed every minute and millions more are
suffering?” She tried to look grave, as though she were in church. But
the secret joy glittered irrepressibly through the slanting narrow
openings of her eyes. Within its ambush her soul kept incessant holiday.
I could not help laughing. “Luckily,” I said, “our sympathy for
suffering is rarely strong enough to prevent us from eating dinner. Do
you prefer lobster or salmon?”
“Lobster,” said Barbara. “But how stupidly cynical you are! You don’t
believe what I say. But I do assure you, there’s not a moment when I
don’t remember all those killed and wounded. And poor people too: the
way they live—in the slums. One can’t be happy. Not really.” She shook
her head.
I saw that if I pursued this subject of conversation, thus forcing her
to continue her pretence of being in church, I should ruin her evening
and make her thoroughly dislike me. The waiter with the wine list made a
timely diversion. I skimmed the pages. “What do you say to a quart of
champagne cup?” I suggested.
“That would be delicious,” she said and was silent, looking at me
meanwhile with a questioning, undecided face that did not know how to
adjust itself—whether to continued gravity or to a more natural
cheerfulness.
I put an end to her indecision by pointing to a diner at a neighbouring
table and whispering: “Have you ever seen anything so like a tapir?”
She burst into a peal of delighted laughter; not so much because what I
had said was particularly funny, but because it was such a tremendous
relief to be allowed to laugh again with a good conscience.
“Or wouldn’t you have said an ant-eater?” she suggested, looking in the
direction I had indicated and then leaning across the table to speak the
words softly and intimately into my ear. Her face approached, dazzlingly
beautiful. I could have cried aloud. The secret happiness in her eyes
was youth, was health, was uncontrollable life. The close lips smiled
with a joyful sense of power. A rosy perfume surrounded her. The red
rose between her breasts was brilliant against the white skin. I was
aware suddenly that under the glossy silk of her dress was a young body,
naked. Was it for this discovery that I had been preparing myself all
these years?
After dinner we went to a music hall and when the show was over to a
night club where we danced. She told me that she went dancing almost
every night. I did not ask with whom. She looked appraisingly at all the
women who came in, asked me if I didn’t think this one very pretty, that
most awfully attractive; and when, on the contrary, I found them rather
repulsive, she was annoyed with me for being insufficiently appreciative
of her sex. She pointed out a red-haired woman at another table and
asked me if I liked women with red hair. When I said that I preferred
Buckle’s _History of Civilization_, she laughed as though I had said
something quite absurdly paradoxical. It was better when she kept
silence; and fortunately she had a great capacity for silence, could use
it even as a defensive weapon, as when, to questions that at all
embarrassed or nonplussed her, she simply returned no answer, however
often they were repeated, smiling all the time mysteriously and as
though from out of another universe.
We had been at the night club about an hour, when a stoutish and flabby
young man, very black-haired, very dark-skinned, with a large fleshy
nose and a nostril curved in an opulent oriental volute, came sauntering
in with a lordly air of possession. He wore a silver monocle in his left
eye, and among the irrepressible black stubbles of his chin the grains
of poudre de riz glittered like little snowflakes. Catching sight of
Barbara he smiled, lavishly, came up to our table and spoke to her.
Barbara seemed very glad to see him.
“Such a clever man,” she explained, when he had moved away to another
table with the red-haired lady to whom I preferred the _History of
Civilization_. “He’s a Syrian. You ought to get to know him. He writes
poetry too, you know.”
I was unhappy the whole evening; but at the same time I wished it would
never end. I should have liked to go on for ever sitting in that stuffy
cellar, where the jazz band sounded so loud that it seemed to be playing
inside one’s head. I would have breathed the stale air and wearily
danced for ever, I would even have listened for ever to Barbara’s
conversation—for ever, so that I might have been allowed to be near her,
to look at her, to speculate, until she next spoke, on the profound and
lovely mysteries behind her eyes, on the ineffable sources of that
secret joy which kept her faintly and yet how intently and how
rapturously smiling.
The weeks passed. I saw her almost every day. And every day I loved her
more violently and painfully, with a love that less and less resembled
the religious passion of my boyhood. But it was the persistent memory of
that passion which made my present desire so parching and tormenting,
that filled me with a thirst that no possible possession could assuage.
No possible possession, since whatever I might possess, as I realised
more and more clearly each time I saw her, would be utterly different
from what I had desired all these years to possess. I had desired all
beauty, all that exists of goodness and truth, symbolised and incarnate
in one face. And now the face drew near, the lips touched mine; and what
I had got was simply a young woman with a “temperament,” as the
euphemists who deplore the word admiringly and lovingly qualify the
lascivious thing. And yet, against all reason, in spite of all the
evidence, I could not help believing that she was somehow and secretly
what I had imagined her. My love for her as a symbol strengthened my
desire for her as an individual woman.
All this, were it to happen to me now, would seem perfectly natural and
normal. If I were to make love to a young woman, I should know precisely
what I was making love to. But that, in those days, was something I
still had to learn. In Barbara’s company I was learning it with a
vengeance. I was learning that it is possible to be profoundly and
slavishly in love with some one for whom one has no esteem, whom one
does not like, whom one regards as a bad character and who, finally, not
only makes one unhappy but bores one. And why not, I might now ask, why
not? That things should be like this is probably the most natural thing
in the world. But in those days I imagined that love ought always to be
mixed up with affection and admiration, with worship and an intellectual
rapture, as unflagging as that which one experiences during the playing
of a symphony. Sometimes, no doubt, love does get involved with some or
all of these things; sometimes these things exist by themselves, apart
from love. But one must be prepared to swallow one’s love completely
neat and unadulterated. It is a fiery, crude and somewhat poisonous
draught.
Every hour I spent with Barbara brought fresh evidence of her inability
to play the ideal part my imagination had all these years been assigning
to her. She was selfish, thirsty for pleasures of the most vulgar sort,
liked to bask in an atmosphere of erotic admiration, amused herself by
collecting adorers and treating them badly, was stupid and a liar—in
other words, was one of the normal types of healthy young womanhood. I
should have been less disturbed by these discoveries if only her face
had been different. Unfortunately, however, the healthy young woman who
now revealed herself had the same features as that symbolic child on the
memory of whose face I had brooded through all an ardent adolescence.
And the contrast between what she was and what—with that dazzling and
mysteriously lovely face—she ought to have been, what in my imagination
she indeed had been, was a perpetual source of surprise and pain. And at
the same time the nature of my passion for her had changed—changed
inevitably and profoundly, the moment she ceased to be a symbol and
became an individual. Now, I desired her; before, I had loved her for
God’s sake and almost as though she were herself divine. And contrasting
this new love with the love I had felt before, I was ashamed, I fancied
myself unworthy, base, an animal. And I tried to persuade myself that if
she seemed different it was because I felt differently and less nobly
towards her. And sometimes, when we sat silent through long summer
twilights under the trees in the Park, or at my Chelsea rooms, looking
out on to the river, I could persuade myself for a precarious moment
that Barbara was what she had been in my imagination and that I felt
towards her now what I had felt towards the memory of her. In the end,
however, Barbara would break the magic silence and with it the illusion.
“It’s such a pity,” she would say pensively, “that July hasn’t got an r
in it. Otherwise we might have had supper in an oyster bar.”
Or else, remembering that I was a literary man, she would look at the
gaudy remains of the sunset and sigh. “I wish _I_ were a poet,” she
would say.
And I was back again among the facts, and Barbara was once more a
tangible young woman who bored me, but whom I desired—with what a
definite and localised longing!—to kiss, to hold fast and caress.
It was a longing which, for some time, I rigorously suppressed. I fought
against it as against an evil thing, too horribly unlike my previous
love, too outrageously incompatible with my conception of Barbara’s
higher nature. I had not yet learned to reconcile myself to the fact
that Barbara’s higher nature was an invention of my own, a figment of my
proper imagination.
One very hot evening in July I drove her to the door of the house in
Regent Square, Bloomsbury, in which she occupied a little flat under the
roof. We had been dancing and it was late; a hunch-backed moon had
climbed a third of the way up the sky and was shining down into the
square over the shoulder of the church that stands on its eastern side.
I paid off the cabman and we were left alone on the pavement. I had been
bored and irritated the whole evening; but at the thought that I should
have to bid her good-night and walk off by myself I was filled with such
an anguish that the tears came into my eyes. I stood there in silent
irresolution, looking into her face. It was calmly and mysteriously
smiling as though to itself and for some secret reason; her eyes were
very bright. She too was silent, not restlessly, not irresolutely as I
was silent, but easily, with a kind of majesty. She could live in
silence, when she so desired, like a being in its proper element.
“Well,” I brought myself to say at last, “I must go.”
“Why not come in for a final cup of tea?” she suggested.
Actuated by that spirit of perversity which makes us do what we do not
want to do, what we know will make us suffer as much as it is possible
in the given circumstance to suffer, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I
must get back.”
I had never longed for anything more passionately than I longed to
accept Barbara’s invitation.
She repeated it. “Do come in,” she said. “It won’t take a minute to make
tea on the gas ring.”
Again I shook my head, in too much anguish, this time, to be able to
speak. My trembling voice, I was afraid, would have betrayed me.
Instinctively I knew that if I went into the house with her we should
become lovers. My old determination to resist what had seemed the baser
desires strengthened my resolution not to go in.
“Well, if you won’t,” she shrugged her shoulders, “then good-night.” Her
voice had a note of annoyance in it.
I shook her hand and walked dumbly away. When I had gone ten yards my
resolution abjectly broke down. I turned. Barbara was still standing on
the doorstep, trying to fit the latchkey into the lock.
“Barbara,” I called in a voice that sounded horribly unnatural in my own
ears. I hurried back. She turned to look at me. “Do you mind if I change
my mind and accept your invitation after all? I find I really am rather
thirsty.” What a humiliation, I thought.
