CHAPTER XVIII

 

December 8^th 1926

 

More guests kept arriving – young people mostly, friends of Joyce and Helen.  Dutifully, they crossed the drawing-room to the far corner where Mary Amberley was sitting between Beppo Bowles and Anthony, said good-evening, then hurried off to dance.

      'They put one in one's middle-aged place all right,' said Anthony; but either Mrs Amberley preferred not to hear the remark, or else she was genuinely absorbed in what Beppo was saying with such loud fizzling enthusiasm about Berlin – the most amusing place in Europe nowadays!  Where else would you find, for example, those special tarts for masochists?  In top-boots; yes, genuine top-boots!  And the Museum of Sexology: such photographs and wax models – almost too trompe l-œil – such astounding objects in horn from Japan, such strange and ingenious tailoring for exhibitionists!  And all those delicious little Lesbian bars, all those cabarets where the boys were dressed up as women …

      'There's Mark Staithes,' said Mrs Amberley, interrupting him, and waved to a shortish, broad-shouldered man who had just entered the drawing-room.  'I forget,' she said, turning to Anthony, 'whether you know him.'

      'Only for the last thirty years,' he answered, finding once again a certain malicious pleasure in insisting, to the point of exaggeration, on his vanished youth.  If he were no longer young, then Mary had ceased to be young nine years ago.

      'But with long gaps,' he qualified.  'During the war and then afterwards, for all that time he was in Mexico.  And I've hardly had more than a glimpse of him since he came back.  I'm delighted to have this chance …'

      'He's a queer fish,' said Mary Amberley, thinking of the time, just after his return from Mexico, some eighteen months before, when he had first come to her house.  His appearance, his manner, as of some savage and fanatical hermit, had violently attracted her.  She had tried all her seductions upon him – without the smallest effect.  He had ignored them – but so completely and absolutely that she felt no ill-will towards him for the rebuff, convinced, as she was, that in fact there hadn't been any rebuff, merely a display of symptoms, either, she diagnosed judicially, of impotence, or else, less probably (though of course one never knew, one never knew) , of homosexuality.  'A queer fish,' she repeated, and decided that she'd take the next opportunity of asking Beppo about the homosexuality.  He would be sure to know.  They always did know about one another.  Then, waving again, 'Come and sit with us, Mark,' she called through the noise of the gramophone.

      Staithes crossed the room, drew up a chair and sat down.  His hair had retreated from his forehead, and above the ears was already grey.  The brown face – that fanatical hermit's face which Mary Amberley had found so strangely attractive – was deeply lined.  No smooth obliterating layer of fat obscured its inner structure.  Under the skin each strip of muscle in the cheek and jaw seemed to stand out distinct and separate like the muscles those lime-wood statues of flayed human beings that were made for Renaissance anatomy rooms.  When he smiled – and each time that happened it was as though the flayed statue had come to life and were expressing its agony – one could follow the whole mechanism of the excruciating grimace; the upward and outward pull of the zygomaticus major, the sideways tug of the risorius, the contraction of the great sphincters round the eyelids.

      'Am I interrupting?' he asked, looking with sharp, inquisitorial movements from one to the other.

      'Beppo was telling us about Berlin,' said Mrs Amberley.

      'I popped over to get away from the General Strike,' Beppo explained.

      'Naturally,' said Staithes, and his face twitched in the anguish of amused contempt.

      'Such a heavenly place!' Beppo exploded irrepressibly.

      'You feel like Lord Haldane about it?  Your spiritual home?'

      'Carnal,' Anthony emended.

      Only too happy to plead guilty, Beppo giggled.  'Yes, those transvestitists!' he had to admit rapturously.

      'I was over there this winter,' said Staithes.  'On business.  But of course one has to play one's tribute to pleasure too.  That night life …'

      'Didn't you find it amusing?'

      'Oh, passionately.'

      'You see!' Beppo was triumphant.

      'One of the creatures came and sat at my table,' Staithes went on.  'I danced with it.  It looked like a woman.'

      'You simply can't tell them apart,' Beppo cried excitedly, as though he were taking personal credit for the fact.

      'When we'd finished dancing, it painted its face a bit and we drank a little beer.  Then it showed me some indecent photographs.  That rather surgical, anti-aphrodisiac kind – you know.  Damping.  Perhaps that was why the conversation flagged.  Anyhow, there were uncomfortable silences.  Neither it nor I seemed to know what to say next.  We were becalmed.'  He threw out his two thin and knotted hands horizontally, as though sliding them across an absolutely flat surface.  'Utterly becalmed.  Until, suddenly, the creature did a most remarkable thing.  One of its regular gambits, no doubt; but never having had it played on me before, I was impressed.  “Would you like to see something?” it said.  I said yes, and immediately it began to poke and pull at something under its blouse.  “Now, look!” it said at last.  I looked.  It smiled triumphantly, like a man playing the ace of trumps – or rather playing two aces of trumps; for what it plunked down on the table was a pair.  A pair of superb artificial breasts, made of pink rubber sponge.'

