CHAPTER XI

 

In Lucy's neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public.  The more the merrier was her principle; or if 'merrier' were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously distracting.  Within five minutes of her arrival, the corner in which Spandrell and Rampion had been sitting all evening in the privacy of quiet conversation was invaded and in a twinkling overrun by a loud and alcoholic party from the inner room.  Cuthbert Arkwright was the noisiest and the most drunken - on principle and for the love of art as well as for that of alcohol.  He had an idea that by bawling and behaving offensively, he was defending art against the Philistines.  Tipsy, he felt himself arrayed on the side of the angels, of Baudelaire, of Edgar Allan Poe, of De Quincey, against the dull unspiritual mob.  And if he boasted of his fornications, it was because respectable people had thought Blake a madman, because Bowdler had edited Shakespeare, and the author of Madame Bovary had been prosecuted, because when one asked for the Earl of Rochester's Sodom at the Bodleian, the librarians would give it unless one had a certificate that one was engaged on bona fide literary research.  He made his living, and in the process convinced himself that he was serving the arts, by printing limited and expensive editions of the more scabrous specimens of the native and foreign literatures.  Blond, beer-red, with green and bulging eyes, his large face shining, he approached vociferating greetings.  Willie Weaver jauntily followed, a little man perpetually smiling, spectacles astride his long nose, bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage.  Behind him, his twin in height and also spectacled, but grey, dim, shrunken and silent, came Peter Slipe.

      'They look like the advertisement of a patent medicine,' said Spandrell as they approached.  'Slipe's the patient before, Weaver's the same after one bottle, and Cuthbert Arkwright illustrates the appalling results of taking the complete cure.'

      Lucy was still laughing at the joke when Cuthbert took her hand.  'Lucy!' he shouted.  'My angel!  But why in heaven's name do you always writer in pencil?  I simply cannot read what you write.  It's a mere chance that I'm here tonight.'

      So she'd written to tell him to meet her here, thought Walter.  That vulgar, stupid lout.

      Willie Weaver was shaking hands with Mary Rampion and Mark.  'I had no idea I was to meet the great,' he said.  'Not to mention the fair.'  He bowed towards Mary, who broke into loud and masculine laughter.  Willie Weaver was rather pleased than offended.  'Positively the Mermaid Tavern!' he went on.

      'Still busy with the bric-à-brac?' asked Spandrell, leaning across the table to address Peter Slipe, who had taken the seat next to Walter's.  Peter was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.

      'But why in pencil, why in pencil?' Cuthbert was roaring.

      'I get my fingers so dirty when I use a pen.'

      'I'll kiss the ink away,' protested Cuthbert, and bending over the hand he was still holding, he began to kiss the thin fingers.

      Lucy laughed.  'I think I'd rather buy a stylo,' she said.

      Walter looked on in misery.  Was it possible?  A gross and odious clown like that?

      'Ungrateful!' said Cuthbert.  'But I simply must talk to Rampion.'

      And turning away, he gave Rampion a clap on the shoulder and simultaneously waved his other hand at Mary.

      'What an agape!' Willie Weaver simmered on, like a tea kettle.  The spout was now turned towards Lucy, 'What a symposium!  What a -' he hesitated for a moment in search of the right, the truly staggering phrase - 'what Athenian enlargements!  What a more than Platonic orgy!'

      'What is an Athenian enlargement?' asked Lucy.

      Willie sat down and began to explain.  'Enlargements, I mean, by contrast with our bourgeois and Pecksniffian smuggeries ...'

      'Why don't you give me something of yours to print?' Cuthbert was persuasively enquiring.

      Rampion looked at him with distaste.  'Do you think I'm ambitious of having my books sold in the rubber shops?'

      'They'd be in good company,' said Spandrell.  'The Works of Aristotle ...'  Cuthbert roared in protest.

      'Compare an eminent Victorian with an eminent Periclean,' said Willie Weaver.  He smiled, he was happy and eloquent.

      On Peter Slipe the burgundy had acted as a depressant, not a stimulant.  The wine had only enhanced his native dimness and melancholy.

      'What about Beatrice?' he said to Walter, 'Beatrice Gilway?' he hiccoughed and tried to pretend that he had coughed.  'I suppose you see her often, now that she works on the Literary World.'

      Walter saw her three times a week and always found her well.

      'Give her my love, when you see her next,' said Slipe.

      'The stertorous borborygms of the dyspeptic Carlyle!' declaimed Willie Weaver, and beamed through his spectacles.  The mot, he flattered himself, could hardly have been more exquisitely juste.  He gave a little cough which was his invariable comment on the best of his phrases.  'I would laugh, I would applaud,' the little cough might be interpreted; 'but modesty forbids.'

      'Stertorous what?' asked Lucy.  'Do remember that I've never been educated.'

      'Warbling your native woodnotes wild!' said Willie.  'May I help myself to some of that noble brandy?  The blushful Hippocrene.'

      'She treated me badly, extremely badly.'  Peter Slipe was plaintive.  'But I don't want her to think that I bear her any grudge.'

      Willie Weaver smacked his lips over the brandy.  'Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion's children know,' he misquoted and repeated his little cough of self-satisfaction.

      'The trouble with Cuthbert,' Spandrell was saying,' is that he's never quite learnt to distinguish art from pornography.'

      'Of course,' continued Peter Slipe, 'she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own house.  But to turn me out at such short notice.'

      At another time Walter would have been delighted to listen to poor little Slipe's version of that curious story.  But with Lucy on his other hand, he found it difficult to take much interest.