She laughed. “What a goose you are, Francis.” And she added in a
bantering tone: “If you weren’t such a silly old dear I’d tell you to go
to the nearest horse-trough and drink there.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Standing once more close to her, breathing once
again her rosy perfume, I felt as I had felt when, a child, I had run
down from my terrifying night nursery to find my mother sitting in the
dining-room—reassured, relieved of a hideous burden, incredibly happy,
but at the same time profoundly miserable in the consciousness that what
I was doing was against all the rules, was a sin, the enormity of which
I could judge from the very mournful tenderness of my mother’s eyes and
the severe, portentous silence out of which, as though from a
thundercloud, my huge and bearded father looked at me like an outraged
god. I was happy, being with Barbara; I was utterly miserable because I
was not with her, so to speak, in the right way: I was not I; she, for
all that the features were the same, was no longer herself. I was happy
at the thought that I should soon be kissing her; miserable because that
was not how I wanted to love my imaginary Barbara; miserable too, when I
secretly admitted to myself the existence of the real Barbara, because I
felt it an indignity to be the slave of such a mistress.
“Of course, if you want me to go,” I said, reacting feebly again towards
revolt, “I’ll go.” And desperately trying to be facetious, “I’m not sure
that it wouldn’t be best if I drowned myself in that horse-trough,” I
added.
“As you like,” she said lightly. The door was open now; she walked into
the darkness. I followed her, closing the door behind me carefully. We
groped our way up steep dark stairs. She unlocked another door, turned a
switch. The sudden light was dazzling.
“All’s well that ends well,” she said, smiling at me, and she slipped
the cloak from off her bare shoulders.
On the contrary, I thought, it was the tragedy of errors. I stepped
towards her, I stretched out my hands and gripped her by her two thin
arms a little below the shoulder. I bent down and kissed her averted
cheek, she turned her face towards me, and it was her mouth.
There is no future, there is no more past;
No roots nor fruits, but momentary flowers.
Lie still, only lie still and night will last
Silent and dark, not for a space of hours,
But everlastingly. Let me forget
All but your perfume, every night but this,
The shame, the fruitless weeping, the regret.
Only lie still: this faint and quiet bliss
Shall flower upon the brink of sleep and spread
Till there is nothing else but you and I
Clasped in a timeless silence. But like one
Who, doomed to die, at morning will be dead,
I know, though night seem dateless, that the sky
Must brighten soon before to-morrow’s sun.
It was then that I learned to live only in the moment—to ignore causes,
motives, antecedents, to refuse responsibility for what should follow.
It was then that I learned, since the future was always bound to be a
painful repetition of what had happened before, never to look forward
for comfort or justification, but to live now and here in the heart of
human reality, in the very centre of the hot dark hive. But there is a
spontaneous thoughtlessness which no thoughtful pains can imitate. Being
what I am, I shall never rival with those little boys who throw their
baby sisters over the cliff for the sake of seeing the delightful
splash; never put a pistol to my head and for the mere fun of the thing
pull the trigger; never, looking down from the gallery at Covent Garden
at the thronged Wagnerites or Saint-Saënsians in the stalls below,
lightly toss down that little hand-grenade (however piercingly amusing
the jest might be), which I still preserve, charged with its pound of
high explosive, in my hat-box, ready for all emergencies. Such gorgeous
carelessness of all but the immediate sensation I can only remotely
imitate. But I do my best, and I did it always conscientiously with
Barbara. Still, the nights always did come to an end. And even during
them, lapped in the temperament, I could never, even for an instant, be
quite unaware of who she was, who I was and had been and would be
to-morrow. The recollection of these things deprived every rapture of
its passionate integrity and beneath the surface of every calm and
silent trance spread out a profound uneasiness. Kissing her I wished
that I were not kissing her, holding her in my arms I wished that it
were somebody else I was holding. And sometimes in the dark quiet
silences I thought that it would be better if I were dead.
Did she love me? At any rate she often said so, even in writing. I have
all her letters still—a score of scribbled notes sent up by messenger
from one wing of the Hotel Cecil to the other and a few longer letters
written when she was on her holiday or week-ending somewhere apart from
me. Here, I spread out the sheets. It is a competent, well-educated
writing; the pen rarely leaves the paper, running on from letter to
letter, from word to word. A rapid writing, flowing, clear and legible.
Only here and there, generally towards the ends of her brief notes, is
the clarity troubled; there are scrawled words made up of formless
letters. I pore over them in an attempt to interpret their meaning. “I
adore you, my beloved ... kiss you a thousand times ... long for it to
be night ... love you madly.” These are the fragmentary meanings I
contrive to disengage from the scribbles. We write such things illegibly
for the same reason as we clothe our bodies. Modesty does not permit us
to walk naked, and the expression of our most intimate thoughts, our
most urgent desires and secret memories, must not—even when we have so
far done violence to ourselves as to commit the words to paper—be too
easily read and understood. Pepys, when he recorded the most scabrous
details of his loves, is not content with writing in cipher; he breaks
into bad French as well. And I remember, now that I mention Pepys,
having done the same sort of thing in my own letters to Barbara; winding
up with a “Bellissima, ti voglio un bene enorme,” or a “Je t’embrasse un
peu partout.”
But did she love me? In a kind of way I think she did. I gratified her
vanity. Her successes so far had mostly been with genial young soldiers.
She had counted few literary men among her slaves. And being infected
with the queer snobbery of those who regard an artist, or any one
calling himself by that name, as somehow superior to other beings—she
was more impressed by a Café Royal loafer than by an efficient officer
and considered that it was a more arduous and finer thing to be able to
paint, or even appreciate, a cubist picture or play a piece by Bartok on
the piano than to run a business or plead in a court of law—being
therefore deeply convinced of my mysterious importance and
significance—she was flattered to have me abjectly gambolling around
her. There is a German engraving of the sixteenth century, made at the
time of the reaction against scholasticism, which represents a naked
Teutonic beauty riding on the back of a bald and bearded man, whom she
directs with a bridle and urges on with a switch. The old man is
labelled Aristotle. After two thousand years of slavery to the
infallible sage it was a good revenge. To Barbara, no doubt, I appeared
as a kind of minor Aristotle. But what made the comparison somewhat less
flattering to me was the fact that she was equally gratified by the
attentions of another literary man, the swarthy Syrian with the blue
jowl and the silver monocle. Even more gratified, I think; for he wrote
poems which were frequently published in the monthly magazines (mine,
alas, were not) and, what was more, he never lost an opportunity of
telling people that he was a poet; he was for ever discussing the
inconveniences and compensating advantages of possessing an artistic
temperament. That, for a time at any rate, she preferred me to the
Syrian was due to the fact that I was quite unattached and far more
hopelessly in love with Barbara than he. The red-haired and, to me,
inferior substitute for Buckle’s _History_ engrossed the greater part of
his heart at this time. Moreover, he was a calm and experienced lover
who did not lose his head about trifles. From me Barbara got passion of
a kind she could not have hoped for from the Syrian—a passion which, in
spite of my reluctance, in spite of my efforts to resist it, reduced me
to a state of abjection at her feet. It is pleasant to be worshipped, to
command and inflict pain; Barbara enjoyed these things as much as any
one.
It was the Syrian who in the end displaced me. I had noticed in October
that friends from South Africa, with whom it was necessary for Barbara
to lunch and dine, kept arriving in ever increasing quantities. And when
it wasn’t friends from South Africa it was Aunt Phoebe, who had become
suddenly importunate. Or old Mr. Goble, the one who had known her
grandfather so well. When I asked her to describe these festivities, she
either said:
“Oh, it was dreadfully dull. We talked about the family,” or merely
smiled, shrugged her shoulders and retired into her impregnable silence.
“Why do you lie to me?” I asked.
She preserved her silence and her secret smile.
There were evenings when I insisted that she should throw over the
friends from South Africa and dine with me. Reluctantly she would
consent; but she took her revenge on these occasions by talking about
all the jolly men she had known.
One evening, when, in spite of all my entreaties, my threats and
commands, she had gone to dine with Aunt Phoebe in Golders Green and
stay the night, I kept watch in Regent Square. It was a damp, cold
night. From nine o’clock till past midnight I remained at my post,
marching up and down opposite the house where she lived. As I walked I
ran the point of my stick with a rattling noise along the railings which
surrounded the gardens in the middle of the square; that rattling
accompanied my thoughts. From the dank black trees overhead an
occasional heavy drop would fall. I must have walked twelve miles that
evening.
In those three hours I thought of many things. I thought of the suddenly
leaping bonfire and the young face shining in the darkness. I thought of
my boyish love, and then how I had seen that face again and the
different love it had inspired in the man. I thought of kisses,
caresses, whispers in the darkness. I thought of the Syrian with his
black eyebrows and his silver monocle, his buttery dark skin damply
shining through the face-powder, and the powder snowy white among the
black stubbles of his jowl. She was probably with him at this moment.
Monna Vanna, Monna Bice—“Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use to
say, who have no mistress but their Muse.” Reality gives imagination the
lie direct. Barbara is the truth, I thought, and that she likes the man
with the silver monocle is the truth, and that I have slept with her is
the truth, and that he has too is quite probably the truth.
And it is the truth that men are cruel and stupid and that they suffer
themselves to be driven even to destruction by shepherds as stupid as
themselves. I thought of my passion for universal justice, of my desire
that all men should be free, leisured, educated, of my imaginations of a
future earth peopled by human beings who should live according to
reason. But of what use is leisure, when leisure is occupied with
listening-in and going to football matches? freedom, when men
voluntarily enslave themselves to politicians like those who now rule
the world? education, when the literate read the evening papers and the
fiction magazines? And the future, the radiant future—supposing that it
should differ from the past in anything but the spread of material
comfort and spiritual uniformity, suppose it conceivably were to be in
some way superior, what has that to do with me? Nothing whatever.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
I was interrupted in my meditations by a policeman who came up to me,
politely touched his helmet and asked me what I was doing. “I seen you
walking up and down here for the last hour,” he said. I gave him half a
crown and told him I was waiting for a lady. The policeman laughed
discreetly. I laughed too. Indeed, the joke was a marvellously good one.
