CHAPTER XXVII

 

May 27^th 1914

 

Anthony came down to breakfast to find his father explaining to the two children the etymology of what they were eating.  '… merely another form of “pottage”.  You say “porridge” just as you say – or rather' (he twinkled at them) 'I hope you don't say - “shurrup” for “shut up”.'

      The two little girls went on stolidly eating.

      'Ah, Anthony!' Mr Beavis went on.  'Better late than never.  What, no pottage this morning?  But you'll have an Aberdeen cutlet, I hope.'

      Anthony helped himself to the haddock and sat down in his place.

      'Here's a letter for you,' said Mr Beavis, and handed it over.  'Don't I recognize Brian's writing?'  Anthony nodded.  'Does he still enjoy his work at Manchester?'

      'I think so,' Anthony answered.  'Except, of course, that he does too much.  He's at the newspaper till one or two in the morning.  And then from lunch to dinner he works at his thesis.'

      'Well, it's good to see a young man who has the energy of his ambitions,' said Mr Beavis.  'Because, of course, I needn't work so hard.  It's not as if his mother hadn't the wherewithal.'

      The wherewithal so exasperated Anthony that, though he found Brian's action absurd, it was with a cutting severity that he answered his father.  'He won't accept his mother's money,' he said very coldly.  'It's a matter of principle.'

      There was a diversion while the children put away the porridge plates and were helped to Aberdeen cutlets.  Anthony took the opportunity to start reading his letter.

 

'No news of you for a long time.  Here all goes on as usual, or would do, if I were feeling a bit sprightlier.  But sleep has been none too good and internal workings not all they might be.  Am slowing down, in consequence, on the thesis, as I can't slow down on the paper.  All this makes me look forward longingly to our projected fortnight in Langdale.  Don't let me down, for heaven's sake.  What a bore one's carcase is when it goes in the least wrong!  Even when it goes right, for that matter.  Such a lot of unmodern inconveniences.  I sometimes bitterly resent this physical predestination to scatology and obscenity.

      'Write soon and let me know how you are, what you've been reading, whether you've met anybody of interest.  And will you do me a kindness?  Joan's in town now, staying with her aunt and working for the Charity Organization people.  Her father didn't want her to go, of course – preferred to have her at home, so that he could tyrannize her.  There was a long battle, which he finally lost; she has been in town nearly a month now.  For which I'm exceedingly thankful – but at the same time, for various reasons, feel a bit worried.  If I could get away for the weekends, I'd come myself; but I can't.  And perhaps, in a certain sense, it's all for the best.  In my present mouldy condition I should be rather a skeleton at the feast; and besides, there are certain complications.  I can't explain them in a letter; but when you come north in July I'll try.  I ought to have asked your advice before this.  You're harder in the head than I am.  Which is ultimately the reason why I didn't talk to you about the matter – the fear of being thought a fool by you!  Such is one's imbecility.  But, there, we'll discuss it all later.  Meanwhile, will you get in touch with her, take her out to a meal, get her to talk, then write and tell me how you think she's reacting to London, what she feels about life in general, and so forth.  It's been a violent transition – from remote country to London, from cramping poverty to a rich house, from subject to her father's bad-tempered tyranny to independence.  A violent transition; and, though I'm glad of it, I'm a bit nervous as to its effects.  But you'll see. - Yours,

                       B.'

 

      Anthony did see that same day.  The old shyness, he noticed, as they shook hands in the lobby of the restaurant, was still there – the same embarrassed smile, the same swaying movement of recoil.  In face and body she was more of a woman than  when he had seen her last, a year before, seemed prettier too – chiefly, no doubt, because she was better dressed.

      They passed into the restaurant and sat down.  Anthony ordered the food and a bottle of Vouvray, then began to explore the ground.

      London – how did she like London?

      Adored it.

      Even the work?

      Not the office part, perhaps.  But three times a week she helped at a crèche.  'I love babies.'

      'Even those horrible little smelly ones?'

