CHAPTER XXXVII

 

Autumn 1933

 

It took longer than Mark expected to dispose of his business, and at moments, during the long weeks that preceded their departure, the temptation to throw up the whole ridiculous enterprise and scuttle back into the delicious otherworld of Mediterranean sunshine and abstract ideas became, for Anthony, almost irresistible.

      'What are you really going for?' he asked resentfully.

      'Fun,' was all the answer that Mark condescended to give.'

      'And your Don Jorge,' Anthony insisted.  'What does he hope to achieve by this little revolution of his?'

      'His own greater glory.'

      'But the peasants, the Indians?'

      'They'll be exactly where they were before, where they always will be: underneath.'

      'And yet you think it's worthwhile to go and help this Jorge of yours?'

      'Worthwhile for me.'  Mark smiled anatomically.  'And worthwhile for you.  Very much worthwhile for you,' he insisted.

      'But not for the peons, I gather.'

      'It never is.  What did the French peons get out of their Revolution?  Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter?  A few years of pleasant intoxication.  Then the same old treadmill.  Gilded, perhaps; repainted.  But in essentials the old machine.'

      'And you expect me to come along with you for fun?  The thought of the Mediterranean and his books heightened Anthony's indignation.  'It's crazy, it's abominable.'

      'In other words,' said Mark, 'you're afraid.  Well, why not?  But if you are, for God's sake say so.  Have the courage of your cowardice.'

      How he had hated Mark for telling him the home truths he knew so well!  If it hadn't been for Mr Beavis, and that interview with Helen, and finally Beppo Bowles, perhaps he would have had the courage of his cowardice.  But they made it impossible for him to withdraw.  There was his father, first of all, still deep in the connubial burrow, among the petticoats and the etymologies and the smell of red-haired women – but agitated, as Anthony had never seen him agitated before, hurt, indignant, bitterly resentful.  The presidency of the Philological Society, which ought, without any question, to have come to him, had gone instead of Jenkins.  Jenkins, if you please!  A mere ignorant popularizer, the very antithesis of a real scholar.  A charlatan, a philological confidence trickster, positively (to use an American colloquialism) a 'crook.'

      Jenkins' election had taken Mr Beavis long strides towards death.  From being a man much younger than his years, he had suddenly come to look his age.  An old man; and tired into the bargain, eroded from within.

      'I'm worried,' Pauline had confided to Anthony.  'He's making himself ill.  And for something so childish, really.  I can't make him see that it doesn't matter.  Or rather I can't make him feel it.  Because he sees it all right, but goes on worrying all the same.'

      Even in the deepest sensual burrow, Anthony reflected as he walked back to his rooms, even in the snuggest of intellectual other-worlds, fate could find one out.  And suddenly he perceived that, having spent all his life trying to react away from the standards of his father's universe, he had succeeded only in becoming precisely what his father was -  a man in a burrow.  With this small difference, that in his case the burrow happened to be intermittently adulterous instead of connubial all the time; and that the ideas were about societies and not words.  For the moment, he was out of his burrow – had been chased out, as though by ferrets.  But it would be easy and was already a temptation to return.  To return and be snug, be safe.  No, not safe; that was the point.  At any moment a Jenkins might be elected to some presidency or other, and then, defenceless in one's burrow of thought and sensuality, one would be at the mercy of any childish passion that might arise.  Outside, perhaps, one might learn to defend oneself against such contingencies.  He decided to go with Mark.

      But in the succeeding days the temptation kept coming back.  In spite of the spectacles of Mr Beavis's self-destroying childishness, the quiet life seemed immensely attractive.  'Mark's mad,' he kept assuring himself.  'We're doing something stupid and wrong.  And after all, my sociology is important.  It'll help people to think clearly.'  Wasn't it (ridiculous word!) a 'duty' to go on with it?  But then, more than six weeks after his return to London, he saw Helen and Beppo Bowles – saw them both in the course of a single afternoon.  The meeting with Helen was a chance one.  It was in the French Room at the National Gallery.  Anthony was stooping to look closely into Cezanne's   Mont Sainte Victoire, when he became aware that two other visitors had halted just behind him.  He shifted a little to one side, so as to let them see the picture, and continued his meticulous examination of the brushwork.