      'But I sometimes wonder if the Victorians didn't have more fun than we did,' she was saying.  'The more prohibitions, the greater the fun.  If you want to see people drinking with real enjoyment, you must go to America.  Victorian England was dry in every department.  For example, there was a nineteenth amendment about love.  They must have made it as enthusiastically as the Americans drink whiskey.  I don't know that I really believe in Athenian enlargements - that is, if we're one of them.'

      'You prefer Pecksniff to Alcibiades,' Willie Weaver concluded.

      Lucy shrugged her shoulders. 'I've had no experience of Pecksniff.'

      'I don't know,' Peter Slipe was saying, 'whether you've ever been pecked by a goose.'

      'Been what?' asked Walter, recalling his attention.

      'Been pecked by a goose?'

      'Never, that I can remember.'

      'It's a hard, dry sensation.'  Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger.  'Beatrice is like that.  She pecks; she enjoys pecking.  But she can be very kind at the same time.  She insists on being kind in her way, and she pecks if you don't like it.  Pecking's part of the kindness; so I always found.  I never objected.  But why should she have turned me out of the house as though I were a criminal?  And rooms are so difficult to find now.  I had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks.  The food ...' He shuddered.

      Walter could not help smiling.

      'She must have been in a great hurry to install Burlap in your place.'

      'But why in such a hurry as all that?'

      'When it's a case of off with the old love and on with the new ...'

      'But what has love to do with it?' asked Slipe.  'In Beatrice's case.'

      'A great deal,' Willie Weaver broke in.  'Everything.  These superannuated virgins - always the most passionate.'

      'But she's never had a love affair in her life.'

      'Hence the violence,' concluded Willie triumphantly.  'Beatrice has a nigger sitting on the safety valve.  And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean.  That's most sinister.'

      'Perhaps she likes being well dressed,' suggested Lucy.

      Willie Weaver shook his head.  The hypothesis was too simple.

      'That woman's unconscious as a black hole.'  Willie hesitated a moment.  'Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,' he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole.  She was thirty-five, but seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless.  Her skin was clear and fresh.  From shallow and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining.  In a sharp, determined way her face was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the pouting mouth and round defiant chin.  But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking and mischievously inquisitive.

      She stitched away.  The clock ticked.  The moving instant which, according to Sir Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advance inexorably through the dimension of time.  Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man might suck for ever at an unending piece of macaroni.  Every now and then Beatrice actualized a potential yawn.  In a basket by the fireplace a black she-cat lay on her side purring and suckling four blind and parti-coloured kittens.  The walls of the room were primrose yellow.  On the top shelf of the bookcase the dust was thickening on the textbooks of Assyriology which she had bought when Peter Slips was the tenant of her upper floor.  A volume of Pascal's Thoughts, with pencil annotations by Burlap, lay open on the table.  The clock continued to tick.

      Suddenly the front door banged.  Beatrice put down her pink silk camisole and sprang to her feet.

      'Don't forget that you must drink your hot milk, Denis,' she said, looking out into the hall.  Her voice was clear, sharp and commanding.

      Burlap hung up his coat and came to the door.  'You oughtn't to have sat up for me,' he said, with tender reproachfulness, giving her one of his grave and subtle Sodona smiles.

      'I had some work I simply had to get finished,' Beatrice lied.

      'Well, it was most awfully sweet of you.'  These pretty colloquialisms, with which Burlap liked to pepper his conversation, had for sensitive ears a most curious ring.  'He talks slang,' Mark Rampion once said, 'as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English - but a foreigner's command.  I don't know if you've ever heard an Indian calling anyone a "jolly good sport",.  Burlap's slang reminds me of that.'

      For Beatrice, however, that 'awfully sweet' sounded entirely natural and un-alien.  She flushed with a young-girlishly timid pleasure.  But, 'Come in and shut the door,' she rapped out commandingly.  Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny, there was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient.  'Sit down there,' she ordered; and while she was briskly busy over the milk-jug, the saucepan, the gas-ring, she asked him if he had enjoyed the party.

      Burlap shook his head.  'Fascinatio nugacitatis,' he said.  Fascinatio nugacitatis.'  He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from Piccadilly Circus.

      Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words connoted disapproval.  'Parties are rather a waste of time, aren't they?' she said.

      Burlap nodded.  'A waste of time,' he echoed in his slow ruminant's voice, keeping his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice's left.  'One's forty, one has lived more than half one's life, the world is marvellous and mysterious.  And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount House.  Why should triviality be so fascinating.  Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one?  Is it some vague fantastic hope that one may meet the messianic person one's always been looking for, or hear the revealing word?'  Burlap wagged his head as he spoke with a curious loose motion, as though the muscles of his neck were going limp.  Beatrice was so familiar with the motion that she saw nothing strange in it any more.  Waiting for the milk to boil, she listened admiringly, she watched him with a serious church-going face.  A man whose excursions into the drawing-rooms of the rich were episodes in a lifelong spiritual quest might justifiably be regarded as the equivalent of Sunday morning church.

      'All the same,' Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous, gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, 'the champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.'  It was the demon that had suddenly interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations.  Burlap had allowed him to speak out loud.  Why not?  It amused him to be baffling.  He looked at Beatrice.

      Beatrice was duly baffled.  'I'm sure they were,' she said, readjusting her church-going face to make it harmonize with the grin.  She laughed rather nervously and turned away to pour out the milk into a cup.  'Here's your milk,' she rapped out, taking refuge from her bafflement in officious command.  'Mind you drink it while it's hot.'