      Joan was indignant.  'They're adorable.  I love the work with them.  Besides, it allows me to enjoy all the rest of London with a clear conscience.  I feel I've paid for my theatres and dances.'

      Shyness broke up her talk, plunged it, as it were, into alternate light and shade.  At one moment she would be speaking with difficulty, hardly opening her lips, her voice low and indistinct, her face averted; the next, her timidity was swept aside by an uprush of strong feeling – delight, or some distress, or irrepressible mirth, and she was looking at him with eyes grown suddenly and surprisingly bold; from almost inaudible, her voice had become clear; the strong white teeth flashed between lips parted in a frank expression of feeling.  Then suddenly she was as though appalled by her own daring; she became conscious of him as a possible critic.  What was he thinking?  Had she made a fool of herself?  Her voice faltered, the blood rose to her cheeks, she looked down at her plate; and for the next few minutes he would get nothing but short mumbled answers to his questions, nothing but the most perfunctory of nervous laughs in response to his best efforts to amuse her.  The food, however, and the wine did their work, and as the meal advanced, she found herself more at ease with him.  They began to talk about Brian.

      'You ought to prevent him from working so hard,' he said.

      'Do you think I don't try?'  Then, with something almost like anger in her voice, 'It's his nature,' she went on.  'He's so terribly conscientious.'

      'It's your business to make him unconscientious.'  He smiled at her, expecting a return in kind.  But, instead of that, she frowned; her face took on an expression of resentful misery.  'It's easy for you to talk,' she muttered.  There was a silence, while she sat with downcast eyes sipping her wine.

      They could have married, it occurred to him for the first time, if Brian had consented to live on his mother.  Why on earth, then, seeing how much he was in love with the girl …?

      With the peach-melba it all came out.  'It's difficult to talk about,' she said.  'I've hardly mentioned it to anyone.  But with you it's different.  You've known Brian such a long time; you're his oldest friend.  You'll understand.  I feel I can tell you about it.'

      Curious, but at the same time a little disquieted, he murmured something vaguely polite.

      She failed to notice the signs of his embarrassment; for her, at the moment, Anthony was only the heaven-sent opportunity for at last releasing in speech a flood of distressing feelings too long debarred from expression.

      'It's that conscientiousness of his.  If you only knew …! Why has he got the idea that there's something wrong about love?  The ordinary, happy kind of love, I mean.  He thinks it isn't right; he thinks he oughtn't to have those feelings.'

      She pushed away her plate, and, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, began to speak in a lower, more intimate tone of the kisses that Brian had given and been ashamed of, and those other kisses that, by way of atonement, he had refused to give.

      Anthony listened in astonishment.  'Certain complications,' was what Brian had written in his letter; it was putting it mildly.  That was just craziness.  Tragic – but also grotesque, absurd.  It occurred to him that Mary would find the story particularly ludicrous.

      'He said he wanted to be worthy of me,' she went on.  'Worthy of love.  But all that happened was that it made him feel unworthy.  Unworthy of everything, in every way.  Guilty – feeling I'd done something wrong.  And dirty too, if you understand what I mean, as though I'd fallen into the mud.  But, Anthony, it isn't wrong, is it?' she questioned.  'I mean, we'd never done anything that wasn't … well, you know: quite innocent.  Why does he say he's unworthy, and make me feel unworthy at the same time?  Why does he?' she insisted.  There were tears in her eyes.

      'He was always rather like that,' said Anthony.  'Perhaps his upbringing … His mother's a wonderful person,' he added, dropping, as he suddenly realized, while the words were being spoken, into Mrs Foxe's own idiom.  'But perhaps a bit oppressive, just for that reason.'

      Joan nodded emphatically, but did not speak.

