CHAPTER XIV

 

Miss Fulkes rotated the terrestrial globe until the crimson triangle of India was opposite their eyes.

      'That's Bombay,' she said, pointing with her pencil.  That's where Daddy and Mummy took the ship.  Bombay is a big town in India,' she went on instructively.  'All this is India.'

      'Why is India red?' asked little Phil.

      'I told you before.  Try to remember.'

      'Because it's English?'  Phil remembered, of course; but the explanation had seemed inadequate.  He had hoped for a better one this time.

      'There, you see, you can remember if you try,' said Miss Fulkes, scoring a small triumph.

      'But why should English things be red?'

      'Because red is England's colour.  Look, here's little England.'  She spun the globe.  'Red too.'

      'We live in England, don't we?'  Phil looked out of the window.  The lawn with its Wellingtonia, the clot-polled elms looked back at him.

      'Yes, we live just about here,' and Miss Fulkes poked the red island in the stomach.

      'But it's green, where we live,' said Phil.  'Not red.'

      Miss Fulkes tried to explain, as she had done so many times before, just precisely what a map was.

      In the garden Mrs Bidlake walked among her flowers, weeding and meditating.  Her walking-stick had a little pronged spud at the end of it; she could weed without bending.  The weeds in the flowerbeds were young and fragile; they yielded without a struggle to the spud.  But the dandelions and plantains on the lawn were more formidable enemies.  The dandelions' roots were like long tapering white serpents.  The plantains, when she tried to pull them up, desperately clawed the earth.

      It was the season of tulips.  Duc van Thol and Keizers Kroon, Proserpine and Thomas Moore stood at attention in all the beds, glossy in the light.  Atoms in the sun vibrated and their trembling filled all space.  Eyes felt the pulses as light; the tulip atoms absorbed or reverberated the accorded movements, creating colours for whose sake the burgesses of seventeenth-century Haarlem were prepared to part with hoarded guilders.  Red tulips and yellow, white and parti-coloured, smooth and feathery - Mrs Bidlake looked at them, happily.  They were like those gay and brilliant young men, she reflected, in Pinturicchio's frescoes at Siena.  She halted so as to be able to shut her eyes and think more thoroughly of Pinturicchio.  Mrs Bidlake could only think really well when she had her eyes shut.  Her face tilted a little upwards towards the sky, her heavy, wax-white eyelids closed against the light, she stood remembering, confusedly thinking.  Pinturicchio, Siena, the solemn huge cathedral - the Tuscan Middle Ages marched past her in a rich and confused pageant ... She had been brought up on Ruskin.  Watts had painted her portrait as a child.  Rebelling against the Pre-Raphaelites, she had thrilled with an admiration that was quickened, at first, by a sense of sacrilege, over the Impressionists.  It was because she loved art that she had married John Bidlake.  Liking his pictures, she had imagined, when the painter of 'The Haymakers' had paid his court to her, that she adored the man.  He was twenty years her senior; his reputation as a husband was bad; her family objected strenuously.  She did not care.  John Bidlake was embodied Art.  His was a sacred function and through his functions he appealed to all her vague, but ardent, idealism.

      John Bidlake's reasons for desiring to marry yet again were unromantic.  Travelling in Provence he had caught typhoid.  ('That's what comes of drinking water,' he used to say afterwards.  'If only I'd stuck to Burgundy and cognac!')  After a month in hospital at Avignon he returned to England, a thin and tottering convalescent.  Three weeks later influenza, followed by pneumonia, brought him again to death's door.  He recovered slowly.  The doctor congratulated him on having recovered at all.  ''Do you call this recovering?' grumbled John Bidlake.  'I feel as though about three-quarters of me were dead and buried.'  Accustomed to being well, he was terrified of illness.  He saw himself living miserably, a lonely invalid.  Marriage would be an alleviation.  He decided to marry.  The girl must be good-looking - that went without saying.  But serious, not flighty; devoted, a stay-at-home.

      In Janet Paston he found all that he had been looking for.  She had a face like a saint's; she was serious almost to excess; her adoration for himself was flattering.

