CHAPTER VXII

 

It had been raining for days.  To Spandrell it seemed as though the fungi and the mildew were sprouting even in his soul.  He lay in bed, or sat in his dismal room, or leaned against the counter in a public-house, feeling the slimy growth within him, watching it with his inward eyes.

      'But if only you'd do something,' his mother had so often implored.  'Anything.'

      And all his friends had said the same thing, had gone on saying it for years.

      But he was damned if he'd do anything.  Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all  that tripe and nonsense.  'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself.  Work's simply a drug, that's all.  It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are.  They must intoxicate themselves with work.  It's stupid.  The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk.  Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face.  It's hiding yourself from yourself.  No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work.  Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important.  If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them.  Just holes in the air, that's all.  Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them.  Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think.  No wonder they daren't stop working.  They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't.  It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.'

      'And what has your courage permitted you to find out about yourself?' asked Philip Quarles.

      Spandrell grinned rather melodramatically.  'It needed some courage,' he said, 'to go on looking at what I discovered.  If I hadn't been such a brave man, I'd have taken to work or morphia long ago.'

      Spandrell dramatized himself a little, made his conduct appear rather more rational and romantic than it really was.  If he did nothing, it was out of habitual laziness as well as on perverse and topsy-turvy moral principle.  The sloth, indeed, had preceded the principle and was its root.  Spandrell would never have discovered that work was a pernicious opiate, if he had not had an invincible sloth to find a reason and a justification for.  But that it did require some courage on his part to do nothing was true; for he was idle in spite of the ravages of a chronic boredom that could become, at moments like the present, almost unbearably acute.  But the habit of idleness was so deeply ingrained that to break it would have demanded more courage than to bear the agonies of boredom to which it gave rise.  Pride had reinforced his native laziness - the pride of an able man who is not quite able enough, of an admirer of great achievements who realizes that he lacks the talent to do original work and who will not humiliate himself by what he knows will be an unsuccessful attempt to create, or by stooping, however successfully, to some easier task.

      'It's all very well you talking about work,' he had said to Philip.  'But you can do something, I can't.  What do you want me to do?  Bank clerking?  Commercial travelling?'

      'There are other professions,' said Philip.  'And since you've got some money, there's all scholarship, all natural history ...'

      'Oh, you want me to be an ant collector, do you?  Or a writer of theses on the use of soap among the Angevins.  A dear old Uncle Toby with a hobby to ride.  But I tell you, I don't want to be an Uncle Toby.  If I'm no real good, I prefer to be just frankly no good.  I don't want to disgust myself as a man of learning.  I don't want to be the representative of a hobby.  I want to be what nature made me - no good.'

      Ever since his mother's second marriage Spandrell had always perversely made the worst of things, chosen the worst course, deliberately encouraged his own worst tendencies.  It was with debauchery that he distracted his endless leisures.  He was taking his revenge on her, on himself also for having been so foolishly happy and good.  He was spiting her, spiting himself, spiting God.  He hoped there was a hell for him to go to and regretted his inability to believe in its existence.  Still, hell or no hell, it was satisfactory, it was even exciting in those early days to know that one was doing something bad and wrong.  But there is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal, that it is only the rarest beings, gifted with much less than the usual amount of intelligence and much more than the usual intensity of appetite, who can go on actively enjoying a regular course of vice or continue actively to believe in its wickedness.  Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it.  Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.  The man who has formed a habit of women or gin, of opium-smoking or flagellation, finds it as difficult to live without his vice as to live without bread and water, even though the actual practice of the vice may have become in itself as unexciting as eating a crust or drinking a glass from the kitchen tap.  Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrong-doing as to active enjoyment.  After a few years the converted or sceptical Jew, the Westernized Hindu, can eat their pork and beef with an equanimity which to their still-believing brothers seems brutally cynical.  It is the same with the habitual debauchee.  Actions which at first seemed thrilling in their intrinsic wickedness become after a certain number of repetitions morally neutral.  A little disgusting, perhaps; for the practice of most vices is followed by depressing physiological reactions; but no longer wicked, because so ordinary.  It is difficult for a routine to seem wicked.