      There was a long silence.  Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly knew for what.

      'You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffet,' said Burlap at last.

      Beatrice smiled.  'Luckily there's no big spider.'

      'Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.'

      'Yes it is,' said Beatrice.  That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she reflected; he was so trustworthy.  Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw you about and kiss you.  Dreadful that was, quite dreadful.  Beatrice had never really got over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie's brother-in-law, whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a hansom.  The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such a panic fear of being touched.  She was over thirty now and had never allowed anyone to touch her.  The soft quivering little girl underneath the business-like shell of her had often fallen in love.  But the terror of being pawed about, of being even touched, had always been stronger than the love.  At the first sign of danger, she had desperately pecked, she had hardened her shell, she had fled.  Arrived in safety, the terrified little girl had drawn a long breath.  Thank Heaven!  But a little sigh of disappointment was always included in the big sigh of relief.  She wished she hadn't been frightened, she wished that the happy relationship that had existed before the pawing could have gone on for ever, indefinitely.  Sometimes she was angry with herself; more often she thought there was something fundamentally wrong with love, something fundamentally dreadful about men.  That was the wonderful thing about Denis Burlap; he was so reassuringly not a pouncer or a pawer.  Beatrice could adore him without a qualm.

      'Susan used to sit on poufs, like little Miss Muffett,' Burlap resumed after a pause.  His voice was melancholy.  He had spent the last minutes in ruminating the theme of his dead wife.  It was nearly two years now since Susan had been carried off in the influenza epidemic.  Nearly two years: but the pain, he assured himself, had not diminished, the sense of loss had remained as overwhelming as ever.  Susan, Susan, Susan - he had repeated the name to himself over and over again.  He would never see her any more, even if he lived for a million years.  A million years, a million years.  Gulfs opened all round the words.  'Or on the floor,' he went on, reconstructing her image as vividly as he could.  'I think she liked sitting on the floor best.  Like a child.'  A child, a child, he repeated to himself.  So young.

      Beatrice sat in silence, looking into the empty grate.  To have looked at Burlap, she felt, would have been indiscreet, indecent almost.  Poor fellow!  When she turned towards him at last, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks.  The sight filled her with a sudden passion of maternal pity.  'Like a child,' he had said.  But he was like a child himself.  Like a poor unhappy child.  Leaning forward she drew her fingers caressingly along the back of his limply hanging hand.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Batrachian grapplings!' Lucy repeated and laughed.  'That was a stroke of genius, Willie.'

      'All my strokes are strokes of genius,' said Willie modestly.  He acted himself; he was Willie Weaver in the celebrated rôle of Willie Weaver.  He exploited artistically that love of eloquence, that passion for the rotund and reverberating phrase with which, more than three centuries too late, he had been born.  In Shakespeare's youth he would have been a literary celebrity.  Among his contemporaries, Willie's euphemisms only raised a laugh.  But he enjoyed applause, even when it was derisive.  Moreover, the laughter was never malicious; for Willie Weaver was so good-natured and obliging that everybody liked him.  It was to a hilariously approving audience that he played his part; and, feeling the approval through the hilarity, he played it for all it was worth.  'All my strokes are strokes of genius.'  The remark was admirably in character.  And perhaps true?  Willie jested, but with a secret belief.  'And mark my words,' he added, 'one of these days the batrachians will erupt, they'll break out.'

      'But why batrachians?' asked Slipe.  'Anything less like a batrachian than Beatrice ...'

      'And why should they break out?' put in Spandrell.

      'Frogs don't peck.'  But Slipe's thin voice was drowned by Mary Rampion's.

      'Because things do break out,' she cried.  'They do.'

      'Moral,' Cuthbert concluded: 'don't shut anything up.  I never do.'

      'But perhaps the fun consists in breaking out,' Lucy speculated.

      ;'Perverse and paradoxical prohibitionist!'

      'But obviously,' Rampion was saying, 'you get revolutions occurring inside as well as outside.  It's poor against rich in the state.  In the individual, it's the oppressed body and instincts against the intellect.  The intellect's been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel.'

      'Hear, hear!' shouted Cuthbert, and banged the table.

      Rampion frowned.  He felt Cuthbert's approbation as a personal insult.

      'I'm a counter-revolutionary,' said Spandrell.  'Put the spiritual lower classes in their place.'

      'Except in your own case, eh?' said Cuthbert grinning.

      'Mayn't one theorize?'

      'People have been forcibly putting them in their place for centuries,' said Rampion; 'and look at the result.  You, among other things.'  He looked at Spandrell, who threw back his head and noiselessly laughed.  'Look at the result,' he repeated.  'Inward personal revolution and consequent outward and social revolution.'

      'Come, come,' said Willie Weaver.  'You talk as though the thermidorian thumbrils were already rumbling.  England still stands very much where it did.'

      'But what do you know of England and Englishmen?' Rampion retorted.  'You've never been out of London or your class.  Go to the North.'

      'God forbid!' Willie piously interjected.

      'Go to the coal and iron country.  Talk a little with the steel workers.  It isn't revolution for a cause.  It's a revolution as an end in itself.  Smashing for smashing's sake.'

      'Rather sympathetic it sounds,' said Lucy.

