CHAPTER XX

 

Of Philip Quarles's father old John Bidlake used to say that he was like one of those baroque Italian churches with sham façades.  High, impressive, bristling with classical orders, broken pediments and statuary, the façade seems to belong to a great cathedral.  But look more closely and you discover that it is only a screen.  Behind the enormous and elaborate front there crouches a wretched little temple of brick and rubble and scabby plaster.  And warming to his simile, John Bidlake would describe the unshaven priest gabbling the office, the snotty little acolyte in his unwashed surplice, the congregation of goitrous peasant women and their brats, the cretin begging at the door, the tin crowns on the images, the dirt on the floor, the stale smell of generations of pious humanity.

      'Why is it,' he concluded, forgetting that he was making an uncomplimentary comment on his own successes, 'that women always needs must love the lowest when they see it - or rather him?  Curious.  Particularly in this case.  One would have given Rachel Quarles too much sense to be taken in by such a vacuum.'

      Other people had thought so too, had also wondered why.  Rachel Quarles seemed so incomparably good for her husband.  But one does not marry a set of virtues and talents; one marries an individual human being.  The Sidney Quarles who had proposed to Rachel was a young man whom anyone might have fallen in love with and even believed in - anyone; and Rachel was only eighteen and particularly inexperienced.  He too was young (youth is in itself a virtue), young and good-looking.  Broad-shouldered and proportionately tall, portly now to the verge of stoutness, Sidney Quarles was still an imposing figure.  At twenty-three the big body had been athletic, the greyish hair which now surrounded a pink and polished tonsure had then been golden-brown and had covered the whole of his scalp with a waving luxuriance.  The large, high-coloured, fleshy face had been fresher, firmer, less moon-like.  The forehead, even before baldness had set in, had seemed intellectual in its smooth height.  Not did Sidney Quarles's conversation belie the circumstantial evidence offered by his brow.  He talked well, albeit perhaps with a little too much arrogance and self-satisfaction for every taste.  Moreover, he had at that time a reputation; he had just come down from the university in something that was almost a blaze of academic and debating-society glory.  On the virgin expanses of his future sanguine friends painted the brightest visions.  At the time when Rachel first knew him, these prophecies had a positively reasonable air.  And in any case, reasonably or unreasonably, she loved him.  They were married when she was only nineteen.

      From his father Sidney had inherited a handsome fortune.  The business (old Mr Quarles was in sugar) was a going concern.  The estate in Essex paid its way.  The town house was in Portman Square, the country house at Chamford was commodious and Georgian.  Sidney's ambitions were political.  After an apprenticeship in local government, he would go into parliament.  Hard work, speeches at once sound and brilliant would mark him out as the coming man.  He would be offered an assistant under-secretaryship, there would be rapid promotions.  He might expect (so at least it had seemed five-and-thirty years ago) to realize the most extravagant ambitions.

      But Sidney, as old Bidlake had said, was only a façade, an impressive appearance, a voice, a superficial cleverness and nothing more.  Behind the handsome front lived the genuine Sidney, feeble, lacking all tenacity of purpose in important matters, though obstinate where trifles were concerned, easily fired with enthusiasm and still more easily bored.  Even the cleverness turned out to be no more than the kind of cleverness which enables brilliant schoolboys to write Ovidian Latin verses or humorous parodies of Herodotus.  Brought to the test, this sixth-form ability proved to be as impotent in its purely intellectual as in its practical sphere.  For when, by a course of neglect tempered by feverish speculation and mismanagement, he had half ruined his father's business (Rachel made him sell out completely before it was too late), when his political prospects had been completely ruined by years of alternating indolence and undisciplined activity, he decided that his real vocation was to be a publicist.  In the first flush of this new conviction, he actually contrived to finish a book about the principles of government.  Shallow and vague, commonplace with an ordinariness made emphatic by the pretensions of an ornate style that coruscated with verbal epigrams, the book met with a deserved neglect, which Sidney Quarles attributed to the machinations of political enemies.  He trusted to posterity for his due.

      Ever since the publication of that first book, Mr Quarles had been writing, or at least had been supposed to be writing, another, much larger and more important, about democracy.  The largeness and the importance justified an almost indefinite delay in its completion.  He had already been at work on it for more than seven years and as yet, he would say to anyone who asked him about the progress of the book (shaking his head as he spoke with the expression of a man who bears an almost intolerable burden), as yet he had not even finished collecting the materials.