      Robbed gradually by habit both of his active enjoyment and of his active sense of wrongdoing (which had always been a part of his pleasure), Spandrell had turned with a kind of desperation to the refinements of vice.  But the refinements of vice do not produce corresponding refinements of feeling.  The contrary is in fact true; the more refined in its far-fetched extravagance, the more uncommon and abnormal the vice, the more dully and hopelessly unemotional does the practice of it become.  Imagine may exert itself in devising the most improbable variations on the normal sexual theme; but the emotional product of all the varieties of orgy is always the same - a dull sense of humiliation and abasement.  There are many people, it is true, (and they are generally the most intellectually civilized, refined and sophisticated), who have a hankering after lowness and eagerly pursue their own abasement in the midst of multiple orgies, masochistic prostitutions, casual and almost bestial couplings with strangers, sexual association with gross and uneducated individuals of a lower class.  Excessive intellectual and aesthetic refinement is liable to be bought rather dearly at the expense of some strange emotional degeneration, and the perfectly civilized Chinaman with his love of art and his love of cruelty is suffering from another form of the same disease which gives the perfectly civilized modern aesthete his taste for guardsmen and apaches, for humiliating promiscuities and violences.  'High brows, low loins,' was how Rampion had once summed up in Spandrell's hearing.  'The higher the one, the lower the other.'  Spandrell, for his part, did not enjoy humiliation.  The emotional results of all the possible refinements of vice seemed to him dully uniform.  Divorced from all significant emotion, whether approving or remorseful, the mere sensations of physical excitement and pleasure were insipid.  The corruption of youth was the only form of debauchery that now gave him any active emotion.  Inspired, as Rampion had divined, by that curious vengeful hatred of sex, which had resulted from the shock of his mother's second marriage supervening, in an uneasy moment of adolescence, on the normal upper-middle-class training in refinement and gentlemanly repression, he could still feel a peculiar satisfaction in inflicting what he regarded as the humiliation of sensual pleasure on the innocent sisters of those too much loved and therefore detested women who had been for him the personification of the detested instinct.  Mediaevally hating, he took his revenge, not (like the ascetics and puritans) by mortifying the hated flesh of women, but by teaching it an indulgence which he himself regarded as evil, by luring and caressing it on to more and more complete and triumphant rebellion against the conscious soul.  And the final stage of his revenge consisted in the gradual insinuation into the mind of his victim of the fundamental wrongness and baseness of the raptures he himself had taught her to feel.  Poor little Harriet was the only innocent on whom, so far, he had been able to carry out the whole of his programme.  With her predecessors he had never gone so far and she had had no successors.  Seduced in the manner he had described to the Rampions, Harriet had adored him and imagined herself adored.  And she was almost right; for Spandrell did genuinely care for her, even while he was deliberately making her his victim.  The violation of his own feelings as well as of hers gave an added spice of perversity to the proceedings.  Patiently, with the tact and gentleness and understanding of the most delicate, most exquisitely sympathetic lover, he allayed her virgin fears and gradually melted the coldness of her youth, thawed down the barriers raised by her education - only, however, to impose on her inexperience the ingenuous acceptance of the most fantastic lubricities.  To see her accepting these as ordinary marks of affection was already, for the reversed ascetic in Spandrell, an admirable revenge on her for being a woman.  But it was not enough; he began to simulate scruples, to shrink with an air of distress from her ardours or, if he accepted them, to accept them passively as though he were being outraged and violated.  Harriet became suddenly anxious and distressed, felt ashamed as a sensitive person always feels whose ardours meet with no response; and suddenly, at the same time, she found herself a little grotesque, like an actor who has been performing with a group of companions and who, deserted, suddenly realizes he is alone on the stage - grotesque and even a little disgusting.  Didn't he love her any more?  But so much, he answered.  Then why?  Precisely because of the depths of his love; and he began to talk about the soul.  The body was like a wild beast that devoured the soul, annihilated the consciousness, abolished the real you and me.  And as though by accident, somebody, that very evening, had sent him a mysterious parcel, which when he opened, as he now did, turned out to contain a portfolio full of pornographic French etchings, in which poor Harriet saw with a growing sense of horror and disgust all the actions she had so innocently and warm-heartedly accepted as love, represented in cold and lucid outlines and made to look so hideous, so low, so bottomlessly vulgar that but to glance was to hate and despise the whole human race.  For some days Spandrell skilfully rubbed the horror in; and then, when she was thoroughly penetrated with a sense of guilt and creeping with self-disgust, cynically and violently renewed his now obscene love-making.  In the end she had left him, hating him, hating herself.  That was three months ago.  Spandrell had made no attempt to have her back or to renew the experiment on another victim.  It wasn't worth the effort; nothing was worth the effort.  He contented himself with talking about the excitements of diabolism, while in practice he remained sunk apathetically in the dismal routine of brandy and hired love.  The talk momentarily excited him; but when it was over he fell back again yet deeper into boredom and despondency.  There were times when he felt as though he were becoming inwardly paralysed, with a gradual numbing of the very soul.  It was a paralysis which it was within his power, by making an effort of the will, to cure.  But he could not, even would not, make the effort.

