CHAPTER V

 

A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers - it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake's imagination.  A jumble of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance.  The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas - yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.

      The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, towards the floor.  But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night.  He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky.  Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cocatoos, up through the perennial mist of London, into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke.  He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise.  That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left - it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon.  And all these voices (what were they saying? '... made an excellent speech ...'; '... no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you've tried them ...'; '... such a bore ...'; '... eloped with the chauffeur ...'), all these voices - how exquisite and tiny they'd be up there!  But meanwhile down here, in the jungle .... Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous.

      Looking over the heads of the people who surrounded him, he saw Frank Illidge, alone, leaning against a pillar.  His attitude, his smile were Byronic, at once world-weary and contemptuous; he glanced about him with a languid amusement, as though he were watching the drolleries of a group of monkeys.  Unfortunately, Walter reflected, as he made his way through the crowd towards him, poor Illidge hadn't the right physique for being Byronically superior.  Satirical romantics should be long, slow-moving, graceful and handsome.  Illidge was small, alert and jerky.  And what a comic face!  Like a street Arab's, with its upturned nose and wide slit of a mouth; a very intelligent, sharp-witted street Arab's face, but not exactly one to be languidly contemptuous with.  Besides, who can be superior with freckles?  Illidge's complexion was sandy with them.  Protectively coloured, the sandy-brown eyes, the sandy-orange eyebrows and lashes disappeared, at a little distance, into the skin, as a lion dissolves into the desert.  From across a room his face seemed featureless and unregarding, like the face of a statue carved out of a block of sandstone.  Pool Illidge!  The Byronic part made him look rather ridiculous.

      'Hullo,' said Walter, as he got within speaking distance.  The two young men shook hands.  'How science?'  What a silly question! thought Walter as he pronounced the words.

      Illidge shrugged his shoulders.  'Less fashionable than the arts, to judge by this party.'  He looked round him.  'I've seen half the writing and painting section of Who's Who this evening.  The place fairly stinks of art.'

      'Isn't that rather a comfort for science?' said Walter.  'The arts don't enjoy being fashionable.'

      'Oh, don't they!  Why are you here, then?'

      'Why indeed?'  Walter parried the question with a laugh.  He looked round, wondering where Lucy could have gone.  He had not caught sight of her since the music stopped.

      'You've come to do your tricks and have your head patted,' said Illidge, trying to get a little of his own back; the memory of that slip on the stairs, of Lady Edward's lack of interest in newts, of the military gentlemen's insolence, still rankled.  'Just look at that girl there with the frizzy hair, in cloth of silver.  The one like a little white negress.  What about her, for example?  It'd be pleasant to have one's head patted by that sort of thing - eh?'

      'Well, would it?'

      Illidge laughed.  'You take the high philosophical line, do you?  But, my dear chap, admit it's all humbug.  I take it myself, so I ought to know.  To tell you the truth, I envy you art-mongers your success.  It makes me really furious when I see some silly, half-witted little writer ...'

      'Like me, for example.'

      'No, you're a cut above most of them,' conceded Illidge.  'But when I see some wretched little scribbler with a tenth of my intelligence, making money and being cooed over, while I'm disregarded, I do get furious sometimes.'

      'You ought to regard it as a compliment.  If they coo over us, it's because they can understand, more or less, what we're after.  They can't understand you; you're above them.  Their neglect is a compliment to your mind.'

      'Perhaps; but it's a damned insult to my body.'  Illidge was painfully conscious of his appearance.  He knew that he was ugly and looked undistinguished.  And knowing, he liked to remind himself of the unpleasant fact, like a man with an aching tooth, who is forever fingering the source of his pain, just to make sure it is still painful.  'If I looked like that enormous lout, Webley, they wouldn't neglect me, even if my mind were like Newton's.  The fact is,' he said, giving the aching tooth a good tug this time, 'I look like an anarchist.  You're lucky, you know.  You look like a gentleman, or at least like an artist. You've no idea what a nuisance it is to look like an intellectual of the lower classes.'  The tooth was responding excruciatingly; he pulled at it the harder.  'It's not merely that the women neglect you - these women, at any rate.  That's bad enough.  But the police refuse to neglect you; they take a horrid inquisitive interest.  Would you believe it, I've been twice arrested, simply because I look like the sort of man who makes infernal machines.'