      'It's a labour of Hercules,' he would say with an air at once martyred and fatuously arrogant.  He had a way when he spoke to you of tilting his face upwards and shooting his words into the air, as though he were a howitzer, looking at you meanwhile, if he condescended to look at you at all, along his nose and from under his half-shut eyelids.  His voice was resonant and full of those baa-ings with which the very Oxonion are accustomed to enrich the English language.  'Really,' in Sidney's mouth was always 'ryahly,' 'mere' was 'myah.'  It was as though a flock of sheep had broken loose in his vocabulary.  'A labour of Hercules.'  The words were accompanied by a sigh.  'Ryahly fyahful.'

      If the questioner were sufficiently sympathetic, he would take him into his study and show him (or preferably her) the enormous apparatus of card indices and steel filing-cabinets which he had accumulated round his very professional-looking roll-top desk.  As time passed and the book showed no signs of getting itself written, Mr Quarles had collected more and more of these impressive objects.  They were the visible proofs of his labour, they symbolized the terrific difficulty of his task.  He possessed no less than three typewriters.  The portable Corona accompanied him wherever he went, in case he should at any time feel inspired when on his travels.  Occasionally, when he felt the need of being particularly impressive, he took the Hammond, a rather larger machine, on which the letters were carried, not on separate arms, but on a detachable band of metal clipped to a revolving drum, so that it was possible to change the type at will and write in Greek or Arabic, mathematical symbols or Russian, according to the needs of the moment; Mr Quarles had a large collection of these alternative types which, of course, he never used, but of which he felt very proud, as though each of them represented a separate talent or accomplishment of his own.  Finally there was the third and latest of the typewriters, a very large and very expensive office instrument, which was not only a typewriter, but also a calculating machine.  So useful, Mr Quarles would explain, for compiling statistics for his great book and for doing the accounts of the estate.  And he would point with special pride to the little electric motor attached to the machine; you made a connection with the wall plug and the motor did everything for you - everything, that is to say, except actually compose your book.  You had only to touch the keys, so (and Mr Quarles would give a demonstration); the electricity provided the force to bring the type into contact with the paper.  All muscular effort was eliminated. You could go on typing for eighteen hours at a stretch (like Balzac, Sir Isaac Newton) - you could go on, indeed, almost indefinitely without experiencing the slightest fatigue, at any rate in the fingers.  An American invention.  Very ingenious.

      Mr Quarles had bought his calculating typewriter at the moment when, for all practical purposes, he had ceased to have anything to do with the management of the estate.  For Rachel had left him the estate.  Not that he ran it any better than the business which she had persuaded him, only just in time, to abandon.  But the absence of profit did not matter, the loss, when there actually was a loss, was inconsiderable.  The estate, Rachel Quarles had hoped, would keep her husband healthily occupied.  For that it was worth paying something.  But the price that had to be paid in these post-War years of depression was very high; and as Sidney occupied himself less and less with the routine of management, the price rose alarmingly, while the object for which it was being paid - healthy occupation for Sidney - was not achieved.  Occasionally, it is true, Sidney would get an idea into his head and suddenly plunge into an orgy of what he called 'estate improvements'.  On one occasion after reading a book about American efficiency, he bought a large outfit of costly machinery, only to discover that the estate was not large enough to justify the expenditure; he could not give his machines enough to do.  Later, he built a jam factory; it had never paid.  Their lack of success made him rapidly lose interest in his 'improvements'.  Hard work and constant attention might conceivably have made them profitable in time; meanwhile, however, owing to Sidney's neglect, the improvement had resulted in a dead loss.  Decidedly, the price was too high, and it was being paid for nothing.  Mrs Quarles decided that it was time to get the estate out of Sidney's hands.  With her usual tact - for after more than thirty years of marriage she knew her husband only too well - she persuaded him that he would have more time for his great work if he left the tiresome business of estate management to others.  She and the bailiff were good enough for that.  There was no sense in wasting talents that might be better, more suitably employed, on such mechanical labour.  Sidney was easily persuaded.  The estate bored him; it had hurt his vanity by being so malevolently unsuccessful in spite of his improvements.  At the same time, he realized that to give up all connection with it would be an acknowledgement of failure and a tribute - yet another - to his wife's inherent superiority.  He agreed to devote less time to the details of management, but promised or threatened, in a god-like way, that he would continue to keep an eye on it, would supervise it distantly, but nonetheless effectively, in the intervals of his literary labours.  It was now that, to justify himself, to magnify his importance, he bought the calculating typewriter.  It symbolized the enormous complexity of the literary work to which he was now mainly to devote himself; and it proved at the same time that he had not completely abandoned all interest in practical affairs.  For the calculating machine was to deal not only with statistics (in what way Mr Quarles was wise enough never precisely to specify), but also with the accounts under which, it was implied, poor Rachel and the bailiff would infallibly succumb without his higher aid.