      They were married, and if John Bidlake had remained the invalid he had imagined himself doomed to be, the marriage might have been a success.  Her devotion would have made up for her incompetence as a nurse; his helplessness would have rendered her indispensable to his happiness.  But health returned.  Six months after his marriage John Bidlake was entirely his old self.  The old self began to behave in the old way.  Mrs Bidlake took refuge from unhappiness in an endless imaginative meditation, which even her two children were hardly able to interrupt.

      It had lasted now for a quarter of a century.  A tall imposing lady of fifty all in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, she stood among the tulips, her eyes shut, thinking of Pinturicchio and the Middle Ages, and time flowing and flowing, and God immobile on the eternal bank.

      A shrill barking precipitated her out of her high eternity.  She opened her eyes, reluctantly, and looked round.  The small and silky parody of an extreme oriental-monster, her little Pekingese was barking at the kitchen cat.  Frisking this way and that round the circumference of a circle whose radius was proportionate to his terror of the arched and spitting tabby, he yapped hysterically.  His tail waved like a plume in the wind, his eyes goggled out of his black face.

      'T'ang!' Mrs Bidlake called.  'T'ang!'  All her Pekingese for the last thirty years had had dynastic names.  T'ang the First had flourished before her children were born.  It was with T'ang the Second that she and Walter had visited the dying Wetherington.  The kitchen cat was now spitting at T'ang the Third.  In the intervals, little Mings and Sungs had lived, grown decrepit and, in the lethal chamber, gone the way of all pets.  'T'ang, come here.'  Even in this emergency Mrs Bidlake was careful to pronounce the apostrophe.  Or rather she was not careful to pronounce it; she pronounced it by cultured instinct, because, being what nature and education had made her, she simply could not pronounce the word without the apostrophe even when the fur was threatening to fly.

      The little dog obeyed at last.  The cat ceased to spit, its fur lay down on its back, it walked away majestically.  Mrs Bidlake went on with her weeding and her vague, unending meditation among the flowers.  God, Pinturicchio, dandelions, eternity, the sky, the clouds, the early Venetians, dandelions ...

      Upstairs in the schoolroom lessons were over.  At least they were over as far as little Phil was concerned; for he was doing what he liked best in the world, drawing.  Miss Fulkes, it is true, called the process 'Art' and 'Imagination Training', and allotted half an hour to it every morning, from twelve to half-past.  But for little Phil it was just fun.  He sat bent over his paper, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his face intent and serious, drawing, drawing with a kind of inspired violence.  Wielding a pencil that seemed disproportionately large, his little brown hand indefatigably laboured.  At once rigid and wavering, the lines of the childish composition traced themselves on the paper.

      Miss Fulkes sat by the window, looking out at the sunny garden, but not consciously seeing it.  What she saw was behind the eyes, in a fanciful universe.  She saw herself -  herself in that lovely Lanvin frock that had been illustrated last month in Vogue, with pearls, dancing at Ciro's, which looked (for she had never been at Ciro's) curiously like the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where she had been.  'How lovely she looks!' all the people were saying.  She walked swayingly, like that actress she had seen at the London Pavilion - what was her name?  She held out her white hand; it was young Lord Wonersh who kissed it, Lord Wonersh, who looked like Shelley and lived like Byron and owned half Oxford Street and had come to the house last February with old Mr Bidlake and had perhaps spoken to her twice.  And then, all at once, she saw herself riding in the Park.  And a couple of seconds later she was on a yacht in the Mediterranean.  And then in a motor car.  Lord Wonersh had just taken his seat beside her, when the noise of T'ang's shrill barking startlingly roused her to consciousness of the lawn, the gay tulips, the Wellingtonia and, on the other side, the schoolroom.  Miss Fulkes felt guilty, she had been neglecting her charge.

      'Well, Phil,' she asked, turning round briskly to her pupil, 'what are you drawing?'

      'Mr Stokes and Albert pulling the mowlawner,' Phil answered, without looking up from his paper.