When he was gone, I went on with my walking.
And this war, I thought. Was there the slightest prospect that any good
would come of it? The war to end war! The argument was forcible enough
this time; it was backed up with a kick in the breech, the most terrific
kick ever administered. But would it convince humanity more effectively
than any other argument had ever done?
Still, men are courageous, I thought, are patient, kind,
self-sacrificing. But they are all the contradictory things, as well—and
both, good and bad, because they can’t help it. Forgive them, for they
know not what they do. Everything arises from a great primeval animal
stupidity. That is the deepest of all realities—stupidity, the being
unaware.
And the aware, the not stupid—they are the odd exceptions, they are
irrelevant to the great reality, they are lies like the ideal of love,
like dreams of the future, like belief in justice. To live among their
works is to live in a world of bright falsehoods, apart from the real
world, it is to escape. Escape is cowardly; to be comforted by what is
untrue or what is irrelevant to the world in which we live is stupid.
And my own talents, such as they are, are irrelevant. So is the art to
whose service I devote them, a lying consolation. A Martian would find
the writing of phrases containing words of similar sound at fixed
recurrent intervals as queer as buying castor oil for the lubrification
of machines of destruction. I remembered the lines I had written for
Barbara—the cheerful comic-amorous lines—at the time of the last
epidemic of air raids. The octosyllables jingled in my head.
But when the next full moon invites
New bugaboos and fly-by-nights,
Let us seek out some deep alcove,
Some immemorial haunt of love.
There we’ll retire with cakes and wine
And dare the imbecile to shine....
I was just repeating them to myself, when a taxi turned into the quiet
square, rolled slowly along the curb and came to a halt in front of the
house where Barbara lived. By the dim light of a muffled street lamp I
saw two people stepping out of it, a man and a woman. The masculine
silhouette moved forward and, bending over his hand, began to count
money by the light of the little lamp at the recording clock-face. In
the narrow beam I saw the glitter of a monocle. Money clinked, the taxi
drove away. The two figures mounted the steps; the door opened before
them, they passed into the house.
I walked away, repeating to myself every injurious and abusive word that
can be applied to a woman. I felt, if anything, rather relieved. It
pleased me to think that all was over, all was now definitely and for
ever done with.
“’Night, sir.”
It was the friendly policeman; I thought I heard an almost imperceptible
note of amusement in his voice.
For the next four days I made no sign of life. Every day I hoped that
she would write or telephone to ask what had become of me. She did
nothing of the kind. My sense of relief had turned into a feeling of
misery. On the fifth day, as I was going out to lunch, I met her in the
courtyard. She made no reference to the unprecedented length of my
silence. I said none of the bitter things that I had planned to say in
the event of just such an accidental meeting as this. Instead, I asked
her, I implored her even, to come to lunch. Barbara declined the
invitation; she had a South African engagement.
“Come to dinner, then,” I abjectly begged. Humiliation, I felt, could go
no further. I would give anything to be received back into grace.
Barbara shook her head. “I wish I could,” she said. “But that tiresome
old Mr. Goble....”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
Such, then, were the phantoms that my recitation called up to dance on
the surface of the Tyrrhenian. Salutarily they reminded me that I was
only on my holiday, that the landscape in the midst of which I was now
floating was hardly better than an illusion and that life was only real
and earnest during the eleven months of each year which I spent between
Gog’s Court and Miss Carruthers’s. I was a democratic Englishman and a
Londoner at that, living in an age when the _Daily Mail_ sells two
million copies every morning; I had no right to so much sunlight, so
tepid and clear a sea, such spiky mountains, such clouds, such blue
expanses of sky; I had no right to Shelley; and if I were a true
democrat, then I ought not even to think. But again I must plead my
congenital weakness.
Couched on the water, I was dreaming of the ideal democratic state where
no irrelevant Holy Ghost-possessed exception should trouble the flat
serenity of the rule—the rule of Cloudesley and Carruthers, Fluffy and
the alert, inimitable Brimstone—when all at once I became aware that a
sailing-boat was coming up behind me, was right on top of me, in fact.
The white sail towered over me; with a little sizzling ripple at the
prow, with a clop clop of tiny waves against its flanks, the brown
varnished boat bore quickly down on me. It is a horrible thing to be
afraid, to be shaken by that sudden spasm of fear which cannot be
controlled because it comes so quickly that the controlling forces of
the mind are taken unaware. Every cell in the body, it seems, feels
terror; from a man one is humiliated for a moment into a congeries of
shrinking amoebae. One descends the scale of being; one drops down the
evolutionary gamut to become for a second no more than a startled and
terrified beast. One moment I had been dozing on my translucent
mattress, like a philosopher; the next I was inarticulately shouting,
frantically moving my limbs to escape from the approaching and now
inevitable peril.
“Hi!” I was yelling, and then something caught me a fearful crack on the
side of the head and pushed me down into the water. I was conscious of
swallowing a vast quantity of brine, of breathing water into my lungs
and violently choking. Then for a time I knew nothing; the blow must
momentarily have stunned me. I became more or less conscious again, to
find myself just coming to the surface, my face half in, half out of
water. I was coughing and gasping—coughing to get rid of the water that
was in my lungs, gasping for air. Both processes, I now perceive,
achieved exactly the contrary of what they were intended to achieve. For
I coughed up all the stationary air that was in my lungs and, my mouth
being under water, I drew in fresh gulps of brine. Meanwhile my blood,
loaded with carbonic acid gas, kept rushing to my lungs in the hope of
exchanging the deadly stuff for oxygen. In vain; there was no oxygen to
exchange for it.
I felt an extraordinary pain in the back of my neck—not excruciating,
but dull; dull and far-reaching and profound, and at the same time
strangely disgusting—a sickening, revolting sort of pain. The nerves
controlling my respiratory system were giving up in despair; that
disgusting pain in my neck was their gesture of farewell, their last
spasm of agony. Slowly I ceased to be conscious; I faded gradually out
of life like the Cheshire Cat in _Alice in Wonderland_. The last thing
that was left of me, that continued to hang in my consciousness when
everything else had vanished, was the pain.
In the circumstances, I know, it would have been the classical thing if
all my past life had unwound itself in a flash before the mind’s eye.
Whiz—an uninteresting drama in thirty-two reels ought duly to have run
its course and I should have remembered everything, from the taste of
the baby food in my bottle to the taste of yesterday’s marsala at the
Grand Hotel, from my first caning to my last kiss. In point of fact,
however, none of the correct things happened. The last thoughts I
remember thinking as I went down were about the Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette
and my mother. In a final access of that conscientiousness which has
haunted and handicapped me all my life long, I reflected that I ought to
have another leading article ready by next Friday. And it struck me very
forcibly that my mother would be most seriously inconvenienced when she
arrived in a few days’ time to find that I was no longer in a position
to accompany her on her journey to Rome.
When I next came to my senses I was lying face downwards on the beach
with somebody sitting astride of my back, as though we were playing
horses, using Professor Schaefer’s method of producing artificial
respiration. “Uno, due, tre, quattro”—and at every “quattro” the man on
my back threw his weight forward on to his hands, which were resting,
one on either side of the spine, on my lower ribs. The contents of my
lungs were violently expelled. Then my rescuer straightened himself up
again, the pressure was relaxed and my lungs replenished themselves with
air. “Uno, due, tre, quattro”—the process began again.
“He’s breathing! He’s all right. He’s opening his eyes!”
Carefully, as though I were a crate of very valuable china, they turned
me right way up. I was aware of the strong sunshine, of a throbbing
headache centred somewhere above the left temple, of a crowd of people
standing round. With deliberation and consciously I breathed the air;
loud voices shouted instructions. Two people began to rub the soles of
my feet. A third ran up with a child’s bucket full of sun-scorched sand
and poured it on the pit of my stomach. This happy thought immediately
had an immense success. All the curious and sympathetic spectators who
had been standing round my corpse, looking on while Professor Schaefer
was being applied to me and wishing that they could do something to
help, now discovered that there was actually something helpful that they
could do. They could help to restore my circulation by sprinkling hot
sand on me. In a moment I had a dozen sympathisers busy around me,
skimming the cream off the hot tideless beach in little buckets, with
spades or in the palms of their scooping hands, to pour it over me. In a
few seconds I was almost buried under a mound of burning grey sand. On
the faces of all my good Samaritans I noticed an expression of
child-like earnestness. They rushed backwards and forwards with their
little buckets as though there were nothing more serious in life than
building sand castles on the stomachs of drowned men. And the children
themselves joined in. Horrified at first by the spectacle of my limp and
livid corpse, they had clung to paternal hands, shrunk away behind
protecting skirts, looking on while Professor Schaefer was being
practised on me, with a reluctant and disgusted curiosity. But when I
had come alive again, when they saw their elders burying me with sand
and understood that it was really only a tremendously good game, then
how violent was their reaction! Shrilly laughing, whooping with
excitement and delight, they rushed on me with their little implements.
It was only with difficulty that they could be prevented from throwing
handfuls of sand in my face, from pouring it into my ears, from making
me eat it. And one small boy, ambitious to do something that nobody else
had done, rushed down to the sea, filled his bucket with water and stale
foam, ran back and emptied its contents, with what a shout of triumph!
plop, from a height on to my solar plexus.