      'But if you're bored by it, if you hate it,' Philip Quarles had interrogated, focusing on Spandrell his bright intelligent curiosity, 'why the devil do you go on with the life?'  It was nearly a year since the question had been asked; the paralysis had not then crept so deep into Spandrell's soul.  But even in those days Philip had found his case very puzzling.  And since the man was prepared to talk about himself without demanding any personalities in return, since he didn't seem to mind being an object of scientific curiosity and was boastful rather than reticent about his weaknesses, Philip had taken the opportunity of cross-examining him.  'I can't see why,' he insisted.

      Spandrell shrugged his shoulders.  'Because I'm committed to it.  Because in some way it's my destiny.  Because that's what life finally is - hateful and boring; that's what human beings are, when they're left to themselves - hateful and boring again.  Because, once one's damned, one ought to damn oneself doubly.  Because ... yes, because I really like hating and being bored.'

      He liked it.  The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them.  He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone.  The concert season was in full swing, there was opera at Covent Garden, all the theatres were open; but Spandrell only read the advertisements - the Eroica at the Queen's Hall, Schnabel playing Op. 106 at the Wigmore, Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Little Tich at the Alhambra, Othello at the Old Vic, Charlie Chaplin at Marble Arch - read them very carefully and stayed at home.  There was a pile of music on the piano, his shelves were full of books, all the London Library was at his disposal; Spandrell read nothing but magazines and the illustrated weeklies and the morning and evening papers.  The rain went sliding incessantly down the dirty glass of the windows; Spandrell turned the enormous crackling pages of The Times.  'The Duke of York,' he read, having eaten his way, like a dung beetle's maggot in its native element, through Births, Deaths and the Agony Column, through Servants and Real Estate, through Legal Reports, through Imperial and Foreign News, through Parliament, through the morning's history, through the five leading articles, through Letters to the Editor, as far as Court and Personal and the little clerical essay on The Bible in Bad Weather, 'the Duke of York will be presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers Company on Monday next.  His Royal Highness will take luncheon with the Master and Wardens of the Company after the presentation.'  Pascal and Blake were within reach, on the bookshelf.  But 'Lady Agusta Crippen has left England on the Berengaria.  She will travel across America to visit her brother-in-law and sister, the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.'  Spandrell laughed, and the laughter was a liberation, was a source of energy.  He got up; he put on his mackintosh and went out.  'The Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.'  Still smiling, he turned into the public-house round the corner.  It was early; there was only one other drinker in the bar.

      'But why should two people stay together and be unhappy?' the barmaid was saying.  'Why?  When they can get a divorce and be happy?'

      'Because marriage is a sacrament,' replied the stranger.

      'Sacrament yourself!' the barmaid retorted contemptuously.  Catching sight of Spandrell, she nodded and smiled.  He was a regular customer.

      'Double brandy,' he ordered, and leaning against the bar examined the stranger.  He had a face like a choirboy's - but a choirboy suddenly overwhelmed by middle age; chubby, prettily doll-like, but withered.  The mouth was horribly small, a little slit in a rosebud.  The cherub's cheeks had begun to sag and were grey, like the chin, with a day's beard.

      'Because,' the stranger went on - and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of self-consciousness, 'because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh.  One flesh,' he repeated and accompanied the words by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter.  He caught Spandrell's eye, blushed, and to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.

      'What do you think, Mr Spandrell!' asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.

      'Of what?  Of being one flesh?'  The barmaid nodded.  'H'm.  As a matter of fact, I was just envying the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter for being so unequivocally two fleshes.  If you were called the Governor-General of South Melanesia,' he went on, addressing himself to the withered choirboy, 'and your wife was Lady Ethelberta Todhunter, do you imagine you'd be one flesh?'  The stranger wriggled like a worm on a hook.  'Obviously not.  It would be shocking if you were.'

      The stranger ordered another whiskey.  'But joking apart,' he said, 'the sacrament of marriage ...'

      'But why should two people be unhappy?' persisted the barmaid.  'When it isn't necessary?'

      'Why shouldn't they be unhappy?' Spandrell enquired.  'Perhaps it's what they're here for.  How do you know that the earth isn't some other planet's hell?'

      'A positivist,' the barmaid laughed.  'What rot!'

