CHAPTER XXII

 

December 8^th 1926

 

Mark lived in a dingy house off the Fulham Road.  Dark brown brick with terra-cotta trimmings; and, within, patterned linoleum; bits of red Axminster carpet; wallpapers of ochre sprinkled with bunches of cornflowers, of green, with crimson roses; fumed oak chairs and tables; rep curtains; bamboo stands supporting glazed blue pots.  The hideousness, Anthony reflected, was so complete, so absolutely unrelieved, that it could only have been intentional.  Mark must deliberately have chosen the ugliest surroundings he could find.  To punish himself, no doubt – but why, for what offence?

      'Some beer?'

      Anthony nodded.

      The other opened a bottle, filled a single glass; but himself did not drink.

      'You still play, I see,' said Anthony, pointing in the direction of the upright piano.

      'A little,' Mark had to admit.  'It's consolation.'

      The fact that the Matthew Passion, for example, the Hammerklavier Sonata, had had human authors was a source of hope.  It was just conceivable that humanity might one day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like.  If there were no Well-Tempered Clavichord, why should one bother even to wish for revolutionary change?

      'Turning one kind of common humanity into common humanity of a slightly different kind – well, if that's all that revolution can do, the game isn't worth the candle.'

      Anthony protested.  For a sociologist it was the most fascinating of all games.

      'To watch or to play?'

      'To watch, of course.'

      A spectacle bottomlessly comic in its grotesqueness, endlessly varied.  But looking closely, one could detect the uniformities under the diversity, the fixed rules of the endlessly shifting game.

      'A revolution to transform common humanity into common humanity of another variety.  You find it horrifying.  But that's just what I'd like to live long enough to see.  Theory being put to the test of practice.  To detect, after your catastrophic reform of everything, the same old uniformities working themselves out in a slightly different way – I can't imagine anything more satisfying.  Like logically inferring the existence of a new planet and then discovering it with a telescope.  As for producing more John Sebastians …' He shrugged his shoulders.  'You might as well imagine that revolution will increase the number of Siamese twins.'

      That was the chief difference between literature and life.  In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

      'Books are opium,' said Mark.

      'Precisely.  That's why it's doubtful if there'll ever be such a thing as proletarian literature.  Even proletarian books will deal with exceptional proletarians.  And exceptional proletarians are no more proletarian than exceptional bourgeois are bourgeois.  Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional.  Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.  Hence those geniuses of fiction, those leaders and dukes and millionaires.  People who are completely conditioned by circumstances – one can be desperately sorry for them; but one can't find their lives very dramatic.  Drama begins where there's freedom of choice.  And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional.  That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.'

      'But do you really think that people with money or power are free?'

      'Freer than the poor, at any rate.  Less completely conditioned by matter and other people's wills.'

      Mark shook his head.  'You don't know my father,' he said, 'Or my disgusting brothers.'

      At Bulstrode, Anthony remembered, it was always, 'My pater says …' or 'My frater at Cambridge.'

      'The whole vile brood of Staitheses,' Mark went on.

      He described the Staithes who was now a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George and a Permanent Under-Secretary.  Pleased as Punch with it all, and serenely conscious of his own extraordinary merits, adoring himself for being such a great man.

      'As though there were any real difficulty in getting where he's got!  Anything in the least creditable about that kind of piddling little conquest!'  Mark made a flayed grimace of contemptuous disgust.  'He thinks he's a marvel.'

      And the other Staitheses, the Staitheses of the younger generation -  they also thought that they were marvels.  There was one of them at Dehli, heroically occupied in bullying Indians who couldn't stand up for themselves.  And the other was on the Stock Exchange and highly successful.  Successful at what?  As a cunning exploiter of ignorance and greed and the insanity of gamblers and misers.  And on top of everything the man prided himself on being an amorist, a professional Don Juan.

      (Why the poor devil shouldn't be allowed to have a bit of fun, Anthony was unable, as he sipped his beer, to imagine.)

      One of the boys!  One of the dogs!  A dog among bitches – what a triumph!

      'And you call them free,' Mark concluded.  'But how can a climber be free?  He's tied to his ladder.'

      'But social ladders,' Anthony objected, 'become broader as they rise.  At the bottom, you can only just get your foot on to them.  At the top the rungs are twenty yards across.'

      'Well, perhaps it's a wider perch than the bank clerk's,' Mark admitted.  'But not wide enough for me.  And not high enough; above all, not clean enough.'

