CHAPTER XVI

 

June 17^th 1912

 

Anthony's fluency, as they walked to the station, was a symptom of his inward sense of guilt.  By the profusion of his talk, by the brightness of his attention, he was making up to Brian for what he had done the previous evening.  It was not as though Brian had uttered any reproaches; he seemed, on the contrary, to be taking special pains not to hint at yesterday's offence.  His silence served Anthony as an excuse for postponing all mention of the disagreeable subject of Mark Staithes.  Some time, of course, he would have to talk about the whole wretched affair (what a bore people were, with their complicated squabbles!); but, for the moment, he assured himself, it would be best to wait … to wait until Brian himself referred to it.  Meanwhile, his uneasy conscience constrained him to display towards Brian a more than ordinary friendliness, to make a special effort to be interesting and to show himself being interested.  Interested in the poetry of Edward Thomas as they walked down Beaumont Street, in Bergson opposite Worcester; crossing Hythe Bridge, in the nationalization of coal mines; and finally, under the viaduct and up the long approach to the station, in Joan Thursley.

      'It's ext-traordinary,' said Brian, breaking, with what was manifestly an effort, a rather long preparatory silence, 'that you sh-shouldn't ever have met her.'

      'Dis aliter visum,' Anthony answered in his father's best classical style.  Though, of course, if he had accepted Mrs Foxe's invitations to stay at Twyford, the gods, he reflected, would have changed their minds.

      'I w-want you to l-like one another,' Brian was saying.

      'I'm sure we shall.'

      'She's not frightfully c-c-c …' Patiently he began again: 'frightfully c-clever.  N-not on the s-surface.  You'd th-think she was o-only interested in c-c-c …' But 'country life' wouldn't allow itself to be uttered; Brian was forced into seemingly affected circumlocution: 'in rural m-matters,' he brought out at last.  'D-dogs and b-birds and all that.'

      Anthony nodded and, suddenly remembering those spew-tits and piddle-warblers of the Bulstrode days, imperceptibly smiled.

      'But w-when you g-get to kn-know her better,' Brian went on laboriously, 'you f-find there's a lot m-more in her than you th-thought.  She's g-got ext-traordinary feeling for p-p-p … for v-verse.  W-wordsworth and M-meredith, for example.  I'm always ast-astonished how g-good her j-judgments are.'

      Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically.  Yes, it would be Meredith!

      The other was silent, wondering how he should explain, whether he should even try to explain.  Everything was against him – his own physical disability, the difficulty of putting what he had to say into words, the possibility that Anthony wouldn't even want to understand what he said, that he would produce his alibi of cynicism and just pretend not to be there at all.

      Brian thought of their first meeting.  The embarrassing discovery of two strangers in the drawing-room when he came in, flushed and his hair still wet with the rain, to tea.  His mother pronounced a name: 'Mrs Thursley.'  The new vicar's wife, he realized, as he shook hands with the thin dowdy woman.  Her manners were so ingratiating that she lisped as she spoke; her smile was deliberately bright.

      'And this is Joan.'

      The girl held out her hand,  and as he took it, her slender body swayed away from his alien presence in a movement of shyness that was yet adorably graceful, like the yielding of a young tree before the wind.  That movement was the most beautiful and at the same time the most touching thing he had ever seen.

      'We've been hearing you're keen on birds,' said Mrs Thursley, with an oppressive politeness and intensifying that all too bright, professionally Christian smile of hers.  'So's Joan.  A regular ornithologist.'

      Blushing, the girl muttered a protest.

      'She will be pleased to have someone to talk to about her precious birds.  Won't you, Joanie?'

      Joan's embarrassment was so great that she simply couldn't speak.

      Looking at her flushed, averted face, Brian was filled with compassionate tenderness.  His heart began to beat very hard.  With a mixture of fear and exultation he realized that something extraordinary, something irrevocable had happened.

      And then, he went on to think, there was that time, some four or five months later, when they were staying together at her uncle's house in East Sussex.  Away from her parents, she was as though transformed – not into another person; into her own fundamental self, into the happy, expansive girl that it was impossible for her to be at home.  For at home she lived under constraint.  Her father's chronic grumblings and occasional outbursts of bad temper oppressed her with fear.  And though she loved her, she felt herself the prisoner of her mother's affection, with dimly conscious of somehow being exploited by means of it.  And finally there was the cold numbing atmosphere of the genteel poverty in which they lived, the unremitting tension of the struggle to keep up appearances, to preserve social superiority.  At home, it was impossible for Joan to be fully herself; but there, in that spacious house at Iden, among its quiet, easy-going inhabitants, she was liberated into a transfiguring happiness.  Dazzled, Brain fell in love with her all over again.