That was too much for my gravity. I began to laugh. But I did not get
very far with my laughter. For after the first outburst of it, when I
wanted to take breath for the next, I found that I had forgotten how to
breathe and it was only after a long choking struggle that I managed to
reacquire the art. The children were frightened; this was no part of the
delightful game. The grown-ups stopped being helpful and allowed
themselves to be driven away from my corpse by the competent
authorities. An umbrella was planted in the sand behind me. Within its
rosy shadow I was left in peace to make secure my precarious footing on
existence. For a long time I lay with my eyes shut. An immensely long
way off, it seemed, somebody was still rubbing my feet. Periodically,
somebody else pushed a spoon with brandy and milk in it into my mouth. I
felt very tired, but wonderfully comfortable. And it seemed to me at
that moment that there could be nothing more exquisitely pleasurable
than merely breathing.
After a while, I felt sufficiently strong and sufficiently safe in my
strength to open my eyes again and look about me. How novel, how
wonderfully charming everything seemed! The first thing I saw was a
half-naked young giant crouching obsequiously at my feet, rubbing my
bloodless soles and ankles. Under his shining copper skin there was a
sliding of muscles. His face was like a Roman’s, his hair jet black and
curly. When he noticed that I had opened my eyes and was looking at him
he smiled and his teeth were brilliantly white, his brown eyes flashed
from a setting of shiny bluish enamel.
A voice asked me in Italian how I was feeling. I looked round. A stout
man with a large red, rubbery face and a black moustache was sitting
beside me. In one hand he held a teacup, in the other a spoon. He was
dressed in white duck. The sweat was pouring off his face; he looked as
though he had been buttered. From all round his very bright black eyes
little wrinkles spread out like rays from a gloria. He proffered the
spoon. I swallowed. The backs of his large brown hands were covered with
fine hairs.
“I am the doctor,” he explained, and smiled.
I nodded and smiled back. It seemed to me that I had never seen such a
lovely doctor before.
And then, when I looked up, there was the blue sky, beautifully
scalloped by the edge of the pink umbrella. And lowering my eyes I saw
people standing round looking at me—all smiling. Between them I caught
glimpses of the blue sea.
“Belli sono,” I said to the doctor, and shut my eyes again.
And many men so beautiful.... In the blood-red darkness behind my
eyelids I listened to their voices. Slowly, voluptuously, I breathed the
salty air. The young giant went on rubbing my feet. With an effort I
lifted one of my hands and laid it on my chest. Lightly, like a blind
man feeling for the sense of a page of Braille, I ran my fingers over
the smooth skin. I felt the ribs and the little depressions between
them. And all at once, under my finger tips, I was aware of a hardly
perceptible throbbing—pulse, pulse, pulse—it was that I had been
searching for. The blind fingers creeping across the page had spelled
out a strange word. I did not try to interpret it. It was enough to be
glad that the word was there. For a long time I lay quite still, feeling
my beating heart.
“Si sente meglio?” asked the doctor.
I opened my eyes. “Mi sento felice.” He smiled at me. The rays round the
twin bright glories of his eyes emphasised themselves. It was as though
the holy symbol had somehow suddenly become more holy.
“It is good not to be dead,” he said.
“It is very good.”
And I looked once more at the sky and the pink umbrella overhead. I
looked at the young giant, so strong and yet so docile at my feet. I
turned my eyes to right and left. The circle of curious spectators had
dissolved. Out of danger, I had ceased to be an object of sympathy or
curiosity. The holiday-makers were going about their business as usual.
I watched them, happily.
A young couple in bathing dresses walked slowly past me towards the sea.
Their faces, their necks and shoulders, their bare arms and legs were
burned to a soft transparent brown. They walked slowly, holding hands,
walked with such a grace, such an easy majesty that I felt like weeping.
They were very young, they were tall, slender and strong. They were
beautiful as a couple of young thoroughbred horses; gracefully, idly,
majestically they seemed to be walking in a world that was beyond good
and evil. It did not matter what they might do or say; they were
justified by the mere fact that they existed. They paused, looked at me
for a moment, one with brown eyes, one with grey, flashed at me with
their white teeth, asked how I was, and when I told them that I was
better, smiled again and passed on.
A little girl dressed in a primrose-coloured garment that was paler in
tone than her dark face and limbs came running up, halted two or three
yards away and began to look at me earnestly. Her eyes were very large
and fringed by absurdly long black lashes. Above them there expanded an
immense domed forehead that would have done credit to a philosopher. Her
snub nose was so small that you hardly noticed it was there at all.
Black and frizzy, her hair stood out, in a state of permanent explosion,
round her head. For a long time she stared at me. I stared back.
“What do you want?” I asked at last.
And suddenly, at the sound of my voice, the child was overwhelmed by
shyness. She covered her face with her forearm as though she were
warding off a blow. Then, after a second or two, she peeped out at me
cautiously from under her elbow. Her face had become quite red. I called
again. It was once too often. She turned and ran away, ran back to her
family, who were sitting, twenty yards down the beach, in the precarious
and shifting oasis of shadow cast by a large striped umbrella. I saw her
hurl herself into the arms of a large placid mother in white muslin.
Then, having successfully abolished my existence by burying her face in
the comfortable bosom, she slid down again from her mother’s knee and
went on playing with her little sister, serenely, as though the untoward
incident had never occurred.
Mournfully, from somewhere in the distance, came the long, suspended cry
of the vendor of doughnuts. “Bomboloni.” Two young American marchesas in
purple bathing gowns went past, talking together on one note, in
indefatigable even voices. “... and he has such a lovely mentality,” I
heard one of them saying. “But what I like,” said the other, who seemed
to have acquired more completely the Latin habit of mind, “what I like
is his teeth.” A middle-aged man, with the large stomach that comes of
too much _pasta_, and a very thin little boy of twelve now entered my
field of vision, all wet and shiny from the sea. The hot sand burned
their feet and they went hopping across the scorching beach with an
agility which it was good to see. But the soles of mad Concetta’s feet
were made of hornier stuff. Barefooted, she walked down every morning
from the mountains, carrying her basket of fruit over one arm and
holding in the other hand a long staff. She hawked her wares along the
beach, she went the round of the villas until her basket was empty. Then
she walked back again, across the plain and up into the hills. Turning
from the fat man and the little thin boy I saw her standing before me.
She was dressed in a stained and tattered old dress. Her grey hair
escaped in wisps from under a wide straw hat. Her old face was eager,
thin and sharp; the wrinkled skin was like brown parchment stretched
over the bones. Leaning on her staff, she looked at me for a little in
silence.
“So you’re the drowned foreigner,” she said at last.
“If he were drowned, how could he be alive?” asked the doctor. The young
giant found this exquisitely witty; he laughed profoundly, out of the
depths of his huge chest. “Go away now, Concetta,” the doctor went on.
“He must be kept quiet. We can’t have you treating him to one of your
discourses.”
Concetta paid no attention to him. She was used to this sort of thing.
“The mercy of God,” she began, shaking her head, “where should we be
without it? You are young, signorino. You still have time to do much.
God has preserved you. I am old. But I lean on the cross.” And
straightening herself up, she lifted her staff. A cross-piece of wood
had been nailed near the top of it. Affectionately she kissed it. “I
love the cross,” she said. “The cross is beautiful, the cross is....”
But she was interrupted by a young nurserymaid who came running up to
ask for half a kilo of the best grapes. Theology could not be allowed to
interfere with business. Concetta took out her little steelyard, put a
bunch of grapes in the pan and moved the weight back and forth along the
bar in search of equilibrium. The nurserymaid stood by. She had a round
face, red cheeks, dimples, black hair and eyes like black buttons. She
was as plump as a fruit. The young giant looked up at her in frank
admiration. She rolled the buttons towards him—for an instant, then
utterly ignored him, and humming nonchalantly to herself as though she
were alone on a desert island and wanted to keep her spirits up, she
gazed pensively away at the picturesque beauties of nature.
“Six hundred grammes,” said Concetta.
The nurserymaid paid for them, and still humming, still on her desert
island, she walked off, taking very small steps, undulating rotundly,
like a moon among wind-driven clouds. The young giant stopped rubbing my
feet and stared after her. With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft
pace the nurserymaid tottered along, undulating unsteadily on her high
heels across the sand.
_Rabear_, I thought: old Skeat was perfectly right to translate the word
as he did.
“Bella grassa,” said the doctor, voicing what were obviously the young
giant’s sentiments. Mine too; for after all, she was alive, obeyed the
laws of her nature, walked in the sun, ate grapes and _rabear’d_. I shut
my eyes again. Pulse, pulse, pulse; the heart beat steadily under my
fingers. I felt like Adam, newly created and weak like a butterfly fresh
from its chrysalis—the red clay still too wet and limp to allow of my
standing upright. But soon, when it had dried to firmness, I should
arise and scamper joyously about this span new world, and be myself a
young giant, a graceful and majestic thoroughbred, a child, a wondering
Bedlamite.
There are some people who contrive to pass their lives in a state of
permanent convalescence. They behave at every moment as though they had
been miraculously preserved from death the moment before; they live
exhilaratedly for the mere sake of living and can be intoxicated with
happiness just because they happen not to be dead. For those not born
convalescent it may be that the secret of happiness consists in being
half-drowned regularly three times a day before meals. I recommend it as
a more drastic alternative to my “water-shoot-in-every-office” remedy
for ennui.
“You’re alone here?” asked the doctor.
I nodded.
“No relations?”
“Not at present.”
“No friends of any kind?”
I shook my head.
“H’m,” he said.
He had a wart growing on one side of his nose where it joined the cheek.
I found myself studying it intently; it was a most interesting wart,
whitish, but a little flushed on its upper surface. It looked like a
small unripe cherry. “Do you like cherries?” I asked.