      'It's terrifying.  It simply isn't human.  Their humanity has all been squeezed out of them by civilized living, squeezed out of them by the weight of coal and iron.  It won't be a rebellion of men.  It'll be a revolution of elementals, monsters, pre-human monsters.  And you just shut your eyes and pretend everything's too perfect.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Think of the disproportion,' Lord Edward was saying, as he smoked his pipe. 'It's positively ...'  His voice failed.  'Take coal, for example.  Man's using a hundred and ten times as much as he used in 1800.  But the population's only two and a half times what it was.  With other animals ... Surely quite different.  Consumption's proportionate to numbers.'

      Illidge objected.  'But if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don't they?  If there's been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat.  Isn't it the same with us?  Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago.  Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts.  When the supplies are exhausted, he'll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.'  Illidge spoke with gusto.  Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction.  'A coalfield's discovered; oil's struck.  Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go.  To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pollulation of ants and flies round a dead dog.  Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisians phosphates - at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers.  "These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Like ostriches,' said Mary Rampion.  'You live like ostriches.'

      'And not about revolutions only,' said Spandrell, while Willie Weaver was heard to put in something about 'strouthocamelian philosophies'.  'About all the important things that happen to be disagreeable.  There was a time when people didn't go about pretending that death and sin didn't exist.  "Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme,"' he quoted.  'Baudelaire was the last poet of the Middle Ages as well as the first modern.  "Et pourtant,"' he went on, looking with a smile to Lucy and raising his glass,

 

                                             '"Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,

                                                  A cette horrible infection,

                                             Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,

                                                  Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

 

                                             Alors, ô ma beauté, dites à la vermine

                                                  Qui vous mangera de baisers ..."'

 

      'My dear Spandrell!'  Lucy held up her hand protestingly.

      'Really too necrophilous,' said Willie Weaver.

      'Always the same hatred of life,' Rampion was thinking.  'Different kinds of death - the only alternatives.'  He looked observantly into Spandrell's face.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'And when you come to think of it,' Illidge was saying, 'the time it took to form the coal measures divided by the length of a human life isn't so hugely different from the life of a sequoia divided by a generation of decay bacteria.'

 

*     *     *      *

 

      Cuthbert looked at his watch.  'But good God!' he shouted.  'It's twenty-five to one.'  He jumped up.  'And I promised we'd put in an appearance at Widdicombe's party.  Peter, Willie!  Quick march.'

      'But you can't go,' protested Lucy.  'Not so absurdly early.'

      'The call of duty,' Willie Weaver explained.  'Stern Daughter of the Voice of God.'  He uttered his little cough of self-approbation.

      'But it's ridiculous, it's not permissible.'  She looked from one to another with a kind of angry anxiety.  The dread of solitude was chronic with her.  And it was always possible, if one sat up another five minutes, that something really amusing might happen.  Besides, it was insufferable that people should do things she didn't want them to do.'

      'And we too, I'm afraid,' said Mary Rampion rising.

      Thank Heaven, thought Walter.  He hoped that Spandrell would follow the general example.

      'But this is impossible!' cried Lucy.  'Rampion, I simply cannot allow it.'

      Mark Rampion only laughed.  These professional sirens! he thought.  She left him entirely cold, she repelled him.  In desperation Lucy even appealed to the woman of the party.

      'Mrs Rampion, you must stay.  Five minutes more.  Only five minutes,' she coaxed.

      In vain.  The waiter opened the side door.  Furtively they slipped out into the darkness.

      'Why will they insist on going?' asked Lucy, plaintively.

      'Why will we insist on staying?' echoed Spandrell.  Walter's heart sank; that meant the man didn't intend to go.  'Surely, that's much more incomprehensible.'

      Utterly incomprehensible!  On Walter the heat and alcohol were having their usual effects.  He was feeling ill as well as miserable.  What was the point of sitting on, hopelessly, in this poisonous air?  Why not go home at once.  Marjorie would be pleased.

      'You, at least, are faithful, Walter.'  Lucy gave him a smile.  He decided to postpone his departure.  There was a silence.

 

*     *     *      *

 

      Cuthbert and his companions had taken a cab.  Refusing all invitations, the Rampions had preferred to walk.

      'Thank heaven!' said Mary as the taxi drove away.  'That dreadful Arkwright!'

      'Ah, but that woman's worse,' said Rampion.  'She gives me the creeps.  That poor silly little Bidlake boy.  Like a rabbit in front of a weasel.'

      'That's male trade unionism.  I rather like her for making you men squirm a bit.  Serves you right.'

      'You might as well like cobras.'  Rampion's zoology was wholly symbolical.

      'But if it's a matter of creeps,' what about Spandrell?  He's like a gargoyle, a demon.'

      'He's like a silly schoolboy,' said Rampion emphatically.  'He's never grown up.  Can't you see that?  He's a permanent adolescent.  Bothering his head about all the things that preoccupy adolescents.  Not being able to live, because he's too busy thinking about death and God and truth and mysticism and all the rest of it; too busy thinking about sins and trying to commit them and being disappointed because he's not succeeding.  It's deplorable.  The man's a sort of Peter Pan - much worse even than Barrie's disgusting little abortion, because he's got stuck at a sillier age.  He's Peter Pan à la Dostoevsky-cum-de Musset-cum-the-Nineties-cum-Bunyan-cum-Byron and the Marquis de Sade.  Really deplorable.  The more so as he's potentially a very decent human being.'

      Mary laughed.  'I suppose I shall have to take your word for it.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'By the way,' said Lucy, turning to Spandrell.  'I had a message from your mother.'  She gave it.  Spandrell nodded, but made no comment.

      'And the General? he enquired as soon as she had finished speaking. He wanted no more said about his mother.