      He though of the day when they had gone walking in Winchelsea marshes.  The hawthorn was in bloom; dotted here and there on the wide, flat expanse of grass, the sheep and the lambs were like white constellations; overhead, the sky was alive with white clouds gliding in the wind.  Unspeakably beautiful!  And suddenly it seemed to him that they were walking through the image of their love.  The world was their love, and their love the world; and the world was significant, charged with depth beyond depth of mysterious meaning.  The proof of God's goodness floated in those clouds, crept in those grazing sheep, shone from every burning bush of incandescent blossom – and, in himself and Joan, walked hand in hand across the grass and was manifest in their happiness.  His love, it seemed to him, in that apocalyptic moment, was more than merely his; it was in some mysterious way the equivalent of this wind and sunshine, these white gleams against the green and blue of spring.  His feeling for Joan was somehow implicit in the world, had a divine and universal significance.  He loved her infinitely, and for that reason was able to love everything in the world as much as he loved her.

      The memory of that experience was precious to him, all the more so now, since the quality of his feelings had undergone a change.  Transparent and seemingly pure as spring water, that infinite love of his had crystallized out, with the passage of time, into specific desires.

 

        Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cruisse et ses reins,

        Polis comme de l'huile, onduleux comme un cygne,

        Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins,

        Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne.

 

Ever since Anthony had first made him read the poem, those lines had haunted his imagination; impersonally, at first; but later, they had come to associate themselves, definitely, with the image of Joan.  Polis comme de l'huile, onduleux comme un cygne.  There was no forgetting.  The words had remained with him, indelibly, like a remorse, like the memory of a crime.

      They entered the station and found that there were nearly five minutes to wait.  The two young men walked slowly up and down the platform.

      In an effort to lay the shameful phantom of those breasts, that oil-smooth belly, 'My m-mother likes her a l-lot,' Brian went on at last.

      'That's very satisfactory,' said Anthony; but felt, even as he uttered the words, that he was rather overdoing the approval.  If he fell in love, he most certainly wouldn't take the girl to be inspected by his father and Pauline.  On approval!  But it wasn't their business to approve – or disapprove, for that matter.  Mrs Foxe was different, of course; one could take her more seriously than Pauline or his father.  But, all the same, one wouldn't want even Mrs Foxe to interfere – indeed, he went on to reflect, would probably dislike the interference even more intensely than other people's, just because of that superiority.  For the superiority constituted a kind of claim on one, gave her certain rights.  One wouldn't be able so easily to ignore her opinion as one could ignore Pauline's, for example.  He was very fond of Mrs Foxe, he respected and admired her; but for that very reason he felt her as potentially a menace to his freedom.  For she might – indeed, if she knew it, she certainly would – object to his way of looking at things.  And though her criticisms would be based on the principles of that liberal Christianity of hers, and though, of course, such modernism was just as preposterous and, in spite of its pretensions to being 'scientific', just as hopelessly beyond the pale of rationality as the most extravagant fetishism – nevertheless, her words, beings hers, would carry weight, would have to be considered.  Which was why he did his best not to place himself in the position of having to listen to them.  It was more than a year now since he had accepted one of her invitations to come and stay with them in the country.  Dis aliter visum.  But he looked forward rather nervously to his impending encounter with her.

      The train came roaring in; and there, a minute later, they all were, at the other end of the platform – Mr Beavis in a grey suit, and Pauline beside him, very large in mauve, her face apoplectically flushed by the shadow of her mauve parasol, and behind them Mrs Foxe, straight and queenly, and a tall girl in a big flopping hat and a flowered dress.

      Mr Beavis adopted for his greetings a humorously mock-heroic manner that Anthony found particularly irritating.  'Six precious souls,' he quoted, as he patted his son's shoulder, 'or rather only four precious souls, but all agog to dash through thick and thin.  And what a hot dash – what a dashed hot dash!' he emended, twinklingly.

      'Well, Anthony.'  Mrs Foxe's voice was musically rich with affection.  'It's an age since I saw you.'

      'Yes, an age.'  He laughed rather uncomfortably, trying, as he did so, to remember those elaborate reasons he had given for not accepting her invitations.  At all costs he mustn't contradict himself.  Was it at Easter or at Christmas that the necessity of working at the British Museum had kept him in London?  He felt a touch on his arm, and thankful for any excuse to break off the embarrassing conversation, turned quickly away.