      'It may be she's made him aim a bit too high,' he went on.  'Too high all along the line, if you see what I mean – even when he's not directly following her example.  That business of not wanting to take her money, for instance …'

      Joan caught up the subject with passionate eagerness.  'Yes, why does he want to be different from everyone else?  After all, there are other good people in the world and they don't feel it necessary to do it.  Mind you,' she added, looking up sharply into Anthony's face, as if trying to catch and quell any expression of disapproval there, or worse, of patronizing amusement, 'mind you, I think it's wonderful of him to do it.  Wonderful!' she repeated with a kind of defiance.  Then, resuming the critical tone which she would not allow Anthony to use, but to which it seemed to her that her own feelings for Brian gave her a right, 'All the same,' she went on, 'I can't see how it would hurt him to take that money.  I believe it was mostly his mother's doing.'

      Surprised, 'But he told me that Mrs Foxe had tried to insist on his taking it.'

      'Oh, she made it seem as though she wanted him to take it.  We were there for a weekend in May to talk it over.  She kept telling him that it wasn't wrong to take the money, and that he ought to think about me and getting married.  But then, when Brian and I told her that I'd agreed to his not taking it, she …'

      Anthony interrupted her.  'But had you agreed?'

      Joan dropped her eyes.  'In a way,' she said sullenly.  Then looking up again with sudden anger, 'How could I help agreeing with him?  Seeing that that was what he wanted to do, and would have done, what's more, even if I hadn't agreed.  And besides, I've told you, there was something rather splendid and wonderful about it.  Of course, I had agreed.  But agreeing didn't mean that I really wanted him to refuse the money.  And that's where his falseness came in – pretending to think that I wanted him to refuse it, and congratulating me and him on what we'd done.  Saying we were heroic and all that.  And so encouraging him to go on with the idea.  It is her doing, I tell you.  Much more than you think.'

      She was silent, and Anthony thought it best to allow the subject to drop.  Heaven only knew what she'd say if he allowed her to go on talking about Mrs Foxe.  'Poor Brian,' he said aloud, and added, taking refuge in platitude, 'The best is the enemy of the good.'

      'Yes, that's just it!' she cried.  'The enemy of the good.  He wants to be perfect – but look at the result!  He tortures himself and hurts me.  Why should I be made to feel dirty and criminal?  Because that's what he's doing.  When I've done nothing wrong.  Nor has he, for that matter.  And yet he wants me to feel the same about him.   Dirty and criminal.  Why does he make it so difficult for me?  As difficult as he possibly can.'  Her voice trembled, the tears overflowed.  She pulled out her handkerchief and quickly wiped her eyes.  'I'm sorry,' she said.  'I'm making a fool of myself.  But if you knew how hard it's been for me!  I've loved him so much, I want to go on loving him.  But he doesn't seem to want to allow me to.  It ought to be so beautiful; but he does his best to make it all seem ugly and horrible.'  Then, after a pause, and in a voice that had sunk almost to a whisper, 'I sometimes wonder if I can go on much longer.'

      Did it mean, he wondered, that she had already decided to break it off – had already met someone else who was prepared to love her and be loved less tragically, more normally than Brian?  No; probably not, he decided.  But there was every likelihood that she soon would.  In her way (it didn't happen to be exactly the way he liked) she was attractive.  There would be no shortage of candidates; and if a satisfactory candidate presented himself, would she be able – whatever she might consciously wish – to refuse?'

      Joan broke the silence.  'I dream so often of the house we're going to live in,' she said.  'Going from room to room; and it all looks so nice.  Such pretty curtains and chair covers.  And vases full of flowers.'  She sighed; then, after a pause, 'Do you understand his not wanting to take his mother's money?'

      Anthony hesitated a moment; then replied noncommittally: 'I understand it; but I don't think I should do it myself.'

      She sighed once more.  'That's how I feel too.'  She looked at her watch; then gathered up her gloves.  'I shall have to go.'  With this return from intimacy to the prosaic world of time and people and appointments, she suddenly woke up again to painful self-consciousness.  Had it bored him?  Did he think her a fool?  She looked into his face, trying to divine his thoughts; then dropped her eyes.  'I'm afraid.  I've been talking a lot about myself,' she mumbled.  'I don't know why I should burden you …'

      He protested.  'I only wish I could be of some help.'

      Joan raised her face again and gave him a quick smile of gratitude.  'You've done a lot by just listening.'