      'Lawnmower,' Miss Fulkes corrected.

      'Lawnmower,' Phil dutifully repeated.

      'You never get your compound words right,' Miss Fulkes continued.  'Mowlawner, hopgrasser, cracknutter - it's a sort of mental defect, like mirror-writing, I suppose.'  Miss Fulkes had taken a course in educational psychology.  'You must really try to correct it, Phil,' she added, earnestly.  After so long and flagrant a dereliction of duty (at Ciro's, on horseback, in the limousine with Lord Wonersh) Miss Fulkes felt it encumbent upon her to be particularly solicitous, scientifically so: she was a very conscientious young woman.  'Will you try?' she insisted.

      'Yes, Miss Fulkes,' the child answered.  He had no idea what she wanted him to try to do.  But it would keep her quiet if he said yes.  He was busy on a particularly difficult bit of his drawing.

      Miss Fulkes sighed and looked out of the window again.  This time she consciously perceived what her eyes saw.  Mrs Bidlake wandering among the tulips, dressed flowingly in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, a sort of Pre-Raphaelitic ghost.  Every now and then she paused and looked at the sky.  Old Mr Stokes, the gardener, passed carrying a rake; the tips of his white beard fluttered gently in the breeze.  The village clock stuck the half-hour.  The garden, the trees, the fields, the wooded hills in the distance were always the same.  Miss Fulkes felt at once so hopelessly sad that she could have cried.

      'Do mowlawners, I mean lawnmowers, have wheels?' asked little Phil, looking up from a frown of effort and perplexity wrinkling his forehead.  'I can't remember.'

      'Yes.  Or let me think ...' Miss Fulkes also frowned; 'no.  They have rollers.'

      'Rollers!' cried Phil.  'That's it.'  He attacked his drawing again with fury.

      Always the same.  There seemed to be no escape, no prospect of freedom.  'If I had a thousand pounds,' thought Miss Fulkes, 'a thousand pounds.  A thousand pounds.'  The words were magical.  'A thousand pounds.'

      'There!' cried Phil.  'Come and look.'  He held up his paper.  Miss Fulkes got up and crossed to the table.  'What a lovely drawing!' she said.

      'That's all the little bits of grass flying up,' said Phil, pointing to a cloud of dots and dashes in the middle of his picture.  He was particularly proud of the grass.

      'I see,' said Miss Fulkes.

      'And look how hard Albert is pulling!'  It was true; Albert was pulling like mad.  And old Mr Stokes, recognizable by the four parallel pencil strokes issuing from his chin, pushed as energetically at the other end of the machine.

      For a child of his age, little Phil had an observant eye, and a strange talent for rendering on paper what he had seen - not realistically, of course, but in terms of expressive symbols.  Albert and Mr Stokes were, for all their scratchy uncertainty of outline, violently alive.

      'Albert's left leg is rather funny, isn't it?' said Miss Fulkes.  'Rather long and thin and ...' She checked herself, remembering what old Mr Bidlake had said.  'On no account is the child to be taught how to draw, in the art-school sense of the word.  On no account.  I don't want him to be ruined.'

      Phil snatched the paper from her.  'No, it isn't,' he said angrily.  His pride was hurt, he hated criticism, refused ever to be in the wrong.

      'Perhaps it isn't really,' Miss Fulkes made haste to be soothing.  'Perhaps I made a mistake.'  Phil smiled again.  'Though why a child,' Miss Fulkes was thinking, 'shouldn't be told when he's drawn a leg that's impossibly long and thin and waggly, I really don't understand.'  Still, old Mr Bidlake ought to know.  A man in his position, with his reputation, a great painter - she had often heard him called a great painter, read it in newspaper articles, even in books.  Miss Fulkes had a profound respect for the Great.  Shakespeare, Milton, Michelangelo ...Yes, Mr Bidlake, the Great John Bidlake, ought to know best.  She had been wrong in mentioning that left leg.