      'It's a good story,' said Walter sceptically.

      'But true, I swear.  Once it was in this country.  Near Chesterfield.  They were having a coal strike.  I happened to be looking on at a fight between strikers and blacklegs.  The police didn't like my face and grabbed me.  It took me hours to get out of their clutches.  The other time was in Italy.  Somebody had just been trying to blow up Mussolini, I believe.  Anyhow, a gang of black-shirted bravoes made me get out of the train at Genoa and searched me from top to toe.  Intolerable!  Simply because of my subversive face.'

      'Which corresponds, after all, to your ideas.'

      'Yes, but a face isn't evidence, a face isn't a crime.  Well, yes,' he added parenthetically, 'perhaps some faces are crimes.  Do you know General Knoyle?'  Walter nodded.  'His is a capital offence.  Nothing short of hanging would do for a man like that.  God! how I'd like to kill them all!'  Had he not slipped on the stairs and been snubbed by a stupid man-butcher?  'How I loathe the rich!  Loathe them!  Don't you think they're horrible?'

      'More horrible than the poor?'  The recollection of Wetherington's sickroom made him almost at once feel rather ashamed of the question.

      'Yes, yes.  There's something peculiarly base and ignoble and diseased about the rich.  Money breeds a kind of gangrened insensitiveness.  It's inevitable.  Jesus understood.  That bit about the camel and the needle's eye is a mere statement of fact.  And remember that other bit about loving your neighbours.  You'll be thinking I'm a Christian at this rate,' he added with parenthetic apology.  'But honour where honour is due.  The man had sense; he saw what was what.  Neighbourliness is the touchstone that shows up the rich.  The rich haven't got any neighbours.'

      'But, damn it, they're not anchorites.'

      'But they have no neighbours in the sense that the poor have neighbours.  When my mother had to go out, Mrs Cradock from next door on the right kept an eye on us children.  And my mother did the same for Mrs Cradock when it was her turn to go out.  And when somebody had broken a leg, or lost his job, people helped with money and food.  And how well I remember, as a little boy, being sent running round the village after the nurse, because young Mrs Foster from next door on the left had suddenly been taken with birth pains before she expected!  When you live on less than four pounds a week, you've damned well got to behave like a Christian and love your neighbour.  To begin with, you can't get away from him; he's practically in your backyard.  There can be no refined and philosophical ignoring of his existence.  You must either hate or love; and on the whole you'd better make a shift to love, because you may need his help in emergencies and he may need yours - so urgently, very often, that there can be no question of refusing to give it.  And since you must give, since, if you're a human being, you can't help giving, it's better to make an effort to like the person you've anyhow got to give to.'

      Walter nodded.  'Obviously.'

      'But you rich,' the other went on, 'you have no real neighbours.  You never perform a neighbourly action or expect your neighbours to do you a kindness in return.  It's unnecessary.  You can pay people to look after you.  You can hire servants to simulate kindness for three pounds a month and board.  Mrs Cradock from next door doesn't have to keep an eye on your babies when you go out.  You have nurses and governesses doing it for money.  No, you're generally not even aware of your neighbours.  You live at a distance from them.  Each of you is boxed up in his own secret house.  There may be tragedies going on behind the shutters; but the people next door don't know anything about it.'

      'Thank God!' ejaculated Walter.

      'Thank him by all means.  Privacy's a great luxury.  Very pleasant, I agree.  But you pay for luxuries.  People aren't moved by misfortunes they don't know about.  Ignorance is insensitive bliss.  In a poor street misfortune can't be hidden.  Life's too public.  People have their neighbourly feeling kept in constant training.  But the rich never have a chance of being neighbourly to their equals.  The best they can do is to feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind.  Horrible!  And that's when they're doing their best.  When they're at their worst, they're like this.'  He indicated the crowded room.  'They're Lady Edward - the lowest hell!  They're that daughter of hers ...' He made a grimace, he shrugged his shoulders.

      Walter listened with a strained and agonized attention.

      'Damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted,' Illidge went on like a denouncing prophet.  He had only spoken to Lucy Tantamount, casually, for a moment.  She had seemed hardly to notice that he was there.