      'Oh, the General!'  Lucy made a grimace.  'I had at least half an hour of Military Intelligence this evening.  Really, he oughtn't to be allowed.  What about a Society for the Prevention of Generals?'

      'I'm an honorary and original member.'

      'Or why not the Prevention of the Old, while one was about it?' Lucy went on.  'The old really aren't possible.  Except your father, Walter.  He's perfect.  Really perfect.  The only possible old man.'

      'One of the few completely impossible, if you only knew.'  Among the Bidlake's of Walter's generation the impossibility of old John was almost axiomatic.  'You wouldn't find him quite so perfect if you'd been his wife or his daughter.'  As he uttered the words, Walter suddenly remembered Marjorie.  The blood rushed to his cheeks.

      'Oh, of course, if you will go and choose him as a husband or a father,' said Lucy, 'what can you expect?  He's a possible old man just because he's been such an impossible husband and father.  Most old people have had the life crushed out of them by their responsibilities.  Your father never allowed himself to be squashed.  He's had wives and children and all the rest.  He's always lived as though he were a boy on the spree.  Not very pleasant for the wives and children, I grant.  But how delightful for the rest of us!'

      'I suppose so,' said Walter.  He had always thought of himself as so utterly unlike his father.  But he was acting just as his father had acted.

      'Think of him unfilially,'

      'I'll try.'  How should he think of himself?

      'Do, and you'll see that I'm right.  One of the few possible old men.  Compare him with the others.'  She shook her head.  'It's no good; you can't have any dealings with them.'

      Spandrell laughed.  'You speak of the old as though they were Kaffirs or Eskimos.'

      'Well, isn't that just about what they are?  Hearts of gold, and all that.  And wonderfully intelligent - in their way, and all things considered.  But they don't happen to belong to our civilization.  They're aliens.  I shall always remember the time I went to tea with some Arab ladies in Tunis.  So kind they were, so hospitable.  But they would make me eat such uneatable cakes, and they talked French so badly, and there was nothing whatever to say to them, and they were so horrified by my short skirts and my lack of children.  Old people always remind me of an Arab tea party.  Do you suppose we shall be an Arab tea party when we're old?'

      'Yes, and probably a death's head into the bargain,' said Spandrell.  'It's a question of thickening arteries.'

      'But what makes the old such an Arab tea party is their ideas.  I simply cannot believe that thick arteries will ever make me believe in God and morals and all the rest of it.  I came out of the chrysalis during the War, when the bottom had been knocked out of everything.  I don't see how our grandchildren could possibly knock it out any more thoroughly than it was knocked then.  So where would the misunderstanding come in?'

      'They might have put the bottom in again,' suggested Spandrell.

      She was silent for a moment. 'I never thought of that.'

      'Or else you might have put it in yourself.  Putting the bottom in again is one of the traditional occupations of the aged.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      The clock struck one and, like the cuckoo released from the bell, Simmons popped into the library, carrying a tray.  Simmons was middle-aged and had that statesman-like dignity of demeanour which the necessity of holding the tongue and keeping the temper, of never speaking one's real mind and preserving appearances tends always to produce in diplomats, royal personages, high government officials and butlers.  Noiselessly, he laid the table for two, and, announcing that his lordship's supper was served, retired.  The day had been Wednesday; two grilled mutton chops were revealed when Lord Edward lifted the silver cover.  Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were chop days.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays there was steak and chips.  On Saturdays, as a treat, Simmons prepared a mixed grill.  On Sundays he went out; Lord Edward had to be content with cold ham and tongue, and a salad.

      'Curious,' said Lord Edward, as he handed Illidge his chop, 'curious that the sheep population doesn't rise.  Not at the same rate as the human population.  One would have expected ... seeing that the symbiosis is such a close ...'  He chewed in silence.

      'Mutton must be going out of fashion,' said Illidge.  'Like God,' he added provocatively, 'and the immortal soul.'  Lord Edward was not to be baited. 'Not to mention the Victorian novelists,' Illidge went on.  He had slipped on the stairs; and the only literature Lord Edward ever read was Dickens and Thackeray.  But the Old Man calmly masticated.  'And innocent young girls.'  Lord Edward took a scientific interest in the sexual activities of axolotls and chickens, guinea-pigs and frogs; but any reference to the corresponding activities of humans made him painfully uncomfortable.  'And purity,' Illidge continued, looking sharply into the Old Man's face, 'and virginities, and ...' He was interrupted and Lord Illidge saved from further persecution by the ringing of the telephone bell.

      'I'll deal with it,' said Illidge jumping up from his place.

      He put the receiver to his ear.  'Hullo!'

      'Edward, is that you?' said a deep voice, not unlike Lord Edward's own.  'This is me, Edward, I've just this moment discovered a most extraordinary mathematical proof of the existence of God, or rather of ...'

      'But this isn't Lord Edward,' shouted Illidge.  'Wait.  I'll ask him to come.'  He turned back to the Old Man.  'It's Lord Gattenden,' he said.  'He's just discovered a new proof of the existence of God.'  He did not smile, his tone was grave.  Gravity in the circumstances was the wildest derision.  The statement made fun of itself.  Laughing comment made it less, not more, ridiculous.  Marvellous old imbecile!  Illidge felt himself revenged for all the evening's humiliations.  'A mathematical proof,' he added, more seriously than ever.

      'Oh dear!' exclaimed Lord Edward, as though something deplorable had happened.  Telephoning always made him nervous.  He hurried to the instrument.  'Charles, is that ...'