      'But how revolting!' cried Mrs Amberley, while Anthony laughed and Beppo's round face took on an expression of pained distress.  'How revolting!' she repeated.

      'Yes, but how satisfactory!' Staithes insisted, making that crooked and agonized grimace that passed with him for a smile.  'It's so good when things happen as they ought to happen – artistically, symbolically.  Two rubber breasts between the beer mugs – that's what vice ought to be.  And when that was what it actually was – well, it felt as though something had clicked into place.  Inevitably, beautifully.  Yes,  beautifully,' he repeated.  'Beautifully revolting.'

      'All the same,' Beppo insisted, 'you must admit there's a lot to be said for a town where that sort of thing can happen.  In public,' he added earnestly, 'in public, mind you.  It's the most tolerant in the world, the German Government.  You've got to admit that.'

      'Oh, I do,' said Staithes.  'It tolerates everybody.  Not only girls in boiled shirts and boys with rubber breasts, but also monarchists, fascists, Junkers, Krupps, Communists too, I'm thankful to say.  All its enemies of every colour.'

      'I think that's rather fine,' said Mrs Amberley.

      'Very fine indeed, until its enemies rise up and destroy it.  I only hope the communists will get in first.'

      'But seeing that they're tolerated, why should its enemies what to destroy it?'

      'Why not?  They don't believe in tolerance.  Quite rightly,' he added.

      'You're barbarous,' Beppo protested.

      'As one should be if one lives in the Dark Ages.  You people – you're survivors from the Age of the Antonines.'  He looked from one to the other, smiling his flayed smile, and shook his head.  'Imagining you're still in the first volume of Gibbon.  Whereas we're well on in the third.'

      'Do you mean to say …? But, good heavens,' Mrs Amberley interrupted herself, 'there's Gerry!'

      At her words, at the sight of Gerry Watchett himself, foxtrotting in from the back drawing-room with Helen, Anthony took out his pocket-book and quickly examined its contents.  'Thank God!' he said.  'Only two pounds.'  Gerry had caught him with ten the previous month and, on the strength of a most improbably distressing story, borrowed them all.  He ought to have disbelieved the story, of course, ought to have withheld the loan.  Ten pounds were more than he could afford.  He had said so, but had lacked the firmness to persist in his refusal.  It had taken more than a fortnight of strict economy to make up that lost money.  Economizing was an unpleasant process; but to say no and to go on saying it in the teeth of Gerry's importunities and reproaches would have been still more unpleasant.  He was always ready to sacrifice his rights to his conveniences.  People thought him disinterested, and he would have liked, he did his best, to accept their diagnosis of his character.  But awareness of the real state of affairs kept breaking through.  When it did, he accepted self-knowledge with a laugh.  He was laughing now.  'Only two,' he repeated.  'Luckily I can afford …'

      He broke off.  Behind Mary's back, Beppo had tapped him on the shoulder, was making significant grimaces.  Anthony turned and saw that she was still staring intently and with knitted brows at the new arrivals.

      'He told me he wasn't coming this evening,' she said, almost as though she were speaking to herself.  Then, through the music, 'Gerry!' she called sharply in a voice that had suddenly lost all its charm – a voice that reminded Anthony only too painfully of those distasteful scenes in which, long since, he had played his part.  So that was it, he said to himself, and felt sorry for poor Mary.

      Gerry Watchett turned, and with the expression of one who refers to some excellent shared joke, gave her a quick smile and even a hint of a wink, then looked down again to go on talking to his partner.

      Mrs Amberley flushed with sudden anger.  Grinning at her like that!  It was intolerable.  Intolerable too – but how typical! - to appear like this, unannounced, out of the blue – casually dancing with another woman, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  This time, it was true, the other woman was only Helen; but that was merely because he hadn't found anyone else to dance with, anyone worse.  'The beast!' she thought, as she followed him round the room with her eyes.  Then, making an effort, she looked away, she forced herself to pay attention to what was going on around her.

      '… a country like this,' Mark Staithes was saying, 'a country where a quarter of the population's genuinely bourgeois and another quarter passionately longs to be.'

      'You're exaggerating,' Anthony protested.

      'Not a bit.  What does the Labour Party poll at an election?  A third of the votes.  I'm generously assuming it might some day poll half of them.  The rest's bourgeois.  Either naturally bourgeois by interest and fear, or else artificially, by snobbery and imagination.  It's childish to think you can get what you want by constitutional methods.'