      They left the restaurant and, when he had seen her to her bus, he set off on foot towards the British Museum, wondering, as he went, what sort of letter he ought to write to Brian.  Should he wash his hands of the whole business and merely scribble a note to the effect that Joan seemed well and happy?  Or should he let out that she had told him everything, and then proceed to expostulate, warn, advise?  He passed between the huge columns of the portico into the dim coolness within.  A regular sermon, he thought with distaste.  If only one could approach the problem as it ought to be approached – as a Rabelaisian joke.  But then poor Brian could hardly be expected to see it in that light.  Even though it would do him a world of good to think for a change in Rabelaisian terms.  Anthony showed his card to the attendant and walked down the corridor to the Reading Room.  That was always the trouble, he reflected; you could never influence anybody to be anything except himself, nor influence him by any means that he didn't already accept the validity of.  He pushed open the door and was under the dome, breathing the faint, acrid smell of books.  Millions of books.  And all those hundreds of thousands of authors, century after century – each convinced he was right, convinced that he could convince the rest of the world by putting it down in black and white.  When in fact, of course, the only people anyone ever convinced were the ones that nature and circumstances had actually or potentially convinced already.  And even those weren't wholly to be relied on.  Circumstances changed.  What convinced in January wouldn't necessarily convince in August.  The attendant handed him the books that had been reserved for him, and he walked off to his seat.  Mountains of the spirit in interminable birthpangs; and the result was – what?  Well, si ridiculum murem requiris, circumspice.  Pleased with his invention, he looked about him at his fellow readers – the men like walruses, the dim females, the Indians, emaciated or overblown, the whiskered patriarchs, the youths in spectacles.  Heirs to all the ages.  Depressing, if you took it seriously; but also irresistibly comic.  He sat down and opened his book – De Lancre's Tableau de l-Inconstance des Mauvais Anges – at the place where he had stopped reading the day before.  'Le Diable estoit en forme de bouc, ayant une queue et au dessoubs un visage d'homme noir, où elle fut contrainte le baiser …' He laughed noiselessly to himself.  Another one for Mary, he thought.

      At five he rose, left his books at the desk and, from Holborn, took the tube to Gloucester Road.  A few minutes later he was at Mary Amberley's front door.  The maid opened; he smiled at her familiarly and, assuming the privilege of an intimate of the house, ran upstairs to the drawing-room, unannounced.

      'I have a story for you,' he proclaimed, as he crossed the room.

      'A coarse story, I hope,' said Mary Amberley from the sofa.

      Anthony kissed her hand in that affected style he had recently adopted, and sat down.  'To the coarse,' he said, 'all things are coarse.'

      'Yes, how lucky that is!'  And with that crooked little smile of hers, that dark glitter between narrowed lids, 'A filthy mind,' she added, 'is a perpetual feast.'  The joke was old and not her own; but Anthony's laughter pleased her none the less for that.  It was wholehearted laughter, loud and prolonged – louder and longer than the joke itself warranted.  But then it wasn't at the joke that he was really laughing.  The joke was hardly more than an excuse; that laughter was his response, not to a single stimulus, but to the whole extraordinary and exciting situation.  To be able to talk freely about anything (anything, mind you) with a woman, a lady, a genuine 'loaf-kneader', as Mr Beavis, in his moments of etymological waggery, had been known to say, a true-blue English loaf-kneader who was also one's mistress, had also read Mallarmé, was also a friend of Guillaume Appolinaire; and to listen to the loaf-kneader preaching what she practised and casually mentioning beds, water-closets, the physiology of what (for the Saxon words still remained unpronounceable) they were  constrained to call l'amour – for Anthony, the experience was still, after two years and in spite of Mary's occasional infidelities, an intoxicating mixture of liberation and forbidden fruit, of relief and titillation.  In his father's universe, in the world of Pauline and the Aunts, such things were simply not there – but not there with a painfully, glaringly conspicuous absence.  Like the hypnotized patient who has been commanded to see the five of clubs as a piece of virgin pasteboard, they deliberately failed to perceive the undesirable things, they were conspiratorially silent about all they had been blind to.  The natural functions even of the lower quadrupeds.  That goat incident, for example – it was the Exquisitely comic – but how much more comic now than at the time, nearly two years before he first met Mary, when it had actually happened!  Picnicking on that horrible Scheideck Pass, with the Weisshorn hanging over them like an obsession and a clump of gentians, carefully sought out by Mr Beavis, in the grass at their feet, the family had been visited by a half-grown kid, greedy for the salt of their hard-boiled eggs.  Shrinking and a little disgusted under their delight, his two small half-sisters had held out their hands to be licked, while Pauline took a snapshot, and Mr Beavis, whose interest in goats was mainly philological, quoted Theocritus.  Pastoral scene!  But suddenly the little creature had straddled its legs and, still expressionlessly gazing at the Beavis family through the oblong pupils of its large yellow eyes, had proceeded to make water on the gentians.