      It was true, Walter was thinking.  She was all that people enviously or disapprovingly called her, and yet the most exquisite and marvellous of beings.  Knowing all, he could listen to anything that might be said about her.  And the more atrocious the words the more desperately he loved her.  Credo quia absurdum.  Amo quia turpe, quia indignum ...

      'What a putrefaction!' Illidge continued grandiloquently.  'The consummate flower of this charming civilization of ours - that's what she is.  A refined and perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.  The logical conclusion, so far as most people are concerned, of having money and leisure.'

      Walter listened, his eyes shut, thinking of Lucy.  'A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.'  The words were true and an excruciation; but he loved her all the more because of the torment and because of the odious truth.

      'Well,' said Illidge in a changed voice, 'I must go and see if the Old Man wants to go on working tonight.  We don't generally knock off before half-past one or two.  It's rather pleasant living upside down like this.  Sleeping till lunch-time, starting work after tea.  Very pleasant, really.'  He held out his hand.  'So long.'

      'We must dine together one evening,' said Walter without much conviction.

      Illidge nodded.  'Let's fix it up one of these days,' he said and was gone.

      Walter edged his way through the crowd, searching.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Everard Webley had got Lord Edward into a corner and was trying to persuade him to support the British Freemen.

      'But I'm not interested in politics,' the Old Man huskily protested.  'I'm not interested in politics ...' Obstinately, mulishly, he repeated the phrase, whatever Webley might say.

      Webley was eloquent.  Men of good will, men with a stake in the country ought to combine to resist the forces of destruction.  It was not only property that was menaced, not only the material interests of a class; it was the English tradition, it was personal initiative, it was intelligence, it was all natural distinction of any kind.  The Freemen were banded to resist the dictatorship of the stupid; they were armed to protect individuality from the mass man, the mob; they were fighting for the recognition of natural superiority in every sphere.  The enemies were many and busy.

      But forewarned was forearmed; when you saw the bandits approaching, you formed up in battle order and drew your swords.  (Webley had a weakness for swords; he wore one when the Freemen paraded, his speeches were full of them, his home bristled with panoplies.)  Organization, discipline, force were necessary.  The battle could no longer be fought constitutionally.  Parliamentary methods were quite adequate when the two parties agreed about fundamentals and disagreed only about trifling details.  But where fundamental principles were at stake, you couldn't allow politics to go on being treated as a Parliamentary game.  You had to resort to direct action or the threat of it.

      'I was five years in Parliament,' said Webley.  'Long enough to convince myself that there's nothing to be done in these days by Parliamentarism.  You might as well try to talk a fire out.  England can only be saved by direct action.  When it's saved we can begin to think about Parliament again.  (Something very unlike the present ridiculous collection of mob-elected rich men it'll have to be.)  Meanwhile, there's nothing for it but to prepare for fighting.  And preparing for fighting, we may conquer peacefully.  It's the only hope.  Believe me, Lord Edward, it's the only hope.'

      Harassed, like a bear in a pit set upon by dogs, Lord Edward turned uneasily this way and that, pivoting his bent body from the loins.  'But I'm not interested in pol ...'  He was too agitated to be able to finish the word.

      'But even if you're not interested in politics,' Webley persuasively continued, 'you must be interested in your fortune, your position, the future of your family.  Remember, all those things will go down in the general destruction.'

      'Yes, but ... No ...' Lord Edward was growing desperate.  'I ... I'm not interested in money.'

      Once, years before, the head of the firm of solicitors to whom he left the entire management of his affairs, had called, in spite of Lord Edward's express injunction that he was never to be troubled with matters of business, to consult his client about a matter of investments.  There were some eighty thousand pounds to be disposed of.  Lord Edward was dragged from the fundamental equations of the statics of living systems.  When he learned the frivolous cause of the interruption, the ordinarily mild Old Man became unrecognizably angry.  Mr Figgis, whose voice was loud and whose manner confident, had been used, in previous interviews, to having things all his own way.  Lord Edward's fury astonished and appalled him.  It was as though, in his rage, the Old Man had suddenly thrown back atavistically to the feudal past, had remembered that he was a Tantamount, talking to a hired servant.  He had given orders; they had been disobeyed and his privacy unjustifiably disturbed.  It was insufferable.  If this sort of thing should ever happen again, he would transfer his affairs to another solicitor.  And with that he wished Mr Figgis a very good afternoon.

      'I'm not interested in money,' he now repeated.