      'And what about unconstitutional ones?'

      'There's a chance.'

      'Not much of a chance,' said Anthony.  'Not against the new weapons.'

      'Oh, I know,' said Mark Staithes, 'I know.  If they use their strength, the middle classes can obviously win.  They could win, most likely, even without tanks and planes – just because they're potentially better soldiers than the proletariat.'

      'Better soldiers?' Beppo protested, thinking of those guardsmen friends of his.

      'Because of their education.  A bourgeois gets anything from ten to sixteen years of training – most of it, what's more, in a boarding school; that's to say, in barracks.  Whereas a workman's child lives at home and doesn't get more than six or seven years at his day school.  Sixteen years of obedience and esprit de corps.  No wonder that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.  If they'll use only half their resources – use them ruthlessly – the game's theirs.'

      'You think they won't use their resources?'

      Mark shrugged his shoulders.  'Certainly the German republicans don't seem ready to use theirs.  And think of what happened here, during the Strike?  Even the majority of industrialists were ready to compromise.'

      'For the simple reason,' Anthony put in, 'that you can't be a successful industrialist unless you have the compromising habit.  A business isn't run by faith; it's run by haggling.'

      'Anyhow,' Mark went on, 'the fact remains that the available resources weren't used.  That's what allows one to hope that a revolution might succeed.  Provided it were carried out very quickly.  For, of course, one they realized they were seriously in danger, they'd forget their scruples.  But they might hesitate long enough, I think, to make a revolution possible.  Even a few hours of compunction would be sufficient.  Yes, in spite of tanks, there's still a chance of success.  But you must be prepared to take a chance.  Not like the imbeciles of the T.U.C.  Or the rank and file of the Unions, for that matter.  As full of scruples as the bourgeoisie.  It's the hangover of evangelical Christianity.  You've no idea what a lot of preaching and hymn-singing there was during the Great Strike.  I was flabbergasted.  But it's good to know the worst.  Perhaps the younger generation …' He shook his head.  'But I don't feel certain even of them.  Methodism may be decaying.  But look at those spiritualist chapels that are sprouting up all over the industrial areas!  Like toadstools.'

     

      The next time he passed, Gerry called her name; but Mary Amberley refused to acknowledge his greeting.  Turning coldly away she pretended to be interested only in what Anthony was saying.

      'Ass of a woman!' thought Gerry, as he looked at her averted face.  Then, aloud, 'What do you say to putting on this record another time?' he asked his partner.

      Helen nodded ecstatically.

      The music of the spheres, the beatific vision … But why should heaven be a monopoly of ear or eye?  The muscles as they move, they too have their paradise.  Heaven is not only an illumination and a harmony; it is also a dance.

      'Half a tick,' said Gerry, when they were opposite the gramophone.

      Helen stood there as he wound up the machine, quite still, her arms hanging limp at her sides.  Her eyes were closed; she was shutting the world away from her, shutting herself out of existence.  In this still vacancy between two heavens of motion, existence was without a point.

      The music stopped for a moment; then began again in the middle of a bar.  Behind her closed eyelids, she was aware that Gerry had moved, was standing over her, very near; then his arm encircled her body.

      'Onward, Christian soldiers!' he said; and they stepped out once more into the music, into the heaven of harmoniously moving muscles.

 

      There had been a silence.  Determined not to pay any attention to that beast, Mary Amberley turned to Staithes.  'And those scents of yours?' she asked with an assumption of bright, amused interest.

      'Flourishing,' he answered.  'I've had to order three new stills and take on more labour.'

      Mary Amberley smiled at him and shook her head.  'You of all people!' she said.  'It seems peculiarly ridiculous that you should be a scent-manufacturer.'

      'Why?'

      'The most unfrivolous of men,' she went on, 'the least gallant, the most implacable misogynist!' (Either impotent or homosexual – there couldn't be a doubt; and, after his story about Berlin, almost certainly impotent, she thought.)

      With a smile of excruciated mockery, 'But hasn't it occurred to you,' Staithes asked, 'that those might be reasons for being a scent-maker?'

      'Reasons?'

      'A way of expressing one's lack of gallantry.'  In point of fact, it was entirely by chance that he had gone into the scent business.  His eye had been caught by an advertisement in The Times, a small factory for sale, very cheap … Just luck.  But now, after the event, it heightened his self-esteem to say that he had chosen the profession deliberately, in order to express his contempt for the women for whom he catered.  The lie, which he had willed and by this time half believed to be the truth, placed him in a position of superiority to all women in general and, at this moment, to Mary Amberley in particular.  Leaning forward, he took Mary's hand, raised it as though he were about to kiss it, but, instead, only sniffed at the skin – then let it fall again.  'For example,' he said, 'there's civet in the stuff you've scented yourself with.'