      Sidney did not, of course, acknowledge his wife's superiority.  But the obscure realization and resentment of it, the desire to prove that, in spite of everything, he was really just as good as she, or indeed much better, conditioned his whole life.  It was this resentment, this desire to assert his domestic superiority that had made him cling so long to his unsuccessful political career.  Left to himself, he would probably have abandoned political life at the first discovery of its difficulties and tediousness; his indolence was stronger than his ambition.  But a reluctance to admit failure and the personal inferiority which failure would have implied, kept him (for ever desperately sanguine of his prospects) from resigning his parliamentary seat.  With the exasperating spectacle of Rachel's quiet efficiency perpetually before his eyes, he could not admit himself defeated.  What Rachel did, she did well; people loved and admired her.  It was to rival and outdo her, in the eyes of the world and in his own, that he clung to politics, that he plunged into the erratic activities which had distinguished his parliamentary career.  Disdaining to be the mere slave of his party and desirous of personal distinction, he had championed with enthusiasm, only to desert again with disgust, a succession of Causes.  The abolition of capital punishment, antivivisection, prison reform, the amelioration of labour conditions in West Africa had called forth, each in its turn, his fieriest eloquence and a brief outburst of energy.  He had visions of himself as a conquering reformer bringing victory by his mere presence to whatever cause he chose to take up.  But the walls of Jericho never collapsed at the sound of his trumpet, and he was not the man to undertake laborious sieges.  Hangings, operations on dogs and frogs, solitary convicts and maltreated negroes - one after another, all lost their charm for him.  And Rachel continued to be efficient, continued to be loved and admired.

      Meanwhile, her direct encouragement had always supplemented that indirect stimulus to ambition which she had provided, all unintentionally, by the mere fact of being herself and Sidney's wife.  At first she genuinely believed in him; she encouraged her hero.  A few years sufficed to change faith in his ultimate success into a pious hope.  When the hope was gone she encouraged him for diplomatic reasons - because failure in politics cost less than failure in the City.  For Sidney's mismanagement of the business was threatening to be ruinous.  She dared not tell him so, dared not advise him to sell out; to have done so would have been to provoke him to cling more tenaciously than ever to the business.  By throwing doubts on his capacity she would only have spurred him on to new and more dangerous speculations.  To hostile criticism Sidney reacted with a violent and obstinate contrariness.  Made wise by experience Rachel Quarles averted the danger by redoubling her encouragement of his political ambitions.  She magnified the importance of his parliamentary activities.  What good, what noble work he was doing!  And what a pity that the care of the business should take up so much of the time and energies that might be better employed!  Sidney responded at once and with a secret and unrealized gratitude.  The routine of business bored him; he was becoming alarmed by his speculative failures.  He welcomed the excuse for divesting himself of his responsibilities, which Rachel had so diplomatically offered.  He sold out before it was too late and reinvested the money in securities which might be trusted to look after themselves.  His income was in this way reduced by about a third; but in any case it was now secure - that was what Rachel chiefly cared about.  Sidney went about hinting at the great financial sacrifices he had made in order that he might devote all his time to the poor convicts.  (Later it was the poor negroes; but the sacrifices remained the same.)