      Illidge, who had approached and was hovering in the neighbourhood, waiting for an opportunity to address the Old Man, overheard the remark and exploded with inward laughter.  'These rich!' he thought.  'These bloody rich!'  They were all the same.

      'But if not for your own sake,' Webley insisted, attacking from another quarter, 'for the sake of civilization, of progress.'

      Lord Edward started at the word.  It touched a trigger, it released a flood of energy.  'Progress!' he echoed, and the tone of misery and embarrassment was exchanged for one of confidence.  'Progress!  You politicians are always talking about it.  As though it were going to last.  Indefinitely.  More motors, more babies, more food, more advertising, more money, more everything, for ever.  You ought to take a few lessons in my subject.  Physical biology.  Progress, indeed!  What do you propose to do about phosphorus, for example?'  His question was a personal accusation.

      'But all this in entirely beside the point,' said Webley impatiently.

      'On the contrary,' retorted Lord Edward, 'it's the only point.'  His voice had become loud and severe.  He spoke with a much more than ordinary degree of coherence.  Phosphorus had made a new man of him; he felt very strongly about phosphorus and, feeling strongly, he was strong.  The worried bear had become the worrier.  'With your intensive agriculture,' he went on, 'you're simply draining the soil of phosphorus.  More than half of one per cent. a year.  Going clean out of circulation.  And then the way you throw away hundreds of thousands of tons of phosphorus pentoxide in your sewage!  Pouring it into the sea.  And you call that progress.  Your modern sewage systems!'  His tone was witheringly scornful.  'You ought to be putting it back where it came from.  On the land.'  Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned.  'On the land, I tell you.'

      'But all this has nothing to do with me,' protested Webley.

      'Then it ought to,' Lord Edward answered sternly.  'That's the trouble with you politicians.  You don't even think of the important things.  Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea.  It's idiotic, it's criminal, it's ... it's fiddling while Rome is burning.'  He saw Webley opening his mouth to speak and made haste to anticipate what he imagined was going to be his objection.  'No doubt,' he said, 'you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks.  But what'll you do when the deposits are exhausted?'  He poked Everard in the shirt front.  'What then?  Only two hundred years and they'll be finished.  You think we're being progressive because we're living on our capital.  Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre - squander them all.  That's your policy.  And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions.'

      'But damn it all,' said Webley, half angry, half amused, 'your phosphorus can wait.  This other danger's imminent.  Do you want a political and social revolution?'

      'Will it reduce the population and check production?' asked Lord Edward.

      'Of course.'

      'Then certainly I want a revolution.'  The Old Man thought in terms of geology and was not afraid of logical conclusions.  'Certainly.'  Illidge could hardly contain his laughter.

      'Well, if that's your view ...' began Webley; but Lord Edward interrupted him.

      'The only result of your progress,' he said, 'will be that in a few generations there'll be a real revolution - a natural, cosmic revolution.  You're upsetting the equilibrium.  And in the end, nature will restore it.  And the process will be very uncomfortable for you.  Your decline will be as quick as your rise.  Quicker, because you'll be bankrupt, you'll have squandered your capital.  It takes a rich man a little time to realize all his resources.  But when they've all been realized, it takes him almost no time to starve.'

      Webley shrugged his shoulders.  'Dotty old lunatic!' he said to himself, and aloud, 'Parallel straight lines never meet, Lord Edward.  So I'll bid you goodnight.'  He took his leave.

      A minute later the Old Man and his assistant were making their way up the triumphal staircase to their world apart.

      'What a relief!' said Lord Edward, as he opened the door of his laboratory.  Voluptuously, he sniffed the faint smell of the absolute alcohol in which the specimens were picked.  'These parties!  One's thankful to get back to science.  Still, the music was really ...' His admiration was inarticulate.

      Illidge shrugged his shoulders.  'Parties, music, science - alternative entertainments for the leisured.  You pays your money and you takes your choice.  The essential is to have the money to pay.'  He laughed disagreeably.

      Illidge resented the virtues of the rich much more than their vices.  Gluttony, sloth, sensuality and all the less comely products of leisure and an independent income could be forgiven, precisely because they were discreditable.  But disinterestedness, spirituality, incorruptibility, refinements of feeling and exquisiteness of taste - these were commonly regarded as qualities to be admired; that was why he so specially disliked them.  For these virtues, according to Illidge, were as fatally the product of wealth as were chronic guzzling and breakfast at eleven.