      'They're not very generous with their butter,' and 'How jolly the dear old Weisshorn is looking today,' Pauline and Mr Beavis brought out almost simultaneously – the one, as she peered into her sandwich, in a tone of complaint, the other, gazing away far-focused, with a note in his voice of a rapture nonetheless genuinely Wordsworthian for being expressed in terms of a gentlemanly and thoroughly English facetiousness.

      In haste and guiltily, the two children swallowed their incipient shriek of startled mirth and averted frozen faces from one another and the outrageous goat.  Momentarily compromised, the world of Mr Beavis and Pauline and the Aunts had settled down again to respectability.

      'And what about your story?' Mrs Amberley enquired, as his laughter subsided.

      'You shall hear,' said Anthony, and was silent for a little, lighting a cigarette, while he thought of what he was about to say and the way he meant to say it.  He was ambitious about his story, wanted to make it a good one, at once amusing and psychologically profound; a smoking-room story that should also be a library story, a laboratory story.  Mary must be made to pay a double tribute of laughter and admiration.

      'You know Brian Foxe?' he began.

      'Of course.'

      'Poor old Brian!'  By his tone, by the use of the patronizing adjective, Anthony established his position of superiority, asserted his right, the right of the enlightened and scientific vivisector, to anatomize and examine.  Yes, poor old Brian!  That maniacal preoccupation of his with chastity!  Chastity! - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added paranthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.  Mary's appreciative smile acted on him like a spur to fresh efforts.  Fresh efforts, of course, at Brian's expense.  But at the moment, that didn't occur to him.

      'But what can you expect,' Mrs Amberley put in, 'with a mother like that?  One of those spiritual vampires.  A regular St Monica.'

      'St Monica by Ary Scheffer,' he found himself overbidding.  Not that there was a trace in Mrs Foxe of that sickly insincerity of Scheffer's saint.  But the end of his story-telling, which was to provide Mary's laughter and admiration, was sufficient justification for any means whatever.  Scheffer was an excellent joke, too good a joke to be neglected, even if he were beside the point.  And when Mary brought out what was at the moment her favourite phrase and talked of Mrs Foxe's 'uterine reactions,' he eagerly seized upon the words and began applying them, not merely to Mrs Foxe, but also to Joan and even (making another joke out of the physical absurdity of the thing) to Brian.  Brian's uterine reactions towards chastity in conflict with his own and Joan's uterine reactions towards the common desires – it was a drama.  A drama, he explained, whose existence hitherto he had only suspected and inferred.  Now there was no more need to guess; he knew.  Straight from the horse's mouth.  Or rather, straight from the mare's.  Poor Joan!  The vivisector laid out another specimen on the operating table.

      'Like early Christians,' was Mrs Amberley's comment, when he had finished.