      A few seconds passed; then, very slowly and with a foreign accent, a man's voice said: 'See now here how the nineteenth-century petit bourgeois tried to escape from industrialism.  Why must he paint such landscapes, so romantic?  Because he will forget the new methods of production.  Because he will not think of the  proletariat.  That is why.'

      'Yes, I suppose that is the reason,' said another voice.

      With a start, Anthony recognized it as Helen's.  'What shall I do?' he was wondering, when the voice spoke again.

      'Why, it's Anthony!'  A hand touched his arm.

      He straightened himself up and turned towards her, making the gestures and noises appropriate to delighted astonishment.  That face, which he had last seen alternately stony and bright with mockery, then in the rapt agony of pleasure, then dabbled with blood and pitiably disintegrated by a grief extreme beyond expression, finally hard as it had been at first, harder, more rigidly a stone – that face was now beautifully alive, and tender, illuminated from within by a kind of secure joy.  She looked at him without the least trace of embarrassment.  It was as though the past had been completely abolished, as though, for her, only the present existed and were real.

      'This is Ekki Giesebrecht,' she said.

      The fair-haired young man beside her bent stiffly forwards as they shook hands.

      'He had to escape from Germany,' she was explaining.  'They would have killed him for his politics.'

      It was not jealousy that he felt as he looked from one glad face to the other – not jealousy, but an unhappiness so acute that it was like a physical pain.  A pain that endured and that was not in the least diminished by the solemn absurdity of the little lecture which Helen now delivered on art as a manifestation of class interests.  Listening, he could laugh to himself, he could reflect with amusement on love's fantastic by-products in matters of taste, political opinions, religious beliefs.  But behind the laughter, beneath the ironical reflections, that pain of unhappiness persisted.

      He refused her invitation to have tea with them.

      'I've promised to go and see Beppo,' he explained.

      'Give him my love,' she said, and went on to ask if, since his return, he had met Hugh.

      Anthony shook his head.

      'We're parting company, you know.'

      Making an effort to smile, 'All good wishes for the divorce,' he said, and hurried away.

      Walking through the smoky dimness of the afternoon, he thought of that softly radiant face of hers, and felt, along with the pain of unhappiness, a renewal of that other, profounder pain of dissatisfaction with himself.  Since his arrival in London he had led his ordinary London life – the lunches with men of learning and affairs, the dinners where women kept the conversation more gossipy and amusing – and the easy, meaningless successes, which his talents and a certain natural charm always allowed him to score at such gatherings, had made him all but completely forget his dissatisfaction, had masked the pain of it, as a drug will mask neuralgia or toothache.  This meeting with Helen had instantaneously neutralized the soothing drug and left him defenceless against a pain no whit diminished by the temporary anodyne – rather, indeed, intensified by it.  For the realization that he had permitted himself to be soothed by an opiate of such poor quality was a new cause for dissatisfaction added to the old.  And then to think that he had been seriously considering the idea of returning to the old quiet life!  So quietly squalid, so quietly inhuman and, for all the expense of thought it entailed, so quietly mad.  Mark's enterprise might be stupid and even disgraceful; but, however bad, it was still preferable to that quietude of work and occasional detached sensuality beside the Mediterranean.

      Standing at the door of Beppo's flat, he heard the sound of voices – Beppo's and another man's.  He rang the bell.  Time passed.  The door remained unopened.  The voices talked on, inarticulately, but with shrill squeaks on Beppo's side and, on that of the stranger, a crescendo of rough barks which proclaimed that they were quarrelling.  He rang again.  There were a few more squeaks and shouts; then the sound of hurrying feet.  The door was flung open, and there stood Beppo.  The face was flushed, the bald crown shiny with perspiration.  Behind him, very upright and soldierly in his carriage, appeared a rather coarsely handsome young man, with a small moustache and carefully oiled wavy brown hair, dressed in a blue serge suit of extreme and somehow improbable smartness.

      'Come in,' said Beppo rather breathlessly.

      'Am I disturbing?'

      'No, no.  My friend was just going – this is Mr Simpson, by the way – just going.'

      'Was he?' asked the young man in a significant voice and with a Nottinghamshire accent.  'I hadn't known he was.'

      'Perhaps I'd better go,' Anthony suggested.