      'Ah, Edward,' cried the disembodied voice of the head of the family from forty miles away at Gattenden.  'Such a really remarkable discovery.  I wanted your opinion on it.  About God.  You know the formula, m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number?  Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought?  In which case you have m equals infinity times nought.  That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.  Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing?  Doesn't it?'  The diaphragm of the telephone receiver was infected by Lord Gattenden's excitement, forty miles away.  It talked with breathless speed; its questions were earnest and insistent.  'Doesn't it, Edward?'  All his life the fifth marquess had been looking for the absolute.  It was the only sort of hunting possible to a cripple.  For fifty years he had trundled in his wheelchair at the hands of the elusive quarry.  Could it be that he had now caught it, so easily, and in such an unlikely place as an elementary schoolbook on the theory of limits?  It was something that justified excitement.  'What's your opinion, Edward?'

      'Well,' began Lord Edward, and at the other end of the electrified wire, forty miles away, his brother knew, from the tone in which that single word was spoken, that it was no good.  The Absolute's tail was still unsalted.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Talking about elders,' said Lucy, 'did I ever tell either of you that really marvellous story about my father?'

      'Which story?'

      'The one about the conservatories.'  The mere thought of the story made her smile.

      'No, I never remember hearing about the conservatories,' said Spandrell, and Walter also shook his head.

      'It was during the War,' Lucy began.  'I was getting on for eighteen, I suppose.  Just launched.  And by the way, somebody did almost literally break a bottle of champagne over me.  Parties were rather feverish in those days, if you remember.'

      Spandrell nodded and, though as a matter of fact he had been at school during the War, Walter also nodded, knowingly.

      'One day,' Lucy continued, 'I got a message: Would I go upstairs and see his Lordship?  It was unprecedented.  I was rather alarmed.  You know how the old imagine one lives.  And how upset they are when they discover they've been wrong.  The usual Arab tea party.'  She laughed and, for Walter, her laughter laid waste to all the years before he had known her.  To elaborate the history of their young and innocent loves had been one of his standing consolations.  She had laughed; and now not even fancy could take pleasure in that comforting romance.

      Spandrell nodded.  'So you went upstairs, feeling as though you were climbing a scaffold ...'

      'And found my father in his library, pretending to read.  My arrival really terrified him.  Poor man!  I never saw anyone so horribly embarrassed and distressed.  You can imagine how his terrors increased mine.  Such strong feelings must surely have an adequate cause.  What could it be?  Meanwhile, he suffered agonies.  If his sense of duty hadn't been so strong, I believe he would have told me to go away again at once.  You should have seen his face!'  The comic memories were too much for her.  She laughed.

      His elbow on the table, his head in his hand, Walter stared into his wine-glass.  The bright little bubbles came rushing to the surface one by one, purposively, as though determined at all costs to be free and happy.  He did not dare to raise his eyes.  The sight of Lucy's laughter-distorted face, he was afraid, might make him do something stupid - cry aloud, or burst into tears.

      'Poor man!' repeated Lucy, and the words came out on a puff of explosive mirth.  'He could hardly speak for terror.'  Suddenly changing her tone, she mimicked Lord Edward's deep blurred voice bidding her sit down, telling her (stammeringly and with painful hesitations) that he had something to talk to her about.  The mimicry was admirable.  Lord Edward's embarrassed phantom was sitting at their table.

      'Admirable!' Spandrell applauded.  And even Walter had to laugh; but the depths of his unhappiness remained undisturbed.

      'It must have taken him a good five minutes,' Lucy went on, 'to screw himself up to the talking point.  I was in an agony, as you can imagine.  But guess what it was he wanted to say?'

      'What?'

      'Guess.'  And all at once Lucy began to laugh again, uncontrollably.  She covered her face with her hands, her whole body shook, as though she were passionately weeping.  'It's too good,' she gasped, dropping her hands and leaning back in her chair.  Her face still worked with laughter; there were tears on her cheeks.  'Too good.'  She opened the little beaded bag that lay on the table in front of her and, taking out a handkerchief, began to wipe her eyes.  A gust of perfume came out with the handkerchief, reinforcing those faint memories of gardenias that surrounded her, that moved with her wherever she went like a second ghastly personality.  Walter looked up; the strong gardenia perfume was in his nostrils; he was breathing what was for him the very essence of her being, the symbol of her power, of his own insane desires.  He looked at her with a kind of terror.

      'He told me,' Lucy went on, still laughing spasmodically, still dabbing at her eyes, 'he told me that he had heard that I sometimes allowed young men to kiss me at dances, in conservatories.  Conservatories!' she repeated.  'What a wonderful touch!  So marvellously in period.  The 'eighties.  The old Prince of Wales.  Zola's novels.  Conservatories!  Poor dear man!  He said he hoped I wouldn't let it happen again.  My mother'd be so dreadfully distressed if she knew.  Oh dear, oh dear!'  She drew a deep breath.  The laughter finally died down.

      Walter looked at her and breathed her perfume, breathed his own desires and the terrible power of her attraction.  And it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first time.  Now for the first time - with the half-emptied glass in front of her, the bottle, the dirty ashtray; now, as she leaned back in her chair, exhausted with laughter, and wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes.

      'Conservatories,' Spandrell was repeating.  'Conservatories.  Yes, that's very good.  That's very good indeed.'