      The virulent contempt in her voice made him suddenly remember, for the first time since he had begun this story, that Brian was his friend, that Joan had been genuinely unhappy.  Too late, he wanted to explain that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was nobody he liked and admired and respected more than Brian.  'You mustn't misunderstand me,' he said to Mary retrospectively and in imagination.  'I'm absolutely devoted to him.'  Inside his head, he became eloquent on the subject.  But no amount of this interior eloquence could alter the fact that he had betrayed confidences and been malicious without apology or qualifying explanation.  At the time, of course, this malice had seemed to him the manifestation of his own psychological acuteness; these betrayed confidences, the indispensable facts without which the acuteness could not have been exercised.  But now …

      He found himself all at once confused and tongue-tied with self-reproach.

      'I felt awfully sorry for Joan,' he stammered, trying to make amends.  'Promised I'd do all I could to help the poor girl.  But what?  That's the question.  What?'  He exaggerated the note of perplexity.  Perplexed, he was justified in betraying Joan's confidences; he had told the story (he now began to assure himself) solely for the sake of asking Mary's advice – the advice of an experienced woman of the world.

      But the experienced woman of the world was looking at him in the most disquieting way.  Mrs Amberley's eyelids had narrowed over a mocking brilliance; the left-hand corner of her mouth was drawn up ironically.  'The nicest thing about you,' she said judicially, 'is your innocence.'

      Her words were so wounding that he forgot in an instant Joan, Brian, his own discreditable behaviour, and could think only of his punctured vanity.

      'Thank you,' he said, trying to give her a smile of frank amusement.  Innocent -  she thought him innocent?  After their time in Paris.  After those jokes about uterine reactions?

      'So deliciously youthful, so touching.'

      'I'm glad you think so.'  The smile had gone all awry; he felt the blood mounting to his cheeks.

      'A girl comes to you,' Mrs Amberley went on, 'and complains because she hasn't been kissed enough.  And here you are, solemnly asking what you ought to do to help her!  And now you're blushing like a beetroot.  Darling, I absolutely adore you!'  Laying her hand on his arm, 'Kneel down on the floor here,' she commanded.  Rather sheepishly, he obeyed.  Mary Amberley looked at him for a little in silence, with the same bright mocking expression in her eyes.  Then, softly, 'Shall I show you what you can do to help her?' she asked.  'Shall I show you?'

      He nodded without speaking; but still, at arm's length, she smiled enquiringly into his face.

      'Or am I a fool to show you?' she asked.  'Won't you learn the lesson too well?  Perhaps I shall be jealous?'  She shook her head and smiled – a gay and 'civilized' smile.  'No, I don't believe in being jealous.'  She took his face between her two hands and, whispering, 'This is how you can help her,' drew him towards her.

      Anthony had felt humiliated by her almost contemptuous assumption of the dominant role; but no shame, no resentment could annul his body's consciousness of the familiar creepings of pleasure and desire.  He abandoned himself to her kisses.

      A clock struck, and immediately, from an upper floor, came the approaching sound of shrill childish voices.  Mrs Amberley drew back and, laying a hand over his mouth, pushed him away from her.  'You've got to be domestic,' she said, laughing.  'It's six.  I do the fond mother at six.'

      Anthony scrambled to his feet and, with a yell like the whistle of an express train a small round child of about five came rushing into the room and fairly hurled herself upon her mother.  Another little girl, three or four years older than the first, came hurrying after.

      'Helen!' she kept calling, and her face, with its expression of anxious disapproval, was the absurd parody of a governess's face.  'Helen!  You mustn't.  Tell her she mustn't shout like that, Mummy,' she appealed to Mrs Amberley.

      But Mrs Amberley only laughed and ran her fingers through the little one's thick yellow hair.  'Joyce believes in the Ten Commandments,' she said, turning to Anthony.  'Was born believing in them.  Weren't you, darling?'  She put an arm round Joyce's shoulder and kissed her.  'Whereas Helen and I …'  She shook her head.  'Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears.'

      'Nanny says it's the draught that gives her a stiff neck,' Joyce volunteered, and was indignant when her mother and Anthony, and even, by uncomprehending contagion, little Helen, burst out laughing.  'But it's true!' she cried; and tears of outraged virtue were in her eyes.  'Nanny said so.'