      'These bourgeois,' he complained, 'they go about handing one another bouquets for being so disinterested - that is to say, for having enough to live on without being compelled to work or be preoccupied about money.  Then there's another bouquet for being able to afford to refuse a tip.  And another for having enough money to buy the apparatus of cultured refinement.  And yet another for having the time to spare for art and reading and elaborate long-drawn love-making.  Why can't they be frank and say outright what they're all the time implying - that the root of all their virtue is a five per cent. guilt-edged security?'

      The amused affection which he felt for Lord Edward was tempered by a chronic annoyance at the thought that the Old Man's intellectual and moral virtues, all his endearing eccentricities and absurdities were only made possible by the really scandalous state of his bank balance.  And this latent disapproval became acute whenever he heard Lord Edward being praised, admired or even laughed at by others.  Laughter, liking and admiration were permitted to him, because he understood and could forgive.  Other people did not even realize that there was anything to forgive.  Illidge was always quick to inform them.

      'If the Old Man wasn't the descendant of monastery-robbers,' he would say to the praisers or admirers, 'he'd be in the workhouse or the loony asylum.'

      And yet he was genuinely fond of the Old Man, he genuinely admired his talents and his character.  The world, however, might be excused for not realizing the fact.  'Unpleasant' was the ordinary comment on Lord Edward's assistant.

      But being unpleasant to and about the rich, besides a pleasure, was also, in Illidge's eyes, a sacred duty.  He owed it to his class, to society at large, to the future, to the cause of justice.  Even the Old Man himself was not spared.  He had only to breathe a word in favour of the soul (for Lord Edward had what his assistant could only regard as a shameful and adulterous passion for idealistic metaphysics); Illidge would at once leap out at him with a sneer about capitalist philosophy and bourgeois religion.  An expression of distaste for hard-headed businessmen, of indifference to material interests, of sympathy for the poor, would bring an immediate reference, more or less veiled, but always sarcastic, to the Tantamount millions.  There were days (and owing to the slip on the stairs and that snub from the General, this day was one of them) when even a reference to pure science elicited its ironic comment.  Illidge was an enthusiastic biologist; but as a class-conscious citizen he had to admit that pure science, like good taste and boredom, perversity and platonic love, is a product of wealth and leisure.  He was not afraid of being logical and deriding even his own idol.

      'Money to pay,' he repeated.  'That's the essential.'

      The Old Man looked rather guiltily at his assistant.  These implied reproofs made him feel uncomfortable.  He tried to change the subject.  'What about our tadpoles?' he asked.  'The asymmetrical ones.'  They had a brood of tadpoles hatched from eggs that had been kept abnormally warm on one side and abnormally cold on the other.  He moved towards the glass tank in which they were kept.  Illidge frowned.

      'Asymmetrical tadpoles!' he repeated.  'Asymmetrical tadpoles!  What a refinement!  Almost as good as playing Bach on the flute or having a palate for wine.'  He thought of his brother Tom, who had weak lungs and worked a broaching machine in a motor factory at Manchester.  He remembered washing days and the pink crinkled skin of his mother's water-sodden hands.  'Asymmetrical tadpoles!' he said once more and laughed.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Strange,' said Mrs Betterton, 'strange that a great artist should be such a cynic.'  In Burlap's company she preferred to believe that John Bidlake had meant what he said.  Burlap on cynicism was uplifting and Mrs Betterton liked to be uplifted.  Uplifting too on greatness, not to mention art.  'For you must admit,' she added, 'he is a great artist.'

      Burlap nodded slowly.  He did not look directly at Mrs Betterton, but kept his eyes averted and downcast as though he were addressing some little personage invisible to everyone but himself, standing to one side of her - his private daemon, perhaps; an emanation from himself, a little doppelgänger.  He was a man of middle height with a stoop and a rather slouching gait.  His hair was dark, thick and curly, with a natural tonsure as big as a medal showing pink on the crown of his head.  His grey eyes were very deeply set, his nose and chin pronounced but well shaped, his mouth full-lipped and rather wide.  A mixture, according to old Bidlake, who was a caricaturist in words as well as with the pencil, of a movie villain and St Anthony of Padua by a painter of the baroque, of a card-sharping Lothario and a rapturous devotee.