      'It's after half-past twelve,' she went on in a brisk efficient voice.  'Time for you to lie down.'  Little Phil always lay down for half an hour before lunch.

      'No!'  Phil tossed his head, scowled ferociously and made a furious gesture with his clenched fists.

      'Yes,' said Miss Fulkes calmly.  'And don't make those silly faces.'  She knew, by experience, that the child was not really angry; he was just making a demonstration, in order to assert himself and in the vague hope, perhaps, that he might frighten his adversary into yielding - as Chinese soldiers are said to put on devil's masks and to utter fearful yells when they approach the enemy, in the hope of inspiring terror.

      'Why should I?'  Phil's tone was already much calmer.

      'Because you must.'

      The child got up obediently.  When the mask and the yelling fail to take effect, the Chinese soldier, being a man of sense and not at all anxious to get hurt, surrenders.

      'I'll come and draw the curtains for you,' said Miss Fulkes.

      Together, they walked down the passage to Phil's bedroom.  The child took off his shoes and lay down.  Miss Fulkes drew the folds of orange cretonne across the windows.

      'Not too dark,' said Phil, watching her movements through the richly coloured twilight.

      'You rest better when it's dark.'

      'But I'm frightened,' protested Phil.

      'You're not frightened in the least.  Besides, it isn't really dark at all.'  Miss Fulkes moved towards the door.

      'Miss Fulkes!'  She paid no attention.  'Miss Fulkes!'

      On the threshold Miss Fulkes turned round.  'If you go on shouting,' she said severely, 'I shall be very angry.  Do you understand?'  She turned and went out, shutting the door behind her.

      'Miss Fulkes!' he continued to call, but in a whisper, under his breath.  'Miss Fulkes!  Miss Fulkes!'  She mustn't hear him, of course; for then she would really be cross.  At the same time he wasn't going to obey tamely and without a protest.  Whispering her name he rebelled, he asserted his personality, but in complete safety.

      Sitting in her own room, Miss Fulkes was reading - to improve her mind.  The book was The Wealth of Nations.  Adam Smith, she knew, was Great.  His book was one of those that one ought to have read.  The best that has been thought or said.  Her family was poor, but cultured.  We needs must love the highest when we see it.  But when the highest takes the form of a chapter beginning, 'As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or in other words, by the extent of the market,' then, really, it is difficult to love it as ardently as one ought to do.  'When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for.'

      Miss Fulkes read the sentence through; but before she had come to the end of it, she had forgotten what the beginning was about.  She began again; ... 'for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus ... (I could take the sleeves out of my brown dress, she was thinking; because it's only under the arms that it's begun to go, and wear it for the skirt only with a jumper over it) ... over and above his own consumption for such parts ... (an orange jumper perhaps).'  She tried a third time, reading the words out aloud.  'When the market is very small ...'  A vision of the cattle market at Oxford floated before her inward eye; it was quite a large market.  'No person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself ...'  What was it all about?  Miss Fulkes suddenly rebelled against her own conscientiousness.  She hated the highest when she saw it.  Getting up, she put The Wealth of Nations back on the shelf.  It was a row of very high books - 'my treasures,' she called them.  Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson bound in squashy leather and looking with their rounded corners and Gothic titles, like so many Bibles.  Sartor Resartus, also Emerson's Essays.  Marcus Aurelius in one of those limp leathery artistic little editions that one gives, at Christmas, and in sheer despair, to those to whom one can think of nothing more suitable to give.  Macaulay's History.  Thomas à Kempis, Mrs Browning.  Miss Fulkes did not select any of them.  She put her hand behind the best that has been thought or said and withdrew from its secret place a copy of The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds.  A ribbon marked her place.  She opened and began to read.  'Lady Kitty turned on the lights and walked in.  A cry of horror broke from her lips, a sudden faintness almost overcame her.  In the middle of the room lay the body of a man in faultless evening dress.  The face was almost unrecognizably mangled; there was a red gash in the white shirt front.  The rich Turkey carpet was darkly soaked with blood ...'  Miss Fulkes read on, avidly.  The thunder of the gong brought her back with a start from the world of emeralds and murder.  She sprang up.  'I ought to have kept an eye on the time,' she thought, feeling guilty.  'We shall be late.'  Pushing The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds back into its place behind the best that has been thought and said, she hurried along to the night nursery.  Little Phil had to be washed and brushed.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      There was no breeze except the wind of the ship's own speed; and that was like a blast from the engine-room.  Stretched in their chairs Philip and Elinor watched the gradual diminution against the sky of a jagged island of bare red rock.  From the deck above came the sound of people playing shuffleboard. Walking on principle or for an appetite, their fellow passengers passed and re-passed with the predictable regularity of comets.