      'Well, why not?'

      'Oh, no reason at all,' said Staithes, 'no reason at all, if you happen to have a taste for the excrement of polecats.'

      Mary Amberley made a grimace of disgust.

      'In Abyssinia,' he went on, 'they have civet farms.  Twice a week, you take a stick and go and poke the cats until they're thoroughly angry and frightened.  That's when they secrete their stuff.  Like children wetting their knickers when they're afraid.  Then you catch them with a pair of tongs, so that they can't bite, and scrape out the contents of the little pouch attached to their genital organs.  You do it with an egg-spoon and the stuff's a kind of yellow grease, rather like earwax.  Stinks like hell when it's undiluted.  We get it in London packed in buffalo horns.  Huge cornucopias full of dark brown stinking earwax.  At a hundred and seventeen shillings the ounce, what's more.  That's one of the reasons why your scent costs so much.  The poor can't afford to smear themselves with cat's mess.  They have to be content with plain iso-eugenol and phenyl acetic aldehyde.'

     

      Colin and Joyce had stopped dancing and were sitting on the landing outside the drawing-room door.  Alone.  It was Colin's opportunity for releasing some of the righteous indignation that had been accumulating within him, ever since dinner-time.

      'I must say, Joyce,' he began, 'some of your mother's guests …'

      Joyce looked at him with eyes in which there was anxiety as well as adoration.  'Yes, I know,' she apologized.  'I know,' and was abjectly in a hurry to agree with him about Beppo's degeneracy and Anthony Beavis's cynicism.  Then, seeing that he was enjoying his indignation and that she herself rather profited than suffered by it, she even volunteered the information that that man who had come in last and was sitting with her mother was a Bolshevik.  Yes, Mark Staithes was a Bolshevik.

      The phrase that Colin had been meditating all the evening found utterance.  'I may be stupid and all that,' he said with an assumption of humility that cloaked an overweening self-satisfaction in what he regarded as the quite extraordinary quality of his ordinariness; 'I may be ignorant and badly educated; but at least' (his tone changed, he was proudly giving expression to his consciousness of being uniquely average), 'at least I know – well, I do know what's done.  I mean, if one's a gentleman.'  He underlined the words to make them sound slightly comic and so prove that he had a sense of humour.  To speak seriously of what one took seriously – this, precisely, was one of the things that wasn't done.  That touch of humour proved more cogently than any emphasis could do, any emotional trembling of the voice, that he did take these things seriously – as a uniquely average gentleman must take them.  And of course Joyce understood that he did.  She glanced at him worshippingly and pressed his hand.

 

      Dancing, dancing … Oh, if only, thought Helen one could go on dancing for ever!  If only one didn't have to spend all that time doing other things!  Wrong things, mostly, stupid things, things one was sorry for after they were done.  Dancing, she lost her life in order to save it; lost her identity and became something greater than herself; lost her perplexities and self-hatreds in a bright and harmonious certitude; lost her bad character and was made perfect; lost the regretted past, the apprehended future, and gained a timeless present of consummate happiness.  She who could not paint, could not write, could not even sing in tune, became while she danced an artist; no, more than an artist; became a god, the creator of a new heaven and a new earth, a creator rejoicing in his creation and finding it good.

      ' “Yes, sir, she's my baby.  No, sir ...” ' Gerry broke off his humming.  'I won sixty pounds at poker last night,' he said.  'Pretty good, eh?'

      She smiled up at him and nodded in a rapturous silence.  Good, good – everything was wonderfully good.

 

      'And I can't tell you,' Staithes was saying, 'how intensely I enjoy writing those advertisements.'  The muscles in his face were working as though for an anatomical demonstration.  'The ones about bad breath and body odours.'

      'Hideous! Mrs Amberley shuddered. 'Hideous! There's only one Victorian convention I appreciate, and that's the convention of not speaking about those things.'

      'Which is precisely why it's such fun to speak about them,' said Staithes, beaming at her between contracted sphincters.  'Forcing humans to be fully, verbally conscious of their own and other people's disgustingness.  That's the beauty of this kind of advertising.  It shakes them into awareness.'

      'And into buying,' put in Anthony.  'You're forgetting the profits.'

      Staithes shrugged his shoulders.  'They're incidental,' he said; and it was obvious, Anthony reflected, as he watched him, it was obvious that the man was telling the truth.  For him, the profits were incidental.  'Breaking down your protective convention,' he went on, turning again to Mary, 'that's the real fun.  Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can't do without your fellow humans, and that, when you're with them, they make you sick.'