      'Marvellous,' said Lucy.  'The old are really marvellous.  But hardly possible, you must admit.  Except, of course, Walter's father.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      John Bidlake climbed slowly up the stairs.  He was very tired.  'These awful parties,' he was thinking.  He turned on the light in his bedroom.  Over the mantelpiece one of Degas's realistically unlovely women sat in her round tin bath trying to scrub her back.  On the opposite wall a little girl by Renoir played the piano between a landscape of his own and one of Walter Sickert's visions of Dieppe.  Above the bed hung two caricatures of himself by Max Beerbohm and another by Rouveyre.  There was a decanter of brandy on the table, with a siphon and a glass.  Two letters were propped conspicuously against the edge of the tray.  He opened them.  The first contained press cuttings about his latest show.  The Daily Mail called him 'the veteran of British Art' and assured its readers that 'his hand has lost nothing of its cunning'.  He crumpled up the cutting and threw it angrily into the fireplace.  The next was from one of the superior weeklies.  The tone was almost contemptuous.  He was judged by his own earlier performances and condemned.  'It is difficult to believe that works so cheap and flashy - ineffectively flashy, at that - as those collected in the present exhibition should have been produced by the painter of the Tate Gallery 'Haymakers' and the still more magnificent 'Bathers', now at Tantamount House.  In these empty and trivial pictures we look in vain for those qualities of harmonious balance, of rhythmic calligraphy, of three-dimensional plasticity which ...' What a rigmarole!  What tripe!  He threw the whole bunch of cuttings after the first.  But his contempt for the critics could not completely neutralize the effects of their criticism.  'Veteran of British Art' - it was the equivalent of 'poor old Bidlake'.  And when they complimented him on his hand having lost none of its cunning, they were patronizingly assuring him that he still painted wonderfully well for an old dotard in his second childhood.  The only difference between the hostile and the favourable critic was that one said brutally in so many words what the other implied in his patronizing compliment.  He almost wished that he had never painted those Bathers.

      He opened the other envelope.  It contained a letter from his daughter Elinor.  It was dated from Lahore:

      'The bazaars are the genuine article - maggoty.  What with the pollulations and the smells, it is like burrowing through a cheese.  From the artist's point of view, the distressing thing about all this oriental business is that it's exactly like that painting of Eastern scenes they did in France in the middle of the last century [19th].  You know the stuff, smooth and shiny, like those pictures that used to be painted on tea canisters.  When you're here, you see that the style is necessary.  The brown skin makes the faces uniform and the sweat puts a polish on the skin.  One would have to paint with a surface at least as slick as an Ingres.'

He read on with pleasure.  The girl always had something amusing to say in her letters.  She saw things with the right sort of eye.  But suddenly he frowned.

      'Yesterday, who should come to see us but John Bidlake Junior.  We had imagined him in Waziristan; but he was down here on leave.  I hadn't seen him since I was a little girl.  You can imagine my surprise when an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache stalked in and called me by my Christian name.  He had never seen Phil, of course.  We killed such fatted calves as this hotel can offer in honour of the prodigal brother.'

John Bidlake leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.  The enormous military man with the grey moustache was his son.  Young John was fifty.  Fifty.  There had been a time when fifty seemed a Methusalem age.  'If Manet hadn't died prematurely ...'  He remembered the words of his old teacher at the art school in Paris.  'But did Manet die so young?'  The old man had shaken his head.  (Old?  John Bidlake reflected.  He had seemed very old then.  But probably he wasn't more than sixty.)  'Manet was only fifty-one,' the teacher had answered.  He had found it difficult to restrain his laughter.  And now his own son was the age of Manet when Manet died.  An enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache.  And his brother was dead and buried at the other side of the world, in California.  Cancer of the intestine.  Elinor had met his son at Santa Barbara - a young man with a rich young wife, evading the Prohibition laws to the tune of a bottle of gin a day between them.

      John Bidlake thought of his first wife, the mother of the military gentleman and the Californian who had died of cancer of the intestine.  He was only twenty-two when he married for the first time.  Rose was not yet twenty.  They loved one another frantically, with a tigerish passion.  They quarrelled too, quarrelled rather enjoyably at first, when the quarrels could be made up in effusions of sensuality as violent as the furies they assuaged.  But the charm began to wear off when the children arrived, two of them within twenty-five months.  There was not enough money to keep the brats at a distance, to hire professionals to do the tiresome and dirty work.  John Bidlake's paternity was no sinecure.  His studio became a nursery.  Very soon, the results of passion - the yelling and the wetted diapers, the broken sleep, the smells - disgusted him of passion.  Moreover, the object of his passion was no longer the same.  After the babies were born, Rose began to put on fat.  Her face became heavy; her body swelled and sagged.  The quarrels, now, were not so easily made up.  At the same time, they were more frequent; paternity got on John Bidlake's nerves.  His art provided him with a pretext for going to Paris.  He went for a fortnight and stayed away four months.  The quarrels began again on his return.  Rose now frankly disgusted him.  His models offered him facile consolations; he had a more serious love affair with a married woman who had come to him to have her portrait painted.  Life at home was a dreariness tempered by scenes.  After a particularly violent scene Rose packed up and went to live with her parents.  She took the children with her; John Bidlake was only too delighted to be rid of them.  The elder of the squalling diaper-wetters was now an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache.  And the other was dead of cancer of the intestine.  He had not seen either of them since they were boys of five-and-twenty.  The sons had stuck to their mother.  She too was dead, had been in the grave these fifteen years.