      'The way people take exercise,' said Elinor in a tone positively of resentment; it made her hot to look at them.  'Even in the Red Sea.'

      'It explains the British Empire,' he said.

      There was a silence.  Burnt brown, burnt scarlet, the young men on leave passed laughing, four to a girl.  Sun-dried and curry-pickled veterans of the East strolled by with acrimonious words, about the Reforms and the cost of Indian living, upon their lips.  Two female missionaries padded past in a rarely broken silence.  The French globe-trotters reacted to the oppressively imperial atmosphere by talking very loud.  The Indian students slapped one another on the back like stage subalterns in the days of 'Charley's Aunt'; and the slang they talked would have seemed old-fashioned in a preparatory school.

      Time flowed.  The island vanished; the air was if possible hotter.

      'I'm worried about Walter,' said Elinor, who had been ruminating the contents of that last batch of letters she had received just before leaving Bombay.

      'He's a fool,' Philip answered.  'After committing one stupidity with that Carling female, he ought to have had the sense not to start again with Lucy.'

      'Of course he ought,' said Elinor irritably.  'But the point is that he hasn't had the sense.  It's a question of thinking of a remedy.'

      'Well, it's no good thinking about it five thousand miles away.'

      'I'm afraid he may suddenly rush off and leave poor Marjorie in the lurch.  With a baby on the way, too.  She's a dreary woman.  But he mustn't be allowed to treat her like that.'

      'No,' Philip agreed.  There was a pause.  The sparse procession of exercise lovers marched past.  'I've been thinking,' he went on reflectively, 'that it would make an excellent subject.'

      'What?'

      'This business of Walter's.'

      'You don't propose to exploit poor Walter as copy?'  Elinor was indignant.  'No really, I won't have it.  Botanizing on his grave - or at any rate his heart.'

      'But of course not!' Philip protested.

      'Mais je vous assure,' one of the Frenchwomen was shouting so loud that he had to abandon the attempt to continue, 'aux Galeries Layfayette les camisoles en flanelle pour enfant ne coütent que ...'

      'Camisoles en flanelle,' repeated Philip.  'Phew!'

      'But seriously, Phil ...'

      'But, my dear, I never intended to use more than the situation.  The young man who tries to make his life rhyme with his idealizing books and imagines he's having a great spiritual love, only to discover that he's got hold of a bore whom he really doesn't like at all.'

      'Poor Marjorie!  But why can't she keep her face better powdered?  And those artistic beads and earrings she always wears ...'

      'And who then goes down like a ninepin,' Philip continued, 'at the mere sight of a Siren.  It's the situation that appealed to me.  Not the individuals.  After all, there are plenty of other nice young men besides Walter.  And Marjorie isn't the only bore.  Nor Lucy the only man-eater.'

      'Well, if it's only the situation,' Elinor grudgingly allowed.

      'And besides,' he went on, 'it isn't written and probably never will be.  So there's nothing to get upset about, I assure you.'

      'All right.  I won't say anything more till I see the book.'

      There was another pause.

      '... such a wonderful time at Gulmerg last summer,' the young lady was saying to her four attentive cavaliers.  'There was golf, and dancing every evening, and ...'

      'And in any case,' Philip began again in a meditative tone, 'the situation would only be a kind of ...'

      'Mais je lui ai dit les hommes sont comme ça.  Une jeune fille bien élevée doit ...'