      'But the Anglicans don't regard it as a sacrament,' Spandrell continued.

      The choirboy writhed indignantly.  'Do you take me for an Anglican?'

      The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation.  Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously.  In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalent of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy, of poetry and a weekend with Cleopatra, of big-game hunting and music.  The choirboy ordered another drink.

      'What an age we live in!' he said, shaking his head.  'Barbarous.  Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.'

      'Not to mention hygienic truths,' said Spandrell.  'These damp clothes!  And not a window.'  He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.

      The choirboy shuddered and held up his hands.  'But what a handkerchief!' he exclaimed, 'what a horror!'

      Spandrell held it out for inspection.  'It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,' he said.  It was a silk bandana, red with bold patterns in black and pink.  'Extremely expensive, I may add.'

      'But the colour, my dear sir.  The colour!'

      'I like it.'

      'But not at this season of the year.  Not between Easter and Whitsun.  Impossible!  The liturgical colour is white.'  He pulled out his own handkerchief.  It was snowy.  'And my socks.'  He lifted a foot.

      'I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.'

      'White, white,' said the choirboy.  'It's prescribed.  Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white.  Not to mention the fact that today's the feast of St Natalia the Virgin.  And white's the colour for all virgins who aren't also martyrs.'

      'I should have thought they were all martyrs,' said Spandrell.  'That is, if they've been virgins long enough.'

      The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut.  Outside was loneliness and the damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact.  The choirboy began to talk of little St Hugh of Lincoln and St Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin-miners.  He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.

      'Another wet Derby,' prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company with the fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls.  The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever, - a stream of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening.  Into Spandrell's face the withered choirboy breathed alcohol and poetry.

            'To and fro, to and fro,

            Piran of Perranzabuloe,'

he intoned.  Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacing.  He had lost his self-consciousness.  The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep.  A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.

            'Walked weightless,'

he continued.

            'Walked weightless on the heaving seas

            Among the Cassiterides.'

'That was Piran's chief miracle,' he explained; 'walking from Land's End to the Scilly Islands.'

      'Pretty nearly the world's record, I should think,' said Spandrell.

      The other shook his head.  'There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales.  But I can't remember his name.  Miss!' he called.  'Here!  Another whiskey, please.'

      'I must say,' said Spandrell, 'you seem to make the best of both worlds.  Six whiskeys ...'

      'Only five,' the choirboy protested.  'This is only the fifth.'

      'Five whiskeys, then, and the liturgical colours.  Not to mention St Piran of Pirranzabuloe.  Do you really believe in that walk to the Scillies?'

      'Absolutely.'

      'And here's for your Sacramento,' said the barmaid, pushing his glass across the counter.

      The choirboy shook his head as he paid.  'Blasphemies all round,' he said.  'Every word another wound in the Sacred Heart.'  He drank.  'Another bleeding, agonizing wound.'

      'What fun you have with your Sacred Heart!'

      'Fun?' said the choirboy indignantly.

      'Staggering from the bar to the altar rails.  And from the confessional to the bawdy house.  It's the ideal life.  Never a dull moment.  I envy you.'

      'Mock on, mock on!'  He spoke like a dying martyr.  'And if you knew what a tragedy my life has been, you wouldn't say you envied me.'

      The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut.  God-thirsty from the spiritual deserts of the workshop and the office, men came, as to a temple.  Bottled and barrelled by Clyde and Liffey, by Thames, Douro and Trent, the mysterious divinity revealed itself to them.  For the Brahmins who pressed and drank the soma, its name was Indra; for the hemp-eating yogis, Siva.  The gods of Mexico inhabited the peyotl.  The Persian Sufis discovered Allah in the wine of Shiraz, the shamans of the Samoyedes ate toadstools and were filled with the spirit of Num.

      'Another whiskey, Miss,' said the choirboy, and turning back to Spandrell almost wept over his misfortunes.  He had loved, he had married - sacramentally; he insisted on that.  He had been happy.  They had both been happy.

      Spandrell raised his eyebrows.  'Did she like the smell of whiskey?'

      The other shook his head sadly.  'I had my faults,' he admitted.  'I was weak.  This accursed drink!  Accursed!'  And in a sudden enthusiasm for temperance he poured his whiskey on the floor.  'There!' he said triumphantly.

      'Very noble!' said Spandrell.  He beckoned to the barmaid.  'Another whiskey for this gentleman.'

      The choirboy protested, but without must warmth.  He sighed.  'It was always my besetting sin,' he said.  'But I was always sorry afterwards.  Genuinely repentant.'