      'No, please don't, please don't.'  There was a note in Beppo's voice of almost desperate appeal.

      The young man laughed.  'He wants protection – that's what it is.  Thinks he's going to be blackmailed.  And so I could if I wanted to.'  He looked at Anthony with knowing, insolent eyes.  'But I don't want to.'  He assumed an expression that was meant to be one of lofty moral indignation.  'I wouldn't do it for a thousand pounds.  It's a skunk's game, that's what I say.'  From being loftily general, the moral indignation came down to earth and focused itself on Beppo.  'But a man's got no business to be mean,' he went on.  'That's a skunk's game too.'  He pointed an accusing finger.  'A mean, dirty swine.  That's what you are.  I've said it before, and I say it again.  And I don't care who hears me.  Because I can prove it.  Yes, and you know I can.  A mean, dirty swine.'

      'All right, all right,' Beppo cried, in the tone of one who makes unconditional surrender.  Catching Anthony by the arm, 'Go into the sitting-room, will you,' he begged.

      Anthony did as he was told.  Outside in the hall, a few almost whispered sentences were exchanged.  Then, after a silence, the front door slammed, and Beppo, pale and distracted, entered the room.  With one hand he was wiping his forehead; but it was only after he had sat down that he noticed what he was holding in the other.  The fat white fingers were closed round his wallet.  Embarrassed, he put the compromising object away in his breast pocket.  Then, fizzling explosively in misery as he fizzled in mirth, 'It's only money that they're after,' he burst out like an opened ginger-beer bottle.  'You've seen it.  Why should I try to hide it?  Only money.'  And he rambled on, popping, squeaking, fizzling in almost incoherent denunciation of 'them', and commiseration for himself.  Yes, he was doubly to be pitied – pitied for what he had to suffer because of 'their' mercenary attitude, when the thing he was looking for was love for love's and adventure for adventure's sake; pitied also for that growing incapacity to find the least satisfaction in any amorous experience that was not wholly new.  Increasingly, repetition was becoming the enemy.  Repetition killed what he called the frisson.  Unspeakable tragedy.  He, who so longed for tenderness, for understanding, for companionship, was debarred from ever getting what he wanted.  To have an affair with somebody of one's own class, somebody one could talk to, had come to be out of the question.  But how could there be real tenderness without the sensual relationship?  With 'them,' the relationship was possible, was wildly desirable.  But tenderness could no more flourish without communication than it could flourish without sensuality.  And sensuality entirely divorced from communication and tenderness seemed now to be possible only under the stimulus of a constant change of object.  There had to be another of 'them' each time.  For that he was to be pitied; but the situation had its romantic side.  Or at any rate might have had it – used to have it.  Nowadays, Beppo complained, 'they' had changed, were becoming mercenary, frankly rapacious, mere prostitutes.

      'You saw just now,' he said, 'the sordidness of it, the lowness!'  His misery bubbled over as though under an inner pressure of carbonic acid gas.  In his agitation, he heaved himself out of his chair and began to walk up and down the room, exposing to Anthony's eyes, now the bulging waistcoat, the lavish tie from Sulka's, the face with its pendant of chins, the bald and shining crown, now the broad seat of pale check trousers, the black jacket rising pear-like to narrow shoulders, and below the central baldness that fuzz of pale brown hair, like a Florentine page's, above the collar.  'And I'm not mean.  God knows, I've got plenty of other faults, but not that.  Why can't they understand that it isn't meanness, that it's a wish to … to …' he hesitated, 'well, to keep the thing on a human basis?  A basis at least of romance, of adventure.  Instead of that, they make these awful, humiliating scenes.  Refusing to understand, absolutely refusing.'

      He continued to walk up and down the room in silence.  Anthony made no comment, but wondered inwardly how far poor old Beppo knew the truth or whether he too refused to understand – refused to understand that, to 'them,' his ageing and unpalatable person could hardly be expected to seem romantic, that the only charm which remained to him, outside a certain good taste, and a facile intelligence which 'they' were not in a position to appreciate, was his money.  Did he know all this?  Yes, of course he did; it was unavoidable.  He knew it quite well and refused to understand.  'Like me,' Anthony said to himself.

      That evening he telephoned to Mark to tell him definitely that he could book their passage.