      '... a kind of excuse,' bawled Philip.  'It's like trying to talk in the parrot-house at the Zoo,' he added with parenthetic irritation.  'A kind of excuse, as I was saying, for a new way of looking at things that I want to experiment with.'

      'I wish you'd begin by looking at me in a new way,' said Elinor with a little laugh.  'A more human way.'

      'But seriously, Elinor ...'

      'Seriously,' she mocked.  'Being human isn't serious.  Only being clever.'

      'Oh, well,' he shrugged his shoulders, 'if you don't want to listen, I'll shut up.'

      'No, no, Phil.  Please.'  She laid her hand on his.  'Please.'

      'I don't want to bore you.'  He was huffy and dignified.

      'I'm sorry, Phil.  But you do look so comic when you're more in sorrow than in anger.  Do you remember those camels at Bikaner - what an extraordinarily superior expression?  But do go on!'

      'This year,' one female missionary was saying to the other, as they passed by, 'the Bishop of Kuala Lumpur ordained six Chinese deacons and two Malays.  And the Bishop of British North Borneo ...'  The quiet voices faded into inaudability.

      Philip forgot his dignity and burst out laughing.  'Perhaps he ordained some Orang-utans.'

      'But do you remember the wife of the Bishop of Thursday Island?' asked Elinor.  'The woman we met on that awful Australian ship with the cockroaches.'

      'The one who would eat pickles at breakfast?'

      'Pickled onions at that,' she qualified with a shudder.  'But what about your new way of looking at things?  We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.'

      'Well, as a matter of fact,' said Philip, 'we haven't.  All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point.  Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity.  Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen.  For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,' he nodded after the retreating group, 'thinks of it in terms of good times.  And then there's the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian.  Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality.  What I want to do is look with all those eyes at once.  With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes ...'

      'Loving eyes too.'

      He smiled at her and stroked her hand.  'The result ...' he hesitated.

      'Yes, what would the result be?' she asked.

      'Queer,' he answered.  'A very queer picture indeed.'

      'Rather too queer, I should have thought.'

      'But it can't be too queer,' said Philip.  'However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality.  We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer.  And the more you think, the queerer it grows.  That's what I want to get in this book - the astonishingness of the most obvious things.  Really, any plot of situation would do.  Because everything's implicit in anything.  The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross.  Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea.  Really, nothing could be queerer than that.  When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organization, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there's a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think - when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.'

      'All the same,' said Elinor, after a long silence, 'I wish one day you'd write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.'

      'Or why not a detective novel?'  He laughed.  But if, he reflected, he didn't write that kind of story, perhaps it was because he  couldn't.  In art there are simplicities more difficult than the most serried complications.  He could manage the complications as well as anyone.  But when it came to the simplicities, he lacked the talent - that talent which is of the heart, no less than of the head, of the feelings, the sympathies, the intuitions, no less than of the analytical understanding.  The heart, the heart, he said to himself.  'Perceive ye not, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened?'  No heart, no understanding.

      '... a terrible flirt!' cried one of the four cavaliers, as the party rounded the corner into hearing.

      'I am not!' the young lady indignantly retorted.

      'You are!' they all shouted together.  It was courtship in chorus and by teasing.

      'It's a lie!'  But, one could hear, the ticklish impeachment really delighted her.