      'I'm sure you were.  Never a dull moment.'

      'If she'd stood by me, I might have cured myself.'

      'A pure woman's help, what?' said Spandrell.

      'Exactly,' the other nodded.  'That's exactly it.  But she left me.  Ran off.  Or rather, not ran.  She was lured.  She wouldn't have done it on her own.  It was that horrible little snake in the grass.  That little ...'  He ran through the sergeant-major's brief vocabulary.  'I'd wring his neck if he were here,' the choirboy went on.  The Lord of Battles had been in his fifth whiskey.  'Dirty little swine!'  He banged the counter.  'You know the man who painted those pictures in the Tate; Bidlake?  Well, it was that chap's son, Walter Bidlake.'

      Spandrell raised his eyebrows, but made no comment.  The choirboy talked on.

     

      At Sbisa's, Walter was dining with Lucy Tantamount.

      'Why don't you come to Paris too?' Lucy was saying.

      Walter shook his head.  'I've got to work.'

      'I find it's really impossible to stay in one place more than a couple of months at a time.  One gets so stale and wilted, so unutterably bored.  The moment I step into the aeroplane at Croydon I feel as though I had been born again - like the Salvation Army.'

      'And how long does the new life last?'

      Lucy shrugged her shoulders.  'As long as the old one.  But fortunately there's an almost unlimited supply of aeroplanes.  I'm all for Progress.'

 

      The swing-doors of the temple of the unknown god closed behind them.  Spandrell and his companion stepped out into the cold and rainy darkness.

      'Oof!' said the choirboy, shivering., and turned up the collar of his raincoat.  'It's like jumping into a swimming-bath.'

      'It's like reading Haeckel after Fénelon.  You Christians live in such a jolly little public-house of a universe.'

      They walked a few yards down the street.

      'Look here,' said Spandrell, 'do you think you can get home on foot?  Because you don't look as though you could.'

      Leaning against a lamppost the choirboy shook his head.

      'We'll wait for a cab.'

      They waited.  The rain fell.  Spandrell looked at the other man with a cold distaste.  The creature had amused him, while they had been in the pub, had served as a distraction.  Now, suddenly, he was merely repulsive.

      'Aren't you afraid of going to hell?' he asked.  'They'll make you drink burning whiskey there.  A perpetual Christmas pudding in your belly.  If you could see yourself!  The revolting spectacle ...'

      The choirboy's sixth whiskey had been full of contrition.  'I know, I know,' he groaned.  'I'm disgusting.  I'm contemptible.  But if you knew how I'd struggled and striven and ...'

      'There's a cab.'  Spandrell gave a shout.

      'How I'd prayed,' the choirboy continued.

      'Where do you live?'

      'Forty-one Ossian Gardens.  I've wrestled ...'

      The cab drew up in front of them.  Spandrell opened the door.

      'Get in, you sot,' he said, and gave the other a push. 'Forty-one Ossian Gardens,' he said to the driver.  The choirboy, meanwhile, had crawled into his seat.  Spandrell followed.  'Disgusting slug!'

      'Go on, go on.  I deserve it.  You have every right to despise me.'

      'I know,' said Spandrell.  'But if you think I'm going to do you the pleasure of telling you so any more, you're much mistaken.'  He leaned back in his corner and shut his eyes.  All his appalling weariness and disgust had suddenly returned.  'God,' he said to himself.  'God, God, God.'  And like a grotesque derisive echo of his thoughts, the choirboy prayed aloud.  'God have mercy upon me,' the maudlin voice repeated.  Spandrell burst out laughing.

      Leaving the drunkard on his front-door step, Spandrell went back to the cab.  He remembered suddenly that he had not dined.  'Sbisa's Restaurant,' he told the driver.  'God, God,' he repeated in the darkness.  But the night was a vacuum.

      'There's Spandrell,' cried Lucy, interrupting her companion in the middle of a sentence.  She raised her arm and waved.

      'Lucy!'  Spandrell took her hand and kissed it.  He sat down at their table.  'It'll interest you to hear, Walter, that I've just been doing a good Samaritan to your victim.'

      'My victim?'

      'Your cuckold.  Carling; isn't that his name?'  Walter blushed in an agony.  'He wears his horns without any difference.  Quite traditionally.'  He looked at Walter and was glad to see the signs of distress on his face.  'I found him drowning his sorrows,' he went on maliciously.  'In whiskey.  The grand romantic remedy.'  It was a relief to be able to take some revenge for his miseries.