      When finally, tired of being a political nonentity and outraged by what he regarded as the injustice of his party chiefs, Sidney resigned his seat, Mrs Quarles made no objection.  There was no business now for her husband to ruin, and the estate in those times of agricultural prosperity that immediately followed the Armistice was still profitable.  Sidney explained that he was too good for practical politics; they degraded a man of worth, their dirt came off.  He had decided (for his consciousness of Rachel's superiority would not let him rest) to devote himself to something more important than 'myah' politics, something worthier of his powers.  To be the philosopher of politics was better than to be a politician.  He actually finished and published a first instalment of his political philosophy.  The prolonged effort of writing blunted his enthusiasm for philosophical authorship; the poor success of the book disgusted him completely.  But Rachel was still efficient and beloved.  In self-defence he announced his intention of producing the largest and most comprehensive work on democracy that had ever been written.  Rachel might be very active on committees, do good works, be loved by the villagers, have friends and correspondents galore; but, after all, what was that compared with writing the largest book on democracy?  The only trouble was that the book did not get written.  When Rachel showed herself too efficient, when people liked her too much, Mr Quarles bought another card-index, or a new and more ingenious kind of loose-leaf notebook, or a fountain-pen with a particularly large ink capacity - a fountain-pen, he explained, that could write six thousand words without requiring to be refilled.  The retort was perhaps inadequate.  But it seemed to Sidney Quarles good enough.

      Philip and Elinor spent a couple of days with Mrs Bidlake at Gattenden.  Then it was the turn of Philip's parents.  They arrived at Chamford to find that Mr Quarles had just bought a dictaphone. Sidney did not allow his son to remain for long in ignorance of his triumph.  The dictaphone was his greatest achievement since the calculating typewriter.

      'I've just made an acquisition,' he said in his rich voice, shooting the words up over Philip's head.  'Something that will interest you, as a writer.'  He led the way to his study.

      Philip followed him.  He had expected to be overwhelmed with questions about the East and the tropics.  Instead of which his father had only perfunctorily enquired if the voyage had been good, and had gone on, almost before Philip could answer, to speak about his own affairs.  For the first moment Philip had been surprised and even a little nettled.  But the moon, he reflected, seems larger than Sirius, because it is nearer.  The voyage, his voyage, was to him a moon, to his father the smallest of little stars.

      'Here,' said Mr Quarles and raised the cover.  The dictaphone was revealed.  'Wonderful invention!'  He spoke with profound self-satisfaction.  It was the sudden rising, in all its refulgence, of his moon.  He explained the workings of the machine.  Then, tilting up his face, 'It's so useful,' he said, 'when an idyah occurs to you.  You put it into wahds at once.  Talk to yourself; the machine remembahs.  I have it brought up to my bedroom every night.  Such valuable idyahs come to one when one's in bed, don't you find?  Without a dictaphone they would get lost.'

      'And what do you do when you've got to the end of one of these phonograph records?' Philip enquired.

      'Send it to my secretarah to be typed.'

      Philip raised his eyebrows.  'You've got a secretary now?'

      Mr Quarles nodded importantly.  'Only a half-time one, so far,' he said, addressing the cornice of the opposite wall.  'You've no idyah what a lot I have to do. What with the book, and the estate, and letters, and accounts and ... and ... things,' he concluded rather lamely.  He sighed, he shook the martyr's head.  'You're lucky, my dyah boy,' he went on.  'You have no distractions.  You can give your whole time to writing.  I wish I could give all mine.  But I have the estate and all the rest.  Trivial - but the business must be done.'  He sighed again.  'I envy you your freedom.'

      Philip laughed.  'I almost envy myself sometimes.  But the dictaphone will be a great help.'

      'Oh, it will,' said Mr Quarles.  'Undoubtedlah.'

      'How's the book going?'

      Slowly,' his father replied, 'but surely.  I think I have most of my materials now.'

      'Well, that's something.'

      'You novelists,' said Mr Quarles patronizingly, 'you're fortunate.  You can just sit down and write.  No preliminarah labour necessarah.  Nothing like this.'  He pointed to the filing cabinets and the card-index boxes.  They were the proofs of his superiority, as well as of the enormous difficulties against which he had to struggle.  Philip's books might be successful.  But, after all, what was a novel?  An hour's entertainment, that was all; to be picked up and thrown aside again, carelessly.  Whereas the largest book on democracy ... And anyone could write a novel.  It was just a question of living and then proceeding to record the fact.  To compose the largest book on democracy one had to take notes, collect materials from innumerable sources, buy filing cabinets and typewriters, portable, polyglottic, calculating; one needed a card-index and loose-leaf notebooks and a fountain-pen that could write six thousand words without having to be refilled; one required a dictaphone and a half-time secretary who would shortly have to become a whole-time one.  'Nothing like this,' he insisted.