      'Yes, a great artist,' he agreed, 'but not one of the greatest.'  He spoke slowly, ruminatively, as though he were talking to himself.  All his conversation was a dialogue with himself or that little doppelgänger which stood invisibly to one side of the people he was supposed to be talking to; Burlap was unceasingly and exclusively self-conscious.  'Not one of the greatest,' he repeated slowly.  As it happened, he had just been writing an article about the subject-matter of art for next week's number of the Literary World.  'Precisely because of that cynicism.'  Should he quote himself? he wondered.

      'How true that is!' Mrs Betterton's applause exploded perhaps a little prematurely; her enthusiasm was always on the boil.  She clapped her hands together.  'How true!'  She looked at Burlap's averted face and thought it so spiritual, so beautiful in its way.

      'How can a cynic be a great artist?' Burlap went on, having decided that he'd spout his own article at her and take the risk of her recognizing it in print next Thursday.  And even if she did recognize it, that wouldn't efface the personal impression he'd made by spouting it.  'Though why you want to make an impression,' a mocking devil had put in, 'unless it's because she's rich and useful, goodness knows!'  The devil was pitchforked back to where he came from.  'One has responsibilities,' an angel hastily explained.  'The lamp mustn't be hidden under a bushel.  One must let it shine, especially on people of good will.'  Mrs Betterton was on the side of the angels; her loyalty should be confirmed.  'A great artist,' he went on aloud, 'is a man who synthesizes all experience.  The cynic sets out by denying half the facts - the fact of the soul, the fact of ideals, the fact of God.  And yet we're aware of spiritual facts just as directly and indubitably as we're aware of physical facts.'

      'Of course, of course!' exclaimed Mrs Betterton.

      'It's absurd to deny either class of facts.'  'Absurd to deny me,' said the demon, poking out his head into Burlap's consciousness.

      "Absurd!'

      'The cynic confines himself to only half the world of possible experience.  Less than half.  For there are more spiritual than bodily experiences.'

      'Infinitely more!'

      'He may handle his limited subject-matter very well.  Bidlake, I grant you, does.  Extraordinarily well.  He has all the sheer ability of the most consummate artists.  Or had, at any rate.'

      'Had,' Mrs Betterton sighed.  'When I first knew him.'  The implication was that it was her influence that had made him paint so well.

      'But he always applied his powers to something small.  What he synthesizes in his art was limited, comparatively unimportant.'

      'That's what I always told him,' said Mrs Betterton, reinterpreting those youthful arguments about Pre-Raphaelitism in a new and, for her own reputation, favourable light.  'Consider Burne-Jones, I used to say.'  The memory of John Bidlake's huge and Rabelaisian laughter reverberated in her ears.  'Not that Burne-Jones was a particularly good painter,' she hastened to add.  ('He painted,' John Bidlake had said - and how shocked she had been, how deeply offended! - 'as though he had never seen a pair of buttocks in the whole of his life.')  'But his subjects were noble.  If you had his dreams, I used to tell John Bidlake, if you had his ideals, you'd be a really great artist.'

      Burlap nodded, smiling in agreement.  Yes, she's on the side of the angels, he was thinking; she needs encouraging.  One has a responsibility.  The demon winked.  There was something in his smile, Mrs Betterton reflected, that reminded one of a Leonardo or a Sodoma - something mysterious, subtle, inward.

      'Though, mind you,' he said, regurgitating his article slowly, phrase by phrase, 'the subject doesn't make the work of art.  Whittier and Longfellow were fairly stuffed with Great Thoughts.  But what they wrote was very small poetry.'

      'How true!'

      'The only generalization one can risk is that the greatest works of art have had great subjects; and that works with small subjects, however accomplished, are never so good as ...'

      'There's Walter,' said Mrs Betterton, interrupting him.  'Wandering like an unlaid ghost.  Walter!'

      At the sound of his name, Walter turned.  The Betterton - good Lord!  And Burlap!  He assumed a smile.  But Mrs B. and his colleague on the Literary World were among the last people he wanted at this moment to see.

      'We were just discussing greatness in art,' Mrs Betterton explained.  'Mr Burlap was saying such profound things.'

      She began to reproduce the profundities for Walter's benefit.