      'J-joan,' Brian was saying to the girl in the flowered dress, 'h-here's A-anthony.'

      'Awfully glad,' he mumbled.  'Heard such a lot about you from …' Nice hair, he thought; and the hazel eyes were beautifully bright and eager.  But the profile was too emphatic; and though the lips were well cut, the mouth was too wide.  A bit dairymaidish, was his conclusion; and her clothes were really too homemade.  He himself preferred something rather more urban.

      'Well, lead on, Macduff,' said Mr Beavis.

      They left the station, and slowly, on the shady side of the street, walked towards the centre of the town.  Still merrily Gilpinesque, as though (and this particularly irritated Anthony) today's expedition were his first holiday jaunt for twenty years, Mr Beavis expatiated in waggish colloquialisms on the Oxford of his own undergraduate days.  Mrs Foxe listened, smiled at the appropriate moments, asked pertinent questions.  Pauline complained from time to time of the heat.  Her face shone; and, walking in gloomy silence beside her, Anthony remarked with distaste the rather rank intensification of her natural odour.  From behind him, he could hear snatches of the conversation between Brian and Joan.  '… a great big hawk,' she was saying.  Her speech was eager and rapid.  'It must have been a harrier.'  'D-did it have b-bars on its t-t-t … on its tail?'  'That's it.  Dark bars on a light grey ground.'  'Th-then it was a f-female,' said Brian.  'F-females have b-bars on their t-tails.'  Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically.

      They were passing the Ashmolean, when a woman who was coming very slowly and as though disconsolately out of the museum suddenly waved her hand at them and, calling out first Mr Beavis's name and then, as they all turned round to look at her, Mrs Foxe's, came running down the steps towards them.

      'Why, it's Mary Champernowne,' said Mrs Foxe.  'Mary Amberly, I should say.'  Or perhaps, she reflected, should not say, now that the Amberleys were divorced.

      The name, the familiar face, evoked in Mr Beavis's mind only a pleasant sensation of surprised recognition.  Raising his hat with a self-consciously comic parody of an old-world flourish, 'Welcome,' he said to the new arrival.  'Welcome, dear lady.'

      Mary Amberley took Mrs Foxe's hand.  'Such luck,' she exclaimed breathlessly.  Mrs Foxe was surprised by so much cordiality.  Mary's mother was her friend; but Mary had always held aloof.  And anyhow, since her marriage she had moved in a world that Mrs Foxe did not know, and of which, on principle, she disapproved.  'Such marvellous luck!' the other repeated as she turned to Mr Beavis.

      'The luck is ours,' he said gallantly.  'You know my wife, don't you?  And the young stalwart?'  His eyes twinkled; the corners of his mouth, under the moustache, humorously twitched.  He laid a hand on Anthony's arm.  'The young foundation-worthy?'

      She smiled at Anthony.  A strange smile, he noticed; a crooked smile of unparted lips that seemed as though secretly significant.  'I haven't seen you for years,' she said.  'Not since …' Not since the first Mrs Beavis's funeral, as a matter of fact.  But one could hardly say so.  'Not since you were so high!'  And lifting a gloved hand to the level of her eye, she measured, between the thumb and forefinger, a space of about an inch.

      Anthony laughed nervously, intimidated, even while he admired, by so much prettiness and ease and smartness.

      Mrs Amberley shook hands with Joan and Brian; then, turning back to Mrs Foxe, 'I was feeling like Robinson Crusoe,' she said, explaining that abnormal cordiality.  'Marooned.'  She lingered with comical insistence over the long syllable.  'Absolutely marooned.  Monarch of all I surveyed.'  And while they slowly walked on across St Giles's, she launched out into a complicated story about a stray in the Cotswolds; about an appointment to meet some friends on the way home, at Oxford, on the eighteenth; about her journey from Chipping Campden; about her punctual arrival at the meeting-place, her waiting, her growing impatience, her rage, and finally her discovery that she had come a day too early: it was the seventeenth.  'Too typical of me.'

      Everybody laughed a great deal.  For the story was full of unexpected fantasies and extravagances; and it was told in a voice that modulated itself with an extraordinary subtlety to fit the words – a voice that knew when to hurry breathlessly and when to drawl, when to fade out into an inaudibility rich with unspoken implications.

      Even Mrs Foxe, who didn't particularly want to be amused – because of that divorce – found herself unable to resist the story.