      'Oh, no,' said Philip, who had been wandering round the room examining the literary apparatus.  'Nothing like this.'  He picked up some newspaper clippings that were lying under a paperweight on the lid of the unopened Corona.  'Puzzles?' he asked, holding up the irregularly chequered diagrams.  'I didn't know you'd become a crossword fiend.'

      Mr Quarles took the clippings from his son and put them away in a drawer.  He was annoyed that Philip should have seen them.  The crosswords spoiled the effect of the dictaphone.  'Childish things,' he said with a little laugh.  'But they're a distraction when the mind is tired.  I like to amuse myself with them occasionalah.'  In reality Mr Quarles spent almost the whole of his mornings on crosswords.  They exactly suited his type of intelligence.  He was one of the most expert puzzle-solvers of his epoch.

      In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Mrs Quarles was talking with her daughter-in-law.  She was a small and active woman, grey-haired but preserving unblurred and hardly distorted the pure outlines of regular and well-moulded features.  The expression of the face was at once vivacious and sensitive.  It was a delicate energy, a strong but quiveringly responsive life, that shone in incessant variations of brilliance and shade of colour from her expressive grey-blue eyes.  Her lips responded hardly less closely and constantly to her thoughts and feelings than did her eyes, and were grave or firm, smiled or were melancholy through an almost infinitesimally chromatic scale of emotional expression.

      'And little Phil?' she said, enquiring after her grandchild.

      'Radiant.'

      'Darling little man!'  The warmth of Mrs Quarles's affection enriched her voice and was visible as a light in her eyes.  'You must have felt miserable, leaving him for such a long time.'

      Elinor gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders.  'Well, I knew that Miss Fulkes and mother between them would look after him much better than I could do.'  She laughed and shook her head.  'I don't believe nature ever meant me to have children.  Either I'm impatient with them, or else I spoil them.  Little Phil's a pet, of course; but I know that a family would have driven me crazy.'

      Mrs Quarles's expression changed.  'But wasn't it wonderful to see him again after all those months?'  The tone of the question was almost anxious.  She hoped that Elinor would answer it with the enthusiastic affirmative which would have been natural in the circumstances to herself.  But at the same time she was haunted by a fear lest the strange girl might answer (with a frankness which was so admirably a quality in her, but which was also disquieting, in its revelation of unfamiliar and to Rachel incomprehensible states of soul) that she hadn't been in the least pleased to see her child again.  Elinor's first words came to her as a relief.

      'Yes, it was wonderful,' she said, but robbed the phrase of its full effect by adding, 'I didn't imagine I could be so glad to see him again.  But it was really a wild excitement.'

      There was a silence.  'A queer girl,' Mrs Quarles was thinking; and her face reflected something of that bewilderment which she always felt in Elinor's presence.  She did her best to love her daughter-in-law; and up to a point she succeeded.  Elinor had many excellent qualities.  But something seemed to be lacking in her, something without which no human being could be entirely sympathetic to Rachel Quarles.  It was as though she had been born without certain natural instincts.  Not to have expected to feel happy when she saw her baby again - that was strange enough.  But what Rachel found almost stranger was Elinor's calm and casual admission of the fact.  She herself would have blushed to make such an admission, even if it had been the truth.  It would have seemed to her something shameful - a kind of blasphemy, a denial of what was holy.  To Rachel the reverence for holy things came naturally.  It was Elinor's lack of this reverence, her inability even to realize that holy things were holy, which made it impossible for Mrs Quarles to love her daughter-in-law as much as she would have liked.

      On her side Elinor admired, respected and genuinely liked her husband's mother.  For her, the chronic difficulty was to establish effectual contact with a person whose ruling ideas and motives seemed to her so oddly incomprehensible and even so absurd.  Mrs Quarles was unobtrusively but ardently religious and lived to the best of her ability in accordance with her beliefs.  Elinor admired, but felt that it was all rather absurd and superfluous.  Her education had been orthodox.  But she never remembered a time, even in her childhood, when she seriously believed what people told her about the other world and its inhabitants.  The other world bored her; she was interested only in this.  Confirmation had evoked in her no more enthusiasm than a visit to the theatre, indeed considerably less.  Her adolescence had passed without the trace of a religious crisis.