      The rage they had been in when he enlisted during the war as a private!  Feeling that he'd let the family down.  The creatures were incapable of seeing that, if you had the choice, it was more decent to elect to be a private than a staff lieutenant.

      'Turds to the core,' he said.  'So they can't think anything but turdish thoughts.  And above all, they can't conceive of anyone else thinking differently.  Turd calls to turd; and, when it's answered by non-turd, it's utterly at a loss.'

      And when the war was over, there was that job his father had taken such pains to find him in the City – with Lazarus and Coit, no less! - just waiting for him to step into the moment he was demobilized.  A job with almost unlimited prospects for a young man with brains and energy – for a Staithes, in a word.  'A five-figure income by the time you're fifty,' his father had insisted almost lyrically, and had been really hurt and grieved, as well as mortally offended, furiously angry, when Mark replied that he had no intention of taking it.

      ' “But why not?” ' the poor old turd kept asking.  “Why not?”  And simply couldn't see that it was just because it was so good that I couldn't take his job.  So unfairly good!  So ignobly good!  He just couldn't see it.  According to his ideas, I ought to have rushed at it, headlong, like all the Gadarene swine rolled into one.  Instead of which I returned him his cow-pat and went to Mexico – to look after a coffee finca.'

      'But did you know anything about coffee?'

      'Of course not.  That was one of the attractions of the job.'  He smiled.  'When I did know something about it, I came back to see if there was anything doing here.'

      'And is there anything doing?'

      The other shrugged his shoulders.  God only knew.  One joined the Party, one distributed literature, one financed pressure-groups out of the profits on synthetic carnations, one addressed meetings and wrote articles.  And perhaps it was all quite useless.  Perhaps, on the contrary, the auspicious moment might some day present itself …

      'And then what?' asked Anthony.

      'Ah, that's the question.  It'll be all right at the beginning.  Revolution's delightful in the preliminary stages.  So long as it's a question of getting rid of the people at the top.  But afterwards, if the thing's a success – what then?  More wireless sets, more chocolates, more beauty parlours, more girls with better contraceptives.'  He shook his head.  'The moment you give people the chance to be piggish, they take it – thankfully.  That freedom you were talking about just now, the freedom at the top of the social ladder – it's just the licence to be a pig; or alternatively a prig, a self-satisfied pharisee like my father.  Or else both at once, like my precious brother.  Pig and prig simultaneously.  In Russia they haven't yet had the chance to be pigs.  Circumstances have forced them to be ascetics.  But suppose their economic experiment succeeds; suppose a time comes when they're all prosperous – what's to prevent them turning into Babbitts?  Millions and millions of soft, piggish Babbitts, ruled by a small minority of ambitious Staitheses.'

      Anthony smiled.  'A new phase of the game played according to the old unchanging rules.'

      I'm horribly afraid you're right,' said the other.  'It's orthodox Marxism, of course.  Behaviour and modes of thought are the outcome of economic circumstances.  Reproduce Babbitt's circumstances and you can't help reproducing his manners and customs.  Christ!'  He rose, walked to the piano and, drawing up a chair, sat down in front of it.  'Let's try to get that taste out of our mouths.'  He held his large bony hands poised for a moment above the keyboard; the began to play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D.  They were in another universe, a world where Babbitts and Staitheses didn't exist, were inconceivable.

      Mark had played for only a minute or two when the door opened and an elderly woman, thin and horse-faced, in a brown silk dress and wearing round her neck an old diseased brown fur, entered the room.  She walked on tiptoe, acting in elaborate pantomime the very personification of silence, but in the process produced an extraordinary volume and variety of disturbing noises – creaking of shoes, rustling of silk, glassy clinkings of bead necklaces, jingling of the silver objects suspended by little chains from the waist.  Mark went on playing without turning his head.  Embarrassed, Anthony roses and bowed.  The horse-faced creature waved him back to his place, and cautiously, in a final prolonged explosion of noise, sat down on the sofa.

      'Exquisite!' she cried when the final chord had been struck.  'Play us something more, Mark.'

      But Mark got up, shaking his head.  'I want to introduce you to Miss Pendle,' he said to Anthony; and to the old woman, 'Anthony Beavis was at Bulstrode with me,' he explained.

      Anthony took her hand.  She gave him a smile.  The teeth, which were false ones and badly fitting, were improbably too white and bright.  'So you were at Bulstrode with Mark!' she cried.  'Isn't that extraordinary.'

      'Extraordinary that we should still be on speaking terms,' said Mark.