The doctor seemed rather surprised. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s
silence and with great deliberation, as though he had been carefully
weighing the matter in his mind.
“So do I.” And I burst out laughing. This time, however, my breathing
triumphantly stood the strain. “So do I. But not unripe ones,” I added,
gasping with mirth. It seemed to me that nothing funnier had ever been
said.
And then Mrs. Aldwinkle stepped definitely into my life. For, looking
round, still heaving with the after-swell of my storm of laughter, I
suddenly saw the Chinese lantern lady of the _patino_ standing before
me. Her flame-coloured costume, a little less radiant now that it was
wet, still shone among the aquarium shadow of her green parasol, and her
face looked as though it were she who had been drowned, not I.
“They tell me that you’re an Englishman,” she said in the same
ill-controlled, unmusical voice I had heard, not long since, misquoting
Shelley.
Still tipsy, still light-headed with convalescence, I laughingly
admitted it.
“I hear you were nearly drowned.”
“Quite right,” I said, still laughing; it was such a marvellous joke.
“I’m most sorry to hear....” She had a way of leaving her sentences
unfinished. The words would tail off into a dim inarticulate blur of
sound.
“Don’t mention it,” I begged her. “It isn’t at all disagreeable, you
know. Afterwards, at any rate....” I stared at her affectionately and
with my convalescent’s boundless curiosity. She stared back at me. Her
eyes, I thought, must have the same bulge as those little red lenses one
screws to the rear forks of bicycles; they collected all the light
diffused around them and reflected it again with a concentrated glitter.
“I came to ask whether I could be of any assistance,” said the Chinese
lantern lady.
“Most kind.”
“You’re alone here?”
“Quite, for the present.”
“Then perhaps you might care to come and stay a night or two at my
house, until you’re entirely....” She mumbled, made a gesture that
implied the missing word and went on. “I have a house over there.” She
waved her hand in the direction of the mountainous section of the
Shelleian landscape.
Gleefully, in my tipsy mood, I accepted her invitation. “Too
delightful,” I said. Everything, this morning, was too delightful. I
should have accepted with genuine, unmixed pleasure an invitation to
stay with Miss Carruthers or Mr. Brimstone.
“And your name?” she asked. “I don’t know that yet.”
“Chelifer.”
“Chelifer? Not Francis Chelifer?”
“Francis Chelifer,” I affirmed.
“Francis Chelifer!” Positively, her soul was in my name. “But how
_won_derful! I’ve wanted to meet you for years.”
For the first time since I had risen intoxicated from the dead I had an
awful premonition of to-morrow’s sobriety. I remembered for the first
time that round the corner, only just round the corner, lay the real
world.
“And what’s your name?” I asked apprehensively.
“Lilian Aldwinkle,” said the Chinese lantern lady; and she shaped her
lips into a smile that was positively piercing in its sweetness. The
blue lamps that were her eyes glittered with such a focussed intensity
that even the colour-blind chauffeurs who see green omnibuses rolling
down Piccadilly and in the Green Park blood-coloured grass and vermilion
trees would have known them for the danger signals they were.
An hour later I was reclining on cushions in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s Rolls
Royce. There was no escape.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
No escape.... But I was still tipsy enough not seriously to desire
escape. My premonition of sobriety had been no more than a momentary
flash. It came and it passed again, almost immediately, as I became once
more absorbed in what seemed to me the endless and lovely comedy that
was being acted all around me. It was enough for me that I existed and
that things were happening to me. I was carried by two or three young
giants to the hotel, I was dressed, my clothes were packed for me. In
the entrance hall, while I was waiting for Mrs. Aldwinkle to come and
fetch me, I made some essays at walking; the feebleness of my legs was a
source to me of delighted laughter.
Dressed in pale yellow tussore with a large straw hat on her head, Mrs.
Aldwinkle finally appeared. Her guests, she explained, had gone home in
another machine; I should be able to lie flat, or very nearly, in her
empty car. And in case I felt bad—she shook a silver brandy flask at me.
Escape? I did not so much as think of it, I was enchanted.
Luxuriously I reclined among the cushions. Mrs. Aldwinkle tapped the
forward-looking window. The chauffeur languidly moved his hand and the
machine rolled forward, nosing its way through the crowd of admiring
car-fanciers which, in Italy, collects as though by magic round every
stationary automobile. And Mrs. Aldwinkle’s was a particularly
attractive specimen. Young men called to their friends: “_Venite. È una
Ro-Ro._” And in awed voices little boys whispered to one another: “_Una
Ro-Ro._” The crowd reluctantly dispersed before our advance; we glided
away from before the Grand Hotel, turned into the main street, crossed
the piazza, in the centre of which, stranded high and dry by the
receding sea, stood the little pink fort which had been built by the
Princes of Massa Carrara to keep watch on a Mediterranean made dangerous
by Barbary pirates, and rolled out of the village by the road leading
across the plain towards the mountains.
Shuffling along in a slowly moving cloud of dust, a train of white oxen
advanced, shambling and zig-zagging along the road to meet us. Eight
yoke of them there were, a long procession, with half a dozen drivers
shouting and tugging at the leading ropes and cracking their whips. They
were dragging a low truck, clamped to which was a huge monolith of
flawless white marble. Uneasily, as we crawled past them, the animals
shook their heads, turning this way and that, as though desperately
seeking some way of escape. Their long curving horns clashed together;
their soft white dewlaps shook; and into their blank brown eyes there
came a look of fear, an entreaty that we should take pity on their
invincible stupidity and remember that they simply could not, however
hard they tried, get used to motor cars.
Mrs. Aldwinkle pointed at the monolith. “Imagine what Michelangelo could
have made out of that,” she said. Then, noticing that her pointing hand
still grasped the silver flask, she became very solicitous. “You’re sure
you wouldn’t like a sip of this?” she asked, leaning forward. The twin
blue danger signals glittered in my face. Her garments exhaled a scent
in which there was ambergris. Her breath smelt of heliotrope cachous.
But even now I did not take fright; I made no effort to escape. Guided
by their invincible stupidity, the white oxen had behaved more sensibly
than I.
We rolled on. The hills came nearer. The far-away peaks of bare
limestone were hidden by the glowing mass of the tilled and wooded
foothills. Happily I looked at those huge hilly forms. “How beautiful!”
I said. Mrs. Aldwinkle seemed to take my words as a personal compliment.
“I’m so glad you think so. So awfully ...” she replied in the tone of an
author to whom you have just said that you enjoyed his last book so
much.
We drew nearer; the hills towered up, they opposed themselves like a
huge wall. But the barrier parted before us; we passed through the gates
of a valley that wound up into the mountain. Our road now ran parallel
with the bed of a torrent. In the flanks of the hill to our right a
marble quarry made a huge bare scar, hundreds of feet long. The crest of
the hill was fringed with a growth of umbrella pines. The straight
slender tree trunks jetted up thirty feet without a branch; their
wide-spreading flattened domes of foliage formed a thin continuous
silhouette, between which and the dark mass of the hill one could see a
band of sky, thinly barred by the bare stems. It was as though, to
emphasise the outlines of his hills, an artist had drawn a fine and
supple brush stroke parallel with the edge of the silhouette and a
little apart from it.
We rolled on. The high road narrowed into the squalid street of a little
town. The car crept along, hooting as it went.
“Vezza,” Mrs. Aldwinkle explained. “Michelangelo used to come here for
his marbles.”
“Indeed?” I was charmed to hear it.
Over the windows of a large shop filled with white crosses, broken
columns and statues, I read the legend: “Anglo-American Tombstone
Company.” We emerged from the narrow street on to an embankment running
along the edge of a river. From the opposite bank the ground rose
steeply.
“There,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle on a note of triumph as we crossed the
bridge, “that’s my house.” She pointed up. From the hill-top a long
façade stared down through twenty windows; a tall tower pricked the sky.
“The palace was built in 1630,” she began. I even enjoyed the history
lesson.
We had crossed the bridge, we were climbing by a steep and winding road
through what was almost a forest of olive trees. The abrupt grassy slope
had been built up into innumerable little terraces on which the trees
were planted. Here and there, in the grey luminous shadow beneath the
trees, little flocks of sheep were grazing. The barefooted children who
attended them came running to the side of the road to watch us passing.
“I like to think of these old princely courts,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was
saying. “Like abbeys of ... abbeys of....” She shook her brandy flask
impatiently. “You know ... in Thingumy.”
“Abbeys of Thelema,” I suggested.
“That’s it,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Sort of retiring-places where people
were free to live intelligently. That’s what I want to make this house.
I’m so delighted to have met you like this. You’re exactly the sort of
person I want.” She leaned forward, smiling and glittering. But even at
the prospect of entering the Abbey of Thelema I did not blench.
At this moment the car passed through a huge gateway. I caught a glimpse
of a great flight of steps, set between cypresses, mounting up past a
series of terraced landings to a carved doorway in the centre of the
long façade. The road turned, the car swung round and the vista was
closed. By an ilex avenue that wound round the flank of the hill we
climbed more gradually towards the house, which we approached from the
side. The road landed us finally in a large square court opposite a
shorter reproduction of the great façade. At the head of a double flight
of steps, curving horse-shoe fashion from the landing at its threshold,
a tall pompous doorway surmounted by a coat of arms cavernously invited.
The car drew up.
And about time too, as I notice on re-reading what I have written. Few
things are more profoundly boring and unprofitable than literary
descriptions. For the writer, it is true, there is a certain amusement
to be derived from the hunt for apt expressive words. Carried away by
the excitement of the chase he dashes on, regardless of the poor readers
who follow toilsomely through his stiff and clayey pages like the
runners at the tail of a hunt, seeing nothing of the fun. All writers
are also readers—though perhaps I should make exceptions in favour of a
few of my colleagues who make a specialty of native wood-notes—and must
therefore know how dreary description is. But that does not prevent them
from inflicting upon others all that they themselves have suffered.