      Once bitten, twice shy.  After his divorce John Bidlake had promised himself that he would never marry again.  But when one falls desperately in love with a virtuous young woman of good family, what can one do?  He had married, and those two brief years with Isabel had been the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the happiest of all his life.  And then she had died in childbirth, pointlessly.  He did his best never to think of her.  The recollection was too painful.  Between her remembered image and the moment of remembering, the abysses of time and separation were vaster than any other gulf between the present and the past.  And by comparison with the past which he had shared with Isabel every present seemed dim; and her death was a horrible reminder of the future.  He never spoke of her, and all that might remind him of her - her letters, her books, the furniture of her room - he destroyed or sold.  He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal.  But his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabel's were destroyed, he could not guard against chance reminders.  Chance had found many gaps in his defences this evening.  The widest breach was opened by this letter of Elinor's.  Sunk in his armchair, John Bidlake sat for a long time, unmoving.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Polly Logan sat in front of the looking-glass.  As she drew the comb through her hair there was a fine small crackling of electric sparks.

      'Little sparks, like a tiny battle, tiny, tiny ghosts shooting.  Tiny battle, tiny ghost of a battle-rattle.'

      Polly pronounced the words in a sonorous monotone, as though she were reciting to an audience.  She lingered lovingly over them, rolling the r's, hissing on the s's, humming like a bee on the m's, drawing out the long vowels and making them round and pure.  'Ghost rattle of ghost rifles, in-fin-it-es-imal ghost cannonade.'  Lovely words!  It gave her a peculiar satisfaction to be able to roll them out, to listen with an appreciative, a positively gluttonous ear, to the rumble of the syllables as they were absorbed into the silence.  Polly had always liked talking to herself.  It was a childish habit which she would not give up.  'But if it amuses me,' she protested, when people laughed at her for it, 'why shouldn't I?  It does nobody any harm.'

      She refused to let herself be laughed out of the habit.

      'Electric, electric,' she went on, dropping her voice, and speaking in a dramatic whisper.  'Electrical musketry, metrical biscuitry.  Ow!'  The comb had caught in a tangle.  She leaned forward to see more clearly in the glass what she was doing.  The reflected face approached.  'Ma chère,' exclaimed Polly in another tone, 'tu as l'air fatigué.  Tu es vieille.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  At your age.  Tz, tz!'  She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth and shook her head.  'This won't do, this won't do.  Still, you looked all right tonight.  "My dear, how sweet you look in white!"'  She imitated Mrs Betterton's emphatic voice.  'Same to you and many of them.  Do you think I shall look like an elephant when I'm sixty?  Still, I suppose one ought to be grateful even for an elephant's compliments.  "Count your blessings, count them one by one."' she chanted softly, '"and it will surprise you what the Lord has done."  Oh, heavens, heavens!'  She put down her comb, she violently shuddered and covered her face with her hands.  'Heavens!'  She felt the blood rushing up into her cheeks.  'The gaffe!  The enormous and ghastly floater!'  She had thought suddenly of Lady Edward.  Of course she had overheard.  'How could I have risked saying that about her being a Canadian?'  Polly moaned, overwhelmed with retrospective shame and embarrassment.  'That's what comes of wanting to say something clever at any cost.  And then think of wasting attempted cleverness on Norah!  Norah!  Oh Lord, oh Lord!'  She jumped up and pulling her dressing-gown round her as she went, hurried down the corridor to her mother's room.  Mrs Logan was already in bed and had turned out the light.  Polly opened the door and stepped into darkness.

      'Mother,' she called, 'mother!'  Her tone was urgent and agonized.

      'What is it?' Mrs Logan answered anxiously out of the dark.  She sat up and fumbled for the electric switch by the bed.  'What is it?'  The light went on with a click.  'What is it, my darling?'

      Polly threw herself down on the bed and hid her face against her mother's knees.  'Oh, mother, if you knew what a terrible floater I made with Lady Edward!  If you knew!  I forgot to tell you.'

      Mrs Logan was almost angry that her anxiety had been for nothing.  When one has put forth all one's strength to raise what seems an enormous weight, it is annoying to find that the dumbbell is made of cardboard and could have been lifted between two fingers.  'Was it necessary to come and wake me up out of my first sleep to tell me?' she asked crossly.

      Polly looked up at her mother.  'I'm sorry, mother,' she said repentantly.  'But if you knew what an awful floater it was!'

      Mrs Logan could not help laughing.

      'I couldn't have gone to sleep if I hadn't told you,' Polly went on.

      'And I mayn't go to sleep until you have.'  Mrs Logan tried to be severe and sarcastic.  But her eyes, her smile betrayed her.

      Polly took her mother's hand and kissed it.  'I knew you wouldn't mind,' she said.

      'I do mind.  Very much.'

      'It's no good trying to bluff me,' said Polly.  'But now I must tell you about the floater.'

      Mrs Logan heaved the parody of a sigh of resignation and, pretending to be overwhelmed with sleepiness, closed her eyes.  Polly talked.  It was after half-past two before she went back to her room.  They had discussed, not only the floater and Lady Edward, but the whole party, and everyone who was there.  Or rather Polly had discussed and Mrs Logan had listened, had laughed and laughingly protested when her daughter's comments became too exuberantly high-spirited.

      'But Polly, Polly,' she had said, 'you really mustn't say that people look like elephants.'

      'But Mrs Betterton does look like an elephant,' Polly had replied.  'It's the truth.'  And in her dramatic stage whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: 'Even her nose is like a trunk.'

      'But she's got a short nose.'

      Polly's whisper had become more gruesome.  'An amputated trunk.  They bit it off when she was a baby.  Like puppies' tails.'