      He meanwhile was wondering why Burlap's manner towards him had been so cold, so distant, shut, even hostile.  That was the trouble with Burlap.  You never knew where you stood with him.  Either he loved you, or he hated.  Life with him was a series of scenes - scenes of hostility or, even more trying in Walter's estimation, scenes of affection.  One way or the other, the motion was always flowing.  There were hardly any intervals of comfortably slack water.  The tide was always running.  Why was it running now towards hostility?

      Mrs Betterton went on with her exposition of the profundities.  To Walter they sounded curiously like certain paragraphs in that article of Burlap's, the proof of which he had only that morning been correcting for the printers.  Reproduced - explosion after enthusiastic explosion - from Burlap's spoken reproduction, the article did sound rather ridiculous.  A light dawned.  Could that be the reason?  He looked at Burlap.  His face was stony.

      'I'm afraid I must go,' said Burlap abruptly, when Mrs Betterton paused.

      'But no,' she protested.  'But why?'

      He made an effort and smiled his Sodoma smile.  'The world is too much with us,' he quoted mysteriously.  He liked saying mysterious things, dropping them surprisingly into the middle of the conversation.

      'But you're not enough with us,' flattered Mrs Betterton.

      'It's the crowd,' he explained.  'After a time, I get into a panic.  I feel they're crushing my soul to death.  I should begin to scream if I stayed.'  He took his leave.

      'Such a wonderful man!' Mrs Betterton exclaimed before he was well out of earshot.  'It must be wonderful for you to work with him.'

      'He's a very good editor,' said Walter.

      'But I was thinking of his personality.  How shall I say?  The spiritual quality of the man.'

      Walter nodded and said, 'Yes,' rather vaguely.  The spiritual quality of Burlap was just the thing he wasn't very enthusiastic about.

      'In an age like ours,' Mrs Betterton continued, 'he's an oasis in the desert of stupid frivolity and cynicism.'

      'Some of his ideas are first rate,' Walter cautiously agreed.

      He wondered how soon he could decently make his escape.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'There's Walter,' said Lady Edward.

      'Walter who?' asked Bidlake.  Borne by the social currents, they had drifted together again.

      'Your Walter.'

      'Oh, mine.'  He was not much interested, but he followed the direction of her glance.  'What a weed!' he said.  He disliked his children for growing up; growing, they pushed him backwards, year after year, backwards towards the gulf and the darkness.  There was Walter; it was only yesterday he was born.  And yet the fellow must be five-and-twenty, if he was a day.

      'Poor Walter; he doesn't look at all well.'

      'Looks as though he had worms,' said Bidlake ferociously.

      'How's that deplorable affair of his going?' she asked.

      Bidlake shrugged his shoulders.  'As usual, I suppose.'

      'I never met the woman.'

      'I did.  She's awful.'

      'What, vulgar?'

      'No, no.  I wish she were,' protested Bidlake.  'She's refined, terribly refined.  And she speaks like this.'  He spoke into a drawling falsetto that was meant to be an imitation of Marjorie's voice.  'Like a sweet little innocent girlie.  And so serious, such a highbrow.'  He interrupted the imitation with his own deep laugh.  'Do you know what she said to me once?  I may mention that she always talks to me about Art.  Art with a capital A.  She said': (his voice went up again to the babyish falsetto) ' "I think there's a place for Fra Angelico and Rubens." '  He laughed again, homerically.  'What an imbecile!  And she has a nose that's at least three inches too long.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Marjorie had opened the box in which she kept her private papers.  All Walter's letters.  She untied the ribbon and looked them over one by one.  'Dear Mrs Carling, I enclose under separate cover that volume of Keats's Letters I mentioned today.  Please do not trouble to return it.  I have another copy, which I shall re-read for the pleasure of accompanying you, even at a distance, through the same spiritual adventure.'

      That was the first of them.  She read it through and recaptured in memory something of the pleased surprise which that passage about the spiritual adventure had originally evoked in her.  In conversation he had always seemed to shrink from the direct and personal approach, he was painfully shy.  She hadn't expected him  to write like that.  Later, when he had written to her often, she became accustomed to his peculiarities.  She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face.  All his love - all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent - was in his letters.  The arrangement suited Marjorie perfectly.  She would have liked to go on indefinitely making cultured and verbally burning love by post.  She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination.  A correspondence course of passion was, for her, the perfect and ideal relationship with a man.  Better still were personal relationships with women; for women had all the good qualities of men at a distance, with the added advantage of being actually there.  They could be in the room with you and yet demand no more than a man at the other end of a system of post-offices.  With his face-to-face shyness and his postal freedom and ardour, Walter had seemed in Marjorie's eyes to combine the best points of both sexes.  And then he was so deeply, so flatteringly interested in everything she did and thought and felt.  Poor Marjorie was not much used to having people interested in her.