      For Mary Amberley, their laughter was like champagne; it warmed her, it sent a tingling exhilaration through her body.  They were bores, of course; they were philistines.  But the applause even of bores and philistines is still applause and intoxicating.  Her eyes shone, her cheeks flushed.  'Too hopelessly typical of me!' she wailed, when their laughter had subsided; but the gesture of despairing self-disparagement was a caricature; she was really proud of her incompetence, regarded it as part of her feminine charm.  'Well, anyhow,' she concluded, 'there I was – shipwrecked.  All alone on a desert island.'

      They walked for a moment in silence.  The thought that she would have to be asked to lunch was in all their minds – a thought tinged in Mrs Foxe's case with vexation, in Anthony's with embarrassed desire.  The lunch was being given in his rooms; as the host, he ought to ask her.  And he wanted to ask her – violently wanted it.  But what would the others say?  Oughtn't he somehow to consult them first?  Mr Beavis solved the problem for him by making the suggestion on his own account.

      'I think' – he hesitated; then, twinkling, 'I think our festal “spread,”' he went on, 'will run to another guest, won't it, Anthony?'

      'But I can't impose myself,' she protested, turning from the father to the son.  He seemed a nice boy, she thought, sensitive and intelligent.  Pleasant-looking too.

      'But I assure you …' Anthony was earnestly and incoherently repeating, 'I assure you …'

      'Well, if it's really all right …' She thanked him with a smile of sudden intimacy, almost of complicity – as though there were some bond between them, as though, of all the party, they two were the only ones who understood what was what.

      After lunch, Joan had to be shown the sights of Oxford; and Mr Beavis had an appointment with a philological colleague in the Woodstock Road; and Pauline thought she would like to take things quietly till tea-time.  Anthony was left to entertain Mary Amberley.  The responsibility was deliciously alarming.

      In the hansom that was taking them to Magdalen Bridge Mrs Amberley turned to him a face that was bright with sudden mischief.

      'Free at last,' she said.

      Anthony nodded at her and smiled back, understandingly, conspiratorially.  'They were rather heavy,' he said.  'Perhaps I ought to apologize.'

      'I've often thought of founding a league for the abolition of families,' she went on.  'Parents ought never to be allowed to come near their children.'

      'Plato thought so too,' he said, rather pedantically.

      'Yes, but he wanted children to be bullied by the state instead of by their fathers and mothers.  I don't want them to be bullied by anyone.'

      He ventured a personal question.  'Were you bullied?' he asked.

      Mary Amberley nodded.  'Horribly.  Few children have been more loved than I was.  They fairly bludgeoned me with affection.  Made me a mental cripple.  It took me years to get over the deformity.'  There was a silence.  Then, looking at him with an embarrassingly appraising glance, as though he were for sale, 'Do you know,' she said, 'the last time I saw you was at your mother's funeral.'

      The subterranean association between this remark and what had gone before made him blush guiltily, as though at an impropriety in mixed company.  'Yes, I remember,' he mumbled, and was annoyed with himself for feeling so ashamed that he had allowed even this remotely implied comment upon his mother to pass without some kind of protest, that he had felt so little desire to make a protest.

      'You were a horrible, squalid little boy then,' she went on, still looking at him judicially.  'How awful little boys always are!  It seems incredible that they should ever turn into presentable human beings.  And of course,' she added, 'a great many of them don't.  Dismal, don't you find? - the way most people are so hideous and stupid, so utterly and abysmally boring!'

      Making a violent effort of will, Anthony emerged from his embarrassment with a creditable dash.  'I hope I'm not one of the majority?' he said, lifting his eyes to hers.

      Mrs Amberley shook her head, and with a serious matter-of-factness, 'No,' she answered.  'I was thinking how successfully you'd escaped from the horrors of boyhood.'

      He blushed again, this time with pleasure.

      'Let's see, how old are you now?' she asked.

      'Twenty – nearly twenty-one.'

      'And I shall be thirty this winter.  Queer,' she added, 'how these things change their significance.  When I saw you last, those nine years were a great gulf between us.  Uncrossable, it seemed then.  We  belonged to different species.  And yet here we are, sitting on the same side of the gulf as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  Which indeed it is, now.'  She turned and smiled at him that secret and significant smile of unparted lips.  Her dark eyes were full of dancing brightness.  'Ah, there's Magdalen,' she went on, leaving him (to his great relief; for in his excited embarrassment he would not have known what to say) no time to comment on her words.  'How dreary that late Gothic can be!  So mean!  No wonder Gibbon didn't think much of the Middle Ages!'  She was suddenly silent, remembering the occasion when her husband had made that remark about Gibbon.  Only a month of two after their marriage.  She had been shocked and astonished by his airy criticisms of things she had been brought up to regard as sacredly beyond judgment – shocked, but also thrilled, also delighted.  For what fun to see the sacred things knocked about!  And in those days Roger was still adorable.  She sighed; then, with a touch of irritation, shook off the sentimental mood and went on talking bout that odious architecture.