      'It all seems to me just nonsense,' she would say when the matter was discussed in her presence.  And there was no affectation in her words, they were not uttered provocatively.  She simply stated a fact of her personal history.  Religion, and along with religion, all transcendental mentality, all metaphysical speculation seemed to her nonsensical in precisely the same way as the smell of Gorgonzola seemed to her disgusting.  There was no getting behind the immediate experience.  Often, on occasions like this, she wished there were.  She would have liked to cross the abyss which separated her from Mrs Quarles.  As it was, she felt a certain uneasiness when she was with her mother-in-law; she hesitated in her presence to express her feelings or to say what she thought.  For she had found, only too often, that the frank utterance of what seemed to her perfectly natural sentiments and reasonable opinions, was apt to distress her mother-in-law, to strike her as strange and shocking.  It had happened again now, as she could see from the expression which showed itself for an instant on Mrs Quarles's mobile and sensitive face.  What had it been this time?  Conscious of no offence, Elinor could only wonder.  In future, she decided, she would volunteer nothing of her own; she would just agree with what was said.

      As it happened, however, the next topic of conversation to be broached was one in which Elinor was too deeply interested to be able to keep her new-made resolution.  Moreover it was one on which, as she knew by experience, she could speak freely without risk of unintentional offence.  For where Philip was concerned, Elinor's  feelings and opinions seemed to Mrs Quarles entirely appropriate.

      'And big Philip?' she now asked.

      'You see how well he looks,' Elinor answered for his health, though she knew that the question had not concerned his bodily well-being.  It was with a certain dread that she looked forward to the conversation that impended.  At the same time, however, she was glad to have an opportunity of discussing that which so constantly and distressingly occupied her thoughts.

      'Yes, yes, I can see that,' said Mrs Quarles.  'But what I really meant was: how is he in himself?  How is he with you?'

      There was a silence.  Elinor frowned slightly and looked at the floor.  'Remote,' she said at last.

      Mrs Quarles sighed.  'He was always that,' she said.  'Always remote.'

      He too, it seemed to her, was lacking in something - in the desire and the capacity to give himself, to go out and meet his fellows, even those who loved him, even those he loved.  Geoffrey had been so different.  At the memory of her dead son Mrs Quarles felt her whole being invaded by a poignant sadness.  If anyone had suggested that she had loved him more than she loved Philip, she would have protested.  Her own feelings, she felt sure, had been initially the same.  But Geoffrey had permitted himself to be loved more fully, more intimately than his brother.  If only Philip had allowed her to love him more!  But there had always been barriers between them, barriers of his erecting.  Geoffrey had come out to meet her, had given that he might receive.  But Philip had always been reluctant and parsimonious.  He had always shut doors when she approached, always locked up his mind lest she should catch a glimpse of his secrets.  She had never known what he really felt and thought.  'Even as a little boy,' she said aloud.

      'And now he has his work,' said Elinor after a pause.  'Which makes it worse.  It's like a castle on the top of a mountain, his work.  He shuts himself up in it and he's impregnable.'

      Mrs Quarles smiled sadly.  'Impregnable.'  It was the right word.  Even as a little boy he had been impregnable.  'Perhaps in the end he'll surrender of his own accord.'

      'To me?' said Elinor.  'Or to someone else?  It wouldn't be much satisfaction if it was to somebody else, would it?'  Though when I'm feeling unselfish,' she added, 'I wish he'd surrender to anyone - anyone, for his own good.'

      Elinor's words set Mrs Quarles thinking of her husband - not resentfully, though he had done wrong, though he had hurt her, but pityingly, rather, and solicitously.  For she could never feel that it was entirely his fault.  It was his misfortune.

      Elinor sighed.  'I can't really expect to receive his surrender,' she said.  'When one had become a habit, one can't very well suddenly turn into an overwhelming revelation.'

      Mrs Quarles shook her head.  In recent years Sidney's overwhelming revelations had come from such unexpectedly humble sources.  The little kitchen-maid, the gamekeeper's daughter.  How could he, she wondered for the thousandth time, how could he?  It was incomprehensible.