      Like dogs, he thought.  But the heart, the heart ... The heart was Burlap's speciality.  'You'll never write a good book,' he had said oracularly, 'unless you write from the heart.'  It was true; Philip knew it.  But was Burlap the man to say so, Burlap whose books were so heartfelt that they looked as though they had come from the stomach, after an emetic?  If he went in for the grand simplicities, the results would be no less repulsive.  Better to cultivate his own particular garden for all it was worth.  Better to remain rigidly and loyally oneself.  Oneself?  But this question of identity was precisely one of Philip's chronic problems.  It was so easy for him to be almost anybody, theoretically and with his intelligence.  He had such a power of assimilation, that he was often in danger of being unable to distinguish the assimilator from the assimilated, of not knowing among the multiplicity of his rôles who was the actor.  The amoeba, when it finds a prey, flows round it, incorporates it and oozes on.  There was something amoeboid about Philip Quarles's mind.  It was like a sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mould and, having engulfed, having filled, of flowing on towards other obstacles, other receptacles, leaving the first empty and dry.  At different times in his life and even at the same moment he had filled the most various moulds.  He had been a cynic and also a mystic, a humanitarian and also a contemptuous misanthrope; he had tried to live the life of detached and stoical reason and another time he had aspired to the unreasonableness of natural and uncivilized existence.  The choice of moulds depended at any given moment on the books he was reading, the people he was associating with.  Burlap, for example, had redirected the flow of his mind into those mystical channels which it had not filled since he discovered Boehme in his undergraduate days.  Then he had seen through Burlap and flowed out again, ready however at any time to let himself trickle back once more, whenever the circumstances seemed to require it.  He was trickling back at this moment, the mould was heart-shaped.  Where was the self to which he could be loyal?

      The female missionaries passed in silence.  Looking over Elinor's shoulder he saw that she was reading the Arabian Nights in Mardrus's translation.  Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science lay on his knees; he picked it up and began looking for his place.  Or wasn't there a self at all? he was wondering.  No, no, that was untenable, that contradicted immediate experience.  He looked over the top of his book at the enormous blue glare of the sea.  The essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form, to take, and with an equal facility efface, impressions.  To such moulds as his spirit might from time to time occupy, to such hard and burning obstacles as it might flow round, and, itself cold, penetrate to the fiery heart of, no permanent loyalty was owing.  The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by.  But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity - that persisted and to that his loyalty was due.  If there was any single way of life he could lastingly believe in, it was that mixture of pyrrhonism and stoicism which had struck him, an enquiring schoolboy among the philosophers, as the height of human wisdom and into whose mould of sceptical indifference he had poured his impassioned adolescence.  Against the pyrrhonism suspense of judgement and the stoical imperturbability he had often rebelled.  But had the rebellion ever been really serious?  Pascal had made him a Catholic - but only so long as the volume of Pensées was open before him.  There were moments when, in the company of Carlyle or Whitman or bouncing Browning, he had believed in strenuousness for strenuousness' sake.  And then there was Mark Rampion.  After a few hours in Mark Rampion's company he really believed in noble savagery; he felt convinced that the proudly conscious intellect ought to humble itself a little and admit the claims of the heart, aye and the bowels, the loins, the bones and skin and muscles, to a fair share of life.  The heart again!  Burlap had been right, even though he was a charlatan, a sort of swindling thimble-rigger of the emotions.  The heart!  But always, whatever he might do, he knew quite well in the secret depths of his being that he wasn't a Catholic, or a strenuous liver, or a mystic, or a noble savage.  And though he sometimes nostalgically wished he were one or other of these beings, or all of them at once, he was always secretly glad to be none of them and at liberty, even though his liberty was in a strange paradoxical way a handicap and a confinement to his spirit.

      'That simple story of yours,' he said aloud; 'it wouldn't do.'

      Elinor looked up from the Arabian Nights.  'Which simple story?'

      'That one you wanted me to write.'

      'Oh, that!' She laughed.  'You've been brooding over it a long time.'

      'It wouldn't give me my opportunity,' he explained.  'It would have to be solid and deep.  Whereas I'm wide; wide and liquid.  It wouldn't be in my line.'

      'I could have told you that the first day I met you,' said Elinor, and returned to Scheherazade.

      'All the same,' Philip was thinking, 'Mark Rampion's right.  In practice, too; which makes it so much more impressive.  In his art and his living, as well as in his theories.  Not like Burlap.'  He thought with disgust of Burlap's emetic leaders in the World.  Like a spiritual channel crossing.  And such a nasty, slimy sort of life.  But Rampion was the proof of his own theories.  'If I could capture something of his secret!' Philip sighed to himself.  'I'll go and see him the moment I get home.'