      The cab drew up at the bridge; they dismounted and walked down to the boat-house.  Lying back on the cushions of the punt, Mary Amberley was silent.  Very slowly, Anthony poled his way upstream.  The green world slid past her half-shut eyes.  Green darkness of trees overarching the olive shadows and tawny-glaucous lights of water; and between the twilight stretches of green vaulting, the wide gold-green meadows, islanded with elms.  And always the faint weedy smell of the river; and the air so soft and warm against the face that one was hardly aware any longer of the frontiers between self and not-self, but lay there, separated by no dividing surfaces, melting, drowsily melting into the circumambient summer.

      Standing at the stern, Anthony could look down on her, as from a post of vantage.  She lay there at his feet, limp and abandoned.  Handling his long pole with an easy mastery of which he was proud, he felt, as he watched her, exultantly strong and superior.  There was no gulf between them now.  She was a woman, he a man.  He lifted his trailing punt pole and swung it forward with a movement of easy grace, of unhurried and accomplished power.  Thrust it down into the mud, tightened his muscles against its resistance; the punt shot forward, the end of the pole lifted from the riverbed, trailed for a moment, then gracefully, once more, easily, masterfully was swung forward.  Suddenly she lifted her eyelids and looked at him, with that detached appraising look that had embarrassed him so much in the cab.  His manly confidence evaporated at once.

      'My poor Anthony,' she said at last, and her face came closer, as it were, in a sudden smile.  'It makes me hot even to look at you.'

      When the punt had been secured, he came forward and sat down in the place she made, drawing her skirts away, on the cushion beside her.

      'I don't suppose your father bullies you much,' she said, returning to the theme of their conversation in the cab.

      He shook his head.

      'Nor blackmails you with too much affection, I imagine.'

      Anthony found himself feeling unexpectedly loyal to his father.  'I think he was always very fond of me.'

      'Oh, of course,' said Mrs Amberley impatiently.  'I didn't imagine he knocked you about.'

      Anthony could not help laughing.  The vision of his father running after him with a club was irresistibly comic.  Then, more seriously, 'He never got near enough to knock me about,' he said.  'There was always a great gulf fixed.'

      'Yes, one feels he has a talent for fixing gulfs.  And yet your stepmother seems to get on with him all right.  So did your mother, I believe.'  She shook her head.  'But, then, marriage is so odd and unaccountable.  The most obviously incompatible couples stick together, and the most obviously compatible fly apart.  Boring, tiresome people are adored, and charming ones are hated.  Why?  God knows.  But I suppose it's generally a matter of what Milton calls the Genial Bed.'  She lingered, ludicrously, over the first syllable of 'genial'; but Anthony was so anxious not to seem startled by the casual mention of what he had always regarded as, in a lady's presence, the unmentionable, that he did not laugh – for a laugh might have been interpreted as a schoolboy's automatic reaction to smut – did not even smile; but gravely, as though he were admitting the truth of a proposition in geometry, nodded his head and in a very serious and judicial tone said, 'Yes, I suppose it generally is.'

      'Poor Mrs Foxe,' Mary Amberley went on.  'I imagine there was a minimum of geniality there.'

      'Did you know her husband?' he asked.

      'Only as a child.  One grown-up seems as boring as another then.  But my mother's often talked to me about him.  Thoroughly beastly.  And thoroughly virtuous.  God preserve me from a virtuous beast!  The vicious ones are bad enough; but at least they're never beastly on principle.  They're inconsistent; so they're sometimes nice by mistake.  Whereas the virtuous ones – they never forget; they're beastly all the time.  Poor woman!  She had a dog's life, I'm afraid.  But she seems to be getting it back on her son all right.'

      'But she adores Brian,' he protested.  'And Brian adores her.'

      'That's exactly what I was saying.  All the love she never got from her husband, all the love she never gave him – it's being poured out on that miserable boy.'

      'He isn't miserable.'

      'He may not know it, perhaps.  Not yet.  But you wait!'  Then, after a little pause, 'You're lucky,' Mrs Amberley went on.  'A great deal luckier than you know.'