Indeed I sometimes think that some authors must write as they do purely
out of a desire for revenge.
Mrs. Aldwinkle’s other guests had arrived and were waiting for us. I was
introduced and found them all equally charming. The little niece rushed
to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s assistance; the young man who had rowed the _patino_
rushed in his turn to the little niece’s and insisted on carrying all
the things of which she had relieved her aunt. The old man with the red
face, who had talked about the clouds, looked on benevolently at this
little scene. But another elderly gentleman with a white beard, whom I
had not seen before, seemed to view it with a certain disapproval. The
young lady who had talked about the whiteness of her legs and who turned
out to be my distinguished colleague, Miss Mary Thriplow, was now
dressed in a little green frock with a white turned-down collar, white
cuffs and buttons, which made her look like a schoolgirl in a comic
opera by Offenbach. The brown young man stood near her.
I got out of the car, refused all proffered assistance and contrived, a
little wamblingly, it is true, to mount the steps.
“You must be very careful for a little,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle with a
maternal solicitude. “These,” she added, waving her hand in the
direction of a vista of empty saloons, the entrance to which we were
just then passing, “these are the apartments of the Princesses.”
We walked right through the house into a great quadrangle surrounded on
three sides by buildings and on the fourth, towards the rising hill, by
an arcade. On a pedestal in the centre of the court stood a more than
life-sized marble statue, representing, my hostess informed me, the
penultimate Prince of Massa Carrara, wearing a very curly full-bottomed
wig, Roman kilts, buskins, and one of those handsome classical
breastplates which have the head of a Gorgon embossed in the middle of
the chest and a little dimple to indicate the position of the navel in
the middle of the round and polished belly. With the expression of one
who is about to reveal a delightful secret and who can hardly wait until
the moment of revelation comes to give vent to his pleasure, Mrs.
Aldwinkle, smiling as it were below the surface of her face, led me to
the foot of the statue. “Look!” she said. It was one of those pretty
peep-shows on which, for the sake of five minutes’ amusement and
titillation of the eye, Grand Monarchs used to spend the value of a rich
province. From the central arch of the arcade a flight of marble steps
climbed up to where, set against a semicircle of cypresses, at the crest
of the hill, a little round temple played gracefully at paganism, just
as the buskined and corseleted statue in the court below played
heroically at Plutarch.
“And now look here!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle; and taking me round to the
other side of the statue, she led me towards a great door in the centre
of the long range of buildings opposite the arcade. It was open; a
vaulted corridor, like a tunnel, led clean through the house. Through it
I could see the blue sky and the remote horizon of the sea. We walked
along it; from the further threshold I found myself looking down the
flight of steps which I had seen from below, at the entrance gate. It
was a stage scene, but made of solid marble and with growing trees.
“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.
“Magnificent,” I answered, with an enthusiasm that was beginning to be
tempered by a growing physical weariness.
“Such a view,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, poking at it with the tip of her
sunshade. “The contrast between the cypresses and the olive trees....”
“But the view’s still lovelier from the temple,” said the little niece,
who was evidently very anxious to make me realise the full pricelessness
of her Aunt Lilian’s possessions.
Mrs. Aldwinkle turned on her. “How utterly thoughtless you are!” she
said severely. “Do try to remember that poor Mr. Chelifer is still
suffering from the effects of his accident. And you expect him to go
climbing up to the temple!”
The little niece blushed and drooped beneath the reproach. We sat down.
“How are you feeling now?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, remembering once more
to be solicitous.... “Too appalling to think,” she added, “how
nearly.... And I’ve always so enormously admired your work.”
“So have I,” declared my colleague in the green frock. “Most awfully.
Still, I confess, I find some of your things a little, how shall I say,
a little alembicated. I like my poetry to be rather straightforwarder.”
“A very sophisticated desire,” said the red-faced gentleman. “Really
simple, primitive people like their poetry to be as complicated,
conventional, artificial and remote from the language of everyday
affairs as possible. We reproach the eighteenth century with its
artificiality. But the fact is that _Beowulf_ is couched in a diction
fifty times more complicated and unnatural than that of the _Essay on
Man_. And when you compare the Icelandic Sagas with Dr. Johnson, you
find that it’s the Doctor who lisps and prattles. Only the most
complicated people, living in the midst of the most artificial
surroundings, desire their poetry to be simple and straightforward.”
I shut my eyes and allowed the waves of conversation to roll over me.
And what a classy conversation! Prince Papadiamantopoulos could hardly
have kept the ball rolling on a higher level. Fatigue was sobering me.
Fatigue, the body’s weariness—some industrious little scientific emmet
ought to catalogue and measure all its various effects. All—for it isn’t
enough to show that when wage-slaves have worked too long they tend to
fall into the machines and get pulped. The fact is interesting, no
doubt; but there are other facts of no less significance. There is the
fact, for example, that slight fatigue increases our capacity for
sentiment. Those compromising love letters are always written in the
small hours; it is at night, not when we are fresh and reposed, that we
talk about ideal love and indulge our griefs. Under the influence of
slight fatigue we feel more ready than at other times to discuss the
problems of the universe, to make confidences, to dogmatise about the
nature of God and to draw up plans for the future. We are also inclined
to be more languidly voluptuous. When, however, the fatigue is increased
beyond a certain point, we cease entirely to be sentimental, voluptuous,
metaphysical or confiding. We cease to be aware of anything but the
decrepitude of our being. We take no further interest in other people or
the outside world—no further interest unless they will not leave us in
peace, when we come to hate them with a deep but ineffectual loathing,
mingled with disgust.
With me, fatigue had almost suddenly passed the critical point. My
convalescent’s delight in the world evaporated. My fellow beings no
longer seemed to me beautiful, strange and amiable. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s
attempts to bring me into the conversation exasperated me; when I looked
at her, I thought her a monster. I realised, too late (which made the
realisation the more vexatious), what I had let myself in for when I
accepted Mrs. Aldwinkle’s invitation. Fantastic surroundings, art,
classy chats about the cosmos, the intelligentsia, love.... It was too
much, even on a holiday.
I shut my eyes. Sometimes, when Mrs. Aldwinkle interpellated me, I said
yes or no, without much regard to the sense of her remark. Discussion
raged around me. From the alembication of my poetry they had gone on to
art in general. Crikey, I said to myself, crikey.... I did my best to
close the ears of my mind; and for some little time I did, indeed,
contrive to understand nothing of what was said. I thought of Miss
Carruthers, of Fluffy and Mr. Brimstone, of Gog’s Court and Mr. Bosk.
Mrs. Aldwinkle’s voice, raised by irritation to a peculiar loudness,
made itself audible to my muffled mind. “How often have I told you,
Cardan,” it said, “that you understand nothing of modern art?”
“At least a thousand times,” Mr. Cardan replied cheerfully. “But bless
your heart,” he added (and I opened my eyes in time to see his
benevolent smile), “I never mind at all.”
The smile was evidently too much for Mrs. Aldwinkle’s patience. With a
gesture of a queen who implies that the audience is at an end she rose
from her seat. “Just time,” she said, looking at her watch, “there’s
just time. I really must give Mr. Chelifer some idea of the inside of
the palace before lunch. You’d like to come?” She smiled at me like a
Siren.
Too polite to remind her of her recent outburst against the little
niece, I declared myself delighted by the idea. Wamblingly I followed
her into the house. Behind me I heard the young rower exclaiming on a
note of mingled astonishment and indignation: “But a moment ago she was
saying that Mr. Chelifer was too ill to....”
“Ah, but that was different,” said the voice of the red-faced man.
“Why was it different?”
“Because, my young friend, the other fellow is in all cases the rule;
but _I_ am invariably the exception. Shall we follow?”
Mrs. Aldwinkle made me look at painted ceilings till I almost fell down
from giddiness. She dragged me through room after baroque room; then
drove me up dark stairs into the Middle Ages. By the time we were back
in the _trecento_ I was so much exhausted that I could hardly stand. My
knees trembled, I felt sick.
“This is the old armoury,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle with mounting enthusiasm.
“And there are the stairs leading up to the tower.” She pointed to a low
archway, through which, in a dusty twilight, the bottom of a steep stair
could be seen corkscrewing up to unknown heights. “There are two hundred
and thirty-two steps,” she added.
At this moment the gong for luncheon rumbled remotely from the other end
of the huge empty house.
“Thank God!” said the red-faced man devoutly.
But our hostess, it was evident, had no feeling for punctuality. “What a
bore!” she exclaimed. “But never mind. We can make time. I wanted just
to run up the tower before lunch. There’s such a wonderful
bird’s-eye....” She looked inquiringly round. “What do you think, all of
you? Shouldn’t we just dash up? It won’t take a minute.” She repeated
the Siren smile. “Do let’s. Do!” And without waiting for the result of
her plebiscite she walked rapidly towards the stairs.
I followed her. But before I had taken five steps, the floor, the walls
of the room seemed to fade into the distance. There was a roaring in my
ears. It grew suddenly dark. I felt myself falling. For the second time
since breakfast I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I was lying on the floor, with my head on Mrs.
Aldwinkle’s knees; and she was dabbing my forehead with a wet sponge.
The first objects of which I was aware were her bright blue eyes hanging
over me, very close, very bright and alarming. “Poor fellow,” she was
saying, “poor fellow.” Then, looking up, she shouted angrily to the
owners of the various legs and skirts which I distinguished mistily to
right and left of me: “Stand back, you must stand back! Do you want to
suffocate the poor fellow?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III: THE LOVES OF THE PARALLELS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III: The Loves of the Parallels
CHAPTER I
Do all he could, Lord Hovenden had somehow found it impossible, these
last few days, to get Irene for a moment to himself. The change had come
about almost suddenly, just after that fellow Chelifer had made his
appearance. Before he came, there had been a time—beginning, strangely
enough, almost as suddenly as it had ended—a time of blissful happiness.