      'Sphinx,' she read in the third of his letters.  (He had called her that because of her enigmatic silences.  Carling, for some reason, had called her Turnip or Dumb-Bell.)  'Sphinx, why do you hide yourself inside such a shell of silence?  One would think you were ashamed of your goodness and sweetness and intelligence.  But they pop their heads out all the same and in spite of you.'

      The tears came into her eyes.  He had been so king to her, so tender and gentle.  And now ...

      'Love,' she read dimly, through the tears, in the next letter, 'love can transform physical into spiritual desire; it has the magic power to turn the body into pure soul ...'

      Yes, he had had those desires too.  Even he.  All men had, she supposed.  Rather dreadful.  She shuddered, remembering Carling, remembering even Walter with something of the same horror.  Yes, even Walter, though he had been so gentle and considerate.  Walter had understood what she felt.  That made it all the more extraordinary that he should be behaving as he was behaving now.  It was as though he had suddenly become somebody else, become a kind of wild animal, with the animal's cruelty as well as the animal's lusts.

      'How can he be so cruel?' she wondered.  'How can he, deliberately?  Walter?'  Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good.  It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having 'those' desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live together.  She had loved even the weak and unadmirable manifestations of his considerateness; he loved him even when he let himself be overcharged by cabmen and porters, when he gave handfuls of silver to tramps with obviously untrue stories about jobs at the other end of the country and no money to pay the fare.  He was too sensitively quick to see the other person's point of view.  In his anxiety to be just to others he was often prepared to be unjust to himself.  He was always ready to sacrifice his own rights rather than run any risk of infringing the rights of others.  It was a considerateness, Marjorie realized, that had become a weakness, that was on the point of turning into a vice; a considerateness, moreover, that was due to his timidity, his squeamish and fastidious shrinking from every conflict, even every disagreeable contact.  All the same, she loved him for it, loved him even when it led him to treat her with something less than justice.  For having come to regard her as being on the hither side of the boundary between himself and the rest of the world, he had sometimes in his excessive considerateness for the rights of others, sacrificed not only his own rights, but also hers.  How often, for example, she had told him that he was being underpaid for his work on the Literary World!  She thought of the latest of their conversations on what was to him the most odious of topics.

      'Burlap's sweating you, Walter,' she had said.

      'That paper's very hard up.'  He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people towards himself.

      'But why should you let yourself be swindled?'

      'I'm not being swindled.'  There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong.  'And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh.  After all, it's my business.'

      'And mine!'  She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began.  'If you knew the price of vegetables!'

      He had flushed up and left the room without answering.  The conversation, the case were typical of many others.  Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself.  She had never resented these injustices.  They proved how closely he associated her with himself.  But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness.  The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else - somebody ruthless and full of hate - was deliberately making her suffer.

 

*     *     *     *

     

      Lady Edward laughed.  'One wonders what he saw in her, if she's so deplorable as you make out.'

      'What does one ever see in anyone?'  John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone.  Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill.  An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccough.  It often happened now.  Just after eating.  Bicarbonate didn't seem to do much good.  'In these matters,' he added, 'we're all equally insane.'

      'Thanks!' said Lady Edward, laughing.

      Making an essay to be gallant, 'Present company excepted,' he said with a smile and a little bow.  He stifled another hiccough.  How miserable he was feeling!  'Do you mind if I sit down?' he asked.  'All this standing about ...'  He dropped heavily into his chair.

      Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing.  She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.

      'It must have been that caviar,' he was thinking.  'That beastly caviar.'  He violently hated caviar.  Every sturgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy.

      'Poor Walter!' said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped.  'And he has such a talent.'

      John Bidlake snorted contemptuously.

      Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing - by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time.  She changed the subject.

      'And Elinor and Quarles?'

      'Leaving Bombay tomorrow,' John Bidlake answered telegraphically.  He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.