      'No, no,' said Miss Pendle, and with a playfulness that Anthony found positively ghoulish, gave him a little slap on the arm.  'You know exactly what I mean.  He always was like that, Mr Beavis, even when he was a boy – do you remember?'

      Anthony duly nodded assent.

      'So sharp and sarcastic!  Even before you knew him at Bulstrode.  Shocking!'  She flashed her false teeth at Mark in a sparkle of loving mock-reprobation.  'He was my first pupil, you know,' she went on confidentially.  'And I was his first teacher.'

      Anthony rose gallantly to the occasion.  'Let me congratulate Mark,' he said, 'and condole with you.'

      Miss Pendle looked at Mark.  'Do you think I need his condolences?' she asked, almost archly, like a young girl, coquettishly fishing for compliments.

      Mark did not answer, only smiled and shrugged his shoulders.  'I'll go and make some tea,' he said.  'You'd like tea, wouldn't you, Penny?'  Miss Pendle nodded, and he rose and left the room.

      Anthony was wondering rather uncomfortably what he should say to this disquietingly human old nag, when Miss Pendle turned towards him.  'He's wonderful, Mark is; really wonderful.'  The false teeth flashed, the words came gushingly with an incongruously un-equine vehemence.  Anthony felt himself writhing with an embarrassed distaste.  'Nobody knows how kind he is,' she went on.  'He doesn't like it told; but I don't mind – I want people to know.'  She nodded so emphatically that the beads of her necklace rattled.  'I was ill last year,' she went on.  Her savings had gone, she couldn't get another job.  In despair, she had written to some of her old employers, Sir Michael Staithes among them.  'Sir Michael sent me five pounds,' she said.  'That kept me going for a bit.  Then I had to write again.  He said he couldn't do anything more.  But he mentioned the matter to Mark.  And what do you think Mark did?'  She looked at Anthony in silence, a horse transfigured,, with an expression at once of tenderness and triumph and her red-lidded brown eyes full of tears.

      'What did he do?' asked Anthony.

      'He came to me where I was staying – I had a room in Camberwell then – he came and he took me away with him.  Straightaway, the moment I could get my things packed up, and brought me here.  I've kept house for him ever since.  What do you think of that, Mr Beavis?' she asked.  Her voice trembled and she had to wipe her eyes; but she was still triumphant.  'What do you think of that?'

      Anthony really didn't know what to think of it; but said, meanwhile, that it was wonderful.

      'Wonderful,' the horse repeated, approvingly.  'That's exactly what it is.  But you mustn't tell him I told you.  He'd be furious with me.  He's like that text in the Gospel about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing.  That's what he's like.'  She gave her eyes a final wipe and blew her nose.  'There, I hear him coming,' she said, and, before Anthony could intervene, had jumped up, darted across the room in a storm of rustlings and rattlings, and opened the door.  Mark entered, carrying a tray with the tea-things and a plate of mixed biscuits.

      Miss Pendle poured out, said she oughtn't to eat anything at this time of night, but, all the same, took a round biscuit with pink sugar icing on it.

      'Now, tell me what sort of a boy young Master Mark was at Bulstrode,' she said in that playful way of hers.  'Up to all kind of mischief, I'll be bound!'  She took another bite at her biscuit.

      'He bullied me a good deal,' said Anthony.

      Miss Pendle interrupted her quick nibbling to laugh aloud.  'You naughty boy!' she said to Mark; then the jaws started to work again.

      'Being so good at football, he had a right to bully me.'

      'Yes, you were captain of the eleven, weren't you?'

      'I forget,' said Mark.

      'He forgets!' Miss Pendle repeated, looking triumphantly at Anthony.  'That's typical of him.  He forgets!'  She helped herself to a second biscuit, pushing aside the plain ones to select another with icing on it, and began to nibble once more with the intense and concentrated passion of those whose only sensual pleasures have been the pleasures of the palate.

      When she had gone to bed, the two men sat down again by the fire.  There was a long silence.

      'She's rather touching,' said Anthony at last.

      For some time Mark made no comment.  Then, 'A bit too touching,' he brought out.

      Anthony looked into his face and saw there a demonstration of the anatomy of sardonic irony.  There was another silence.  The clock, which was supported by two draped nymphs in gilded bronze, ticked from its place among the imitation Dresden figures that thronged the shelves of the elaborate overmantel.  Hideous on purpose, Anthony said to himself, as his eye took in the details of each separate outrage on good taste.  And the poor old horse – was she merely the largest, the most monstrous of the knick-knacks?  'I'm surprised,' he said aloud, 'that you don't wear a hairshirt.  Or perhaps you do?' he added.