Whenever during those days an opportunity for a _tête-à-tête_ presented
itself Irene had been always at hand and, what was more, always
delighted to seize the opportunity. They had been for long walks
together, they had swum together far out into the sea, sat together in
the gardens, sometimes talking, sometimes silent; but very happy,
whether they spoke or not. He had talked to her about motoring and
dancing and shooting and occasionally, feeling rather shamefaced and
embarrassed by the disquieting gravity of the subject, about the working
classes. And Irene had listened with pleasure to everything he said and
had talked too. They found that they had many tastes in common. It had
been an enchantment while it lasted. And then, all at once, with the
coming of that creature Chelifer, it all came to an end. Irene was never
on the spot when opportunities offered, she never suggested
spontaneously, as once or twice, during the heavenly time, she had
actually done, that they should go for a walk together. She had no time
to talk to him; her thoughts, it seemed, were elsewhere, as with grave
and preoccupied face she hurried mysteriously about the palace and the
gardens. With an extreme anguish of spirit Lord Hovenden observed that
it was always in the direction of Chelifer that Irene seemed to be
hurrying. Did he slip out unobtrusively into the garden after lunch,
Irene was sure, a moment later, to slip out after him. When he proposed
a stroll with Calamy or Mr. Cardan, Irene always asked, shyly but with
the pallid resolution of one who by an effort of will overcomes a
natural weakness for the sake of some all-important cause, to be allowed
to join the party. And if ever Chelifer and Miss Thriplow happened to
find themselves for a moment together, Irene was always certain to come
gliding silently after them.
For all this Lord Hovenden could find only one explanation. She was in
love with the man. True, she never made any effort to talk to him when
she was in his company; she seemed even rather intimidated by his
polished silences, his pointedly insincere formulas of courtesy and
compliment. And for his part Chelifer, as far as his rival could see,
behaved with a perfect correctitude. Too correctly, indeed, in
Hovenden’s opinion. He couldn’t tolerate the fellow’s sarcastic
politeness; the man ought to be more human with little Irene. Lord
Hovenden would have liked to wring his neck; wring it for two mutually
exclusive offences—luring the girl on and being too damned stand-offish.
And she looked so wretched. Looking out of its square window in the
thick bright bell of copper hair, the little face, so childish in the
largeness and limpidity of the eyes, in the shortness of the upper lip,
had been, these last days, the face of a pathetic, not a merry child.
Lord Hovenden could only suppose that she was pining with love for that
creature—though what the devil she contrived to see in him he, for one,
couldn’t imagine. And it was so obvious, too, that old Lilian was also
quite gone on the fellow and making a fool of herself about him. Did she
want to compete with her Aunt Lilian? There’d be the devil and all to
pay if Mrs. Aldwinkle discovered that Irene was trying to cut her out.
The more he thought of the wretched business, the wretcheder it seemed.
Lord Hovenden was thoroughly miserable.
So too was Irene. But not for the reasons Lord Hovenden supposed. It was
true that she had spent most of her days since Chelifer’s arrival in
following the new guest like an unhappy shadow. But it had not been on
her own account, not at her own desire. Chelifer did indeed intimidate
her; so far Lord Hovenden had guessed aright. He had been hopelessly at
fault in imagining that Irene adored the man in spite of her fear of
him. If she followed him about, it was because Mrs. Aldwinkle had asked
her to. And if she looked unhappy, it was because Aunt Lilian was
unhappy—and a little, too, because the task which Aunt Lilian had set
her was a disagreeable one; disagreeable not only in itself, but because
it prevented her from continuing those pleasant talks with Hovenden.
Ever since that evening when Aunt Lilian twitted her on her coldness and
her blindness, Irene had made a point of seeing Hovenden as much as she
could. She wanted to prove that Aunt Lilian had been wrong. She wasn’t
cold, she wasn’t blind; she could see as clearly as any one when people
liked her, and she could be as warmly appreciative. And really, after
the episodes with Jacques, Mario and Peter, it wasn’t fair of Aunt
Lilian to tease her like that. It simply wasn’t. Moved by an indignant
desire to confute Aunt Lilian as quickly as possible, she had positively
made advances to Hovenden; he was so shy that, if she hadn’t, it would
have been months before she could have offered her aunt anything like
convincing rebuttal of her imputation. She had talked with him, gone for
walks with him, quite prepared to feel at any moment the infinitude of
passion. But the affair passed off, somehow, very differently from the
others. She began to feel something indeed, but something quite unlike
that which she had felt for Peter and Jacques. For them it had been a
fizzy, exciting, restless feeling, intimately connected with large
hotels, jazz bands, coloured lights and Aunt Lilian’s indefatigable
desire to get everything out of life, her haunting fear that she was
missing something, even in the heart of the fun. “Enjoy yourself, let
yourself go,” Aunt Lilian was always telling her. And “How handsome he
is! what a lovely fellow!” she would say as one of the young men passed.
Irene had done her best to take Aunt Lilian’s advice. And it had seemed
to her, sometimes, when she was dancing and the lights, the music, the
moving crowd had blended together into a single throbbing whole, it had
seemed to her that she had indeed climbed to the peak of happiness. And
the young man, the Peter or Jacques whom Aunt Lilian had hypnotised her
into thinking a marvel among young men, was regarded as the source of
this bliss. Between the dances, under the palm trees in the garden, she
had even suffered herself to be kissed; and the experience had been
rather momentous. But when the time came for them to move on, Irene
departed without regret. The fizzy feeling had gone flat. But with
Hovenden it was different. She just liked him quietly, more and more. He
was so nice and simple and eager and young. So young—she liked that
particularly. Irene felt that he was really younger, in spite of his
age, than she. The other ones had all been older, more knowing and
accomplished; all rather bold and insolent. But Hovenden wasn’t in the
least like that. One felt very secure with him, Irene thought. And there
was somehow no question of love when one was with him—at any rate the
question wasn’t at all pressing or urgent. Aunt Lilian used to ask her
every evening how they were getting on and if it were getting exciting.
And Irene never quite knew what to answer. She found very soon that she
didn’t want to talk about Hovenden; he was so different from the others,
and their friendship had nothing infinite about it. It was just a
sensible friendship. She dreaded Aunt Lilian’s questions; and she found
herself almost disliking Aunt Lilian when, in that dreadful bantering
way of hers, she ruthlessly insisted on putting them. In some ways,
indeed, the coming of Chelifer had been a relief; for Aunt Lilian became
at once so profoundly absorbed in her own emotions that she had no time
or inclination to think of any one else’s. Yes, that had been a great
relief. But on the other hand, the work of supervision and espionage to
which Aunt Lilian had set her made it all but impossible for Irene ever
to talk to Hovenden. She might as well not be there, Irene sadly
reflected. Still, poor Aunt Lilian was so dreadfully unhappy. One must
do all one could for her. Poor Aunt Lilian!
“I want to know what he thinks of me,” Aunt Lilian had said to her in
the secret hours of the night. “What does he say about me to other
people?” Irene answered that she had never heard him say anything about
her. “Then you must listen, you must keep your ears open.”
But however much she listened, Irene never had anything to report.
Chelifer never mentioned Aunt Lilian. For Mrs. Aldwinkle that was almost
worse than if he had spoken badly of her. To be ignored was terrible.
“Perhaps he likes Mary,” she had suggested. “I thought I saw him looking
at her to-day in a strange, intent sort of way.” And Irene had been
ordered to watch them. But for all she could discover, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s
jealousies were utterly unfounded. Between Chelifer and Mary Thriplow
there passed no word or look that the most suspicious imagination could
interpret in terms of amorous intimacy. “He’s queer, he’s an
extraordinary creature.” That was the refrain of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s talk
about him. “He seems to care for nothing. So cold, such a fixed, frigid
mask. And yet one has only to look at him—his eyes, his mouth—to see
that underneath....” And Mrs. Aldwinkle would shake her head and sigh.
And her speculations about him would go rambling on and on, round and
round, treading the same ground again and again, arriving nowhere. Poor
Aunt Lilian! She was dreadfully unhappy.
In her own mind Mrs. Aldwinkle had begun by saving Chelifer’s life. She
saw herself standing there on the beach between sea and sky, and with
the mountains in the middle distance, looking like one of those
wonderfully romantic figures who, in the paintings of Augustus John,
stand poised in a meditative and passionate ecstasy against a cosmic
background. She _saw_ herself—a John down even to her flame-coloured
tunic and her emerald-green parasol. And at her feet, like Shelley, like
Leander washed up on the sands of Abydos, lay the young poet, pale,
naked and dead. And she had bent over him, had called him back to life,
had raised him up and, figuratively speaking, had carried him off in
maternal arms to a haven of peace where he should gather new strength
and, for his poetry, new inspiration.
Such were the facts as they appeared to Mrs. Aldwinkle, after passing
through the dense refractive medium of her imagination. Given these
facts, given the resultant situation, given her character, it was almost
necessary and inevitable that Mrs. Aldwinkle should feel romantically
towards her latest guest. The mere fact that he was a new arrival,
hitherto unknown, and a poet at that, would have been enough in any
circumstances to make Mrs. Aldwinkle take a lively interest in the young
man. But seeing that she had saved him from a watery grave and was now
engaged in supplying him with inspiration, she felt something more than
interest. She would have been disobeying the laws of her being if she
had not fallen in love with him. Moreover, he made it easier for her by
being so darkly and poetically handsome. And then he was queer—queer to
the point of mysteriousness. His very coldness attracted while it filled
her with despair.
“He can’t really be so utterly indifferent to everything and everybody
as he makes out,” she kept insisting to Irene.
The desire to break down his barriers, enter into his intimacy and
master his secret quickened her love.
From the moment of her discovery of him, in those romantic circumstances
which her imagination had made so much more romantic, Mrs. Aldwinkle had
tried to take possession of Chelifer; she had tried to make him as much
her property as the view, or Italian art. He became at once the best
living poet; but it followed as a corollary that she was his only
interpreter. In haste she had telegraphed to London for copies of all
his books.
“When I think,” she would say, leaning forward embarrassingly close and
staring into his face with those bright, dangerous eyes of hers, “when I
think how nearly you were drowned. Like Shelley....” She shuddered.
“It’s too appalling.”
And Chelifer would bend his full Egyptian lips into a smile and answer:
“They’d have been inconsolable on the staff of the Rabbit Fancier,” or
something of the sort. Oh, queer, queer, queer!
“He slides away from one,” Mrs. Aldwinkle complained to her young
confidant of the small hours.
She might try to take his barriers by storm, might try to creep subtly
into his confidence from the flank, so to speak; but Chelifer was never
to be caught napping. He evaded her. There was no taking possession of
him. It was for nothing, so far as Mrs. Aldwinkle was concerned, that he
was the best living poet and she his prophetess.
He evaded her—evaded her not merely mentally and spiritually, but even
in the flesh. For after a day or two in the Cybo Malaspina palace he
developed an almost magical faculty for disappearing. One moment he’d be
there, walking about in the garden or sitting in one of the saloons;
something would distract Mrs. Aldwinkle’s attention, and the next
moment, when she turned back towards the place where he had been, he was
gone, he was utterly vanished. Mrs. Aldwinkle would search; there was no
trace of him to be found. But at the next meal he’d walk in, punctual as
ever; he would ask his hostess politely if she had had an agreeable
morning or afternoon, whichever the case might be, and when she asked
him where he had been, would answer vaguely that he’d gone for a little
walk, or that he’d been writing letters.
After one of these disappearances Irene, who had been sent by her aunt
to hunt for him, finally ran him to earth on the top of the tower. She
had climbed the two hundred and thirty-two steps for the sake of the
commanding view of the whole garden and hillside to be obtained from the
summit. If he was anywhere above ground, she ought to see him from the
tower. But when at last, panting, she emerged on to the little square
platform from which the ancient marquesses had dropped small rocks and
molten lead on their enemies in the court below, she got a fright that
nearly made her fall backwards down the steps. For as she came up
through the trap-door into the sunlight, she suddenly became aware of
what seemed, to eyes that looked up from the level of the floor, a
gigantic figure advancing, toweringly, towards her.
Irene uttered a little scream; her heart jumped violently and seemed to
stop beating.
“Allow me,” said a very polite voice. The giant bent down and took her
by the hand. It was Chelifer. “So you’ve climbed up for a bird’s-eye
view of the picturesque beauties of nature?” he went on, when he had
helped her up through the hatchway. “I’m very partial to bird’s-eye
views myself.”
“You gave me such a start,” was all that Irene could say. Her face was
quite pale.
“I’m exceedingly sorry,” said Chelifer. There was a long and, for Irene,
embarrassing silence.
After a minute she went down again.
“Did you find him?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, when her niece emerged a
little while later on to the terrace.
Irene shook her head. Somehow she lacked the courage to tell Aunt Lilian
the story of her adventure. It would make her too unhappy to think that
Chelifer was prepared to climb two hundred and thirty-two steps for the
sake of getting out of her way.
Mrs. Aldwinkle tried to guard against his habit of vanishing by never,
so far as it was practicable, letting him out of her sight. She arranged
that he should always sit next to her at table. She took him for walks
and drives in the motor car, she made him sit with her in the garden. It
was with difficulty and only by the employment of stratagems that
Chelifer managed to procure a moment of liberty and solitude. For the
first few days of his stay Chelifer found that: “I must go and write”
was a good excuse to get away. Mrs. Aldwinkle professed such admiration
for him in his poetical capacity that she could not decently refuse to
let him go. But she soon found a way of controlling such liberty as he
could get in this way by insisting that he should write under the ilex
trees, or in one of the mouldering sponge-stone grottoes hollowed in the
walls of the lower terrace. Vainly Chelifer protested that he loathed
writing or reading out of doors.
“These lovely surroundings,” Mrs. Aldwinkle insisted, “will inspire
you.”
“But the only surroundings that really inspire me,” said Chelifer, “are
the lower middle class quarters of London, north of the Harrow Road, for
example.”
“How can you say such things?” said Mrs. Aldwinkle.
“But I assure you,” he protested, “it’s quite true.”
None the less, he had to go and write under the ilexes or in the grotto.
Mrs. Aldwinkle, at a moderate distance, kept him well in sight. Every
ten minutes or so she would come tip-toeing into his retreat, smiling,
as she imagined, like a sibyl, her finger on her lips, to lay beside his
permanently virgin sheet of paper a bunch of late-flowering roses, a
dahlia, some Michaelmas daisies or a few pink berries from the spindle
tree. Courteously, in some charming and frankly insincere formula,
Chelifer would thank her for the gift, and with a final smile, less
sibylline, but sweeter, tenderer, Mrs. Aldwinkle would tip-toe away
again, like Egeria bidding farewell to King Numa, leaving her
inspiration to do its work. It didn’t seem to do its work very well,
however. For whenever she asked him how much he had written, he
regularly answered “Nothing,” smiling at her meanwhile that courteous
and Sphingine smile which Mrs. Aldwinkle always found so baffling, so
pre-eminently “queer.”
Often Mrs. Aldwinkle would try to lead the conversation upwards on to
those high spiritual planes from which the most satisfactory and
romantic approach to love is to be made. Two souls that have
acclimatised themselves to the thin air of religion, art, ethics or
metaphysics have no difficulty in breathing the similar atmosphere of
ideal love, whose territory lies contiguous to those of the other
inhabitants of high mental altitudes. Mrs. Aldwinkle liked to approach
love from the heights. One landed, so to speak, by aeroplane on the
snowy summit of Popocatepetl, to descend by easy stages into the
tropical _tierra caliente_ in the plains below. But with Chelifer it was
impossible to gain a footing on any height at all. When, for example,
Mrs. Aldwinkle started rapturously on art and the delights of being an
artist, Chelifer would modestly admit to being a tolerable second-rate
halma player.
“But how can you speak like that?” cried Mrs. Aldwinkle. “How can you
blaspheme so against art and your own talent? What’s your talent for?”
“For editing the Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette, it appears,” Chelifer
answered, courteously smiling.
Sometimes she started on the theme of love itself; but with no greater
success. Chelifer just politely agreed with everything she said, and
when she pressed him for a definite opinion of his own replied, “I don’t
know.”
“But you must know,” Mrs. Aldwinkle insisted, “you must have some
opinion. You have had experience.”
Chelifer shook his head. “Alas,” he deplored, “never.”
It was hopeless.
“What am I to do?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle despairingly in the small hours.
Wise in the experience of eighteen years, Irene suggested that the best
thing to do would be to think no more about him—in that way.
Mrs. Aldwinkle only sighed and shook her head. She had started loving
because she believed in love, because she wanted to love and because a
romantic opportunity had presented itself. She had rescued a Poet from
death. How could she help loving him? The circumstances, the person were
her invention; she had fallen in love, deliberately almost, with the
figments of her own imagination. But there was no deliberately falling
out again. The romantic yearnings had aroused those profounder instincts
of which they were but the polite and literary emanation. The man was
young, was beautiful—these were facts, not imaginings. These deep
desires once started by the conscious mind from their sleep, once made
aware of their quarry, how could they be held back? “He is a poet. For
the love of poetry, for the love of passion and because I saved him from
death, I love him.” If that had been all, it might have been possible
for Mrs. Aldwinkle to take Irene’s advice. But from the obscure caves of
her being another voice was speaking. “He is young, he is beautiful. The
days are so few and short. I am growing old. My body is thirsty.” How
could she cease to think of him?
“And suppose he did come to love me a little,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on,
taking a perverse delight in tormenting herself in every possible way,
“suppose he should come to love me just a little for what I am and think
and do—should come to love me because, to begin with, I love him and
admire his work, and because I understand what an artist feels and can
sympathise with him—suppose all that, wouldn’t he be repelled at the
same time by the fact that I’m old?” She peered into the mirror. “My
face looks terribly old,” she said.
“No, no,” protested Irene encouragingly.
“He’d be disgusted,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on. “It would be enough to
drive him away even if he were attracted in some other way.” She sighed
profoundly. The tears trickled slowly down her sagging cheeks.
“Don’t talk like that, Aunt Lilian,” Irene implored her. “Don’t talk
like that.” She felt the tears coming into her own eyes. At that moment
she would have done anything, given anything to make Aunt Lilian happy.
She threw her arms round Mrs. Aldwinkle’s neck and kissed her. “Don’t be
unhappy,” she whispered. “Don’t think any more about it. What does it
matter about that man? What does it matter? You must think only of the
people who _do_ love you. I love you, Aunt Lilian. So much, so much.”
Mrs. Aldwinkle suffered herself to be a little comforted. She dried her
eyes. “I shall make myself look still uglier,” she said, “if I go on
crying.” There was a silence. Irene went on brushing her aunt’s hair;
she hoped that Aunt Lilian had turned her thoughts elsewhere.
“At any rate,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle at last, breaking the long silence,
“my body is still young.”
Irene was distressed. Why couldn’t Aunt Lilian think of something else?
But her distress turned into an uneasy sense of embarrassment and shame
as Mrs. Aldwinkle pursued the subject started by her last words into
more and more intimate detail. In spite of her five years’ training in
Aunt Lilian’s school, Irene felt profoundly shocked.
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