      'If at least,' she said almost in a whisper, 'you had God as a companion.'  God had always been her comfort, God and the doing of God's will.  She could never understand how people could get through life without Him.  'If only you could find God.'

      Elinor's smile was sarcastic.  Remarks of this sort annoyed her by being so ridiculously beside the point.  'It might be simpler,' she began, but checked herself after the first words.  She had meant to say that it might be simpler perhaps to find a man.  But she remembered her resolution and was silent.

      'What were you saying?'

      Elinor shook her head.  'Nothing.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Fortunately for Mr Quarles the British Museum had no Essex branch.  It was only in London that he could make researches and collect the documents necessary for his book.  The house in Portman Square was let (Mr Quarles blamed the income tax, but his own speculations in sugar were mainly responsible); and it was in a modest little flat in Bloomsbury ('convenientlah nyah the Museum') that he now camped whenever the claims of scholarship brought him to town.

      During the last few weeks the claims had been more than usually peremptory.  His visits to London had been frequent and prolonged.  After the second of these visits Mrs Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman.  And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the woman had been found.  She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians, he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner-table - not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently.  Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements.  Behind the ink-cloud of the Ancient Indians he hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved.  Poor Sidney!  He thought himself so Machiavellian.  But his ink was transparent, his cunning like a child's.

      'Couldn't you get the books sent down from the London Library?' Mrs Quarles rather pointedly asked.

      Sidney shook his head.  'They're the sort of books,' he said importantly, 'that are only in the Museum.'

      Rachel sighed and could only hope that the woman could be trusted to look after herself well enough to keep out of serious trouble and not so well as to want to make mischief.

      'I think I shall run up to town with you tomorrow,' he announced on the morning before Philip and Elinor took their leave.

      'Again?' asked Mrs Quarles.

      'There's a point about those wretched Indians,' he explained, 'that I ryahly must clyahr up. I think I may find it in Pramathanatha Banerjea's book ... Or it may be dealt with my Radakhumud Mookerji.'  He rolled out the names impressively, professionally.  'It's about local government in Maurya times.  So democratic, you know, in spite of the central despotism.  For example ...'

      Through the ink-cloud Mrs Quarles caught glimpses of a female figure.

      Breakfast over, Sidney retired to his study and addressed himself to the morning's crossword.  A kind of onion, six letters.  Anticipations of the morrow distracted him; he could not fix his attention.  Her breasts, he was thinking, her smooth white back ... What about 'chive'?  No good; only five letters.  Walking over to the bookshelf he took out his Bible; its thin pages rustled under his fingers. 'Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.  Thy two breasts are like young roes that are twins.'  Solomon spoke for him, with what rich thunders!  'The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.'  He read the words out loud.  Gladys had a perfect figure.  'Like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor.'  These orientals knew what passion was.  Miscalling libidinousness 'passion', Mr Quarles regarded himself as a very passionate man.  'Thy belly is like an heap of wheat.'  Passion is respectable, is actually respected by the law in some countries.  For the poets it is even sacred.  He agreed with the poets.  But 'like young roes' was an odd, inadequate simile.  Gladys was plump without being fat, firmly resilient.  Roes, on the contrary ... As a man of great passions, Sidney could regard himself as positively a noble and heroic figure.  'A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.  Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard' spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh ...'  But, of course, the word was 'garlic'!  Six letters.  A kind of onion.  'Myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.'

      Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late.  'Scandalous,' Mr Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch, 'disgraceful.'

      'You're in a great hurry to be at your Indians,' said Philip, smiling from his corner.

      His father frowned and talked about something else.  At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second.  Sidney reached his flat only just in time.  He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang.  He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened.  It was Gladys.  He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown back, his waistcoat projecting, but smiling down at her (Gladys called herself 'petite') and graciously twinkling through half-shut eyelids.  It was an impudent, vulgar, snubby little face that smiled back at him.  But it was not her face that had brought Mr Quarles to London, it was not the individual Gladys Helmsley; it was the merely generic aspect of the woman, her 'figah', as Sidney would have euphemistically put it.

      'You're very punctual, my dyah,' he said, holding out his hand.

      Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting.  After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.

      'Am I!' she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with which to express the multiplicity of their emotions, she laughed as though she had been amused by something, when in fact she was only surprised and disquieted.  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, provocative-petulantly, why he didn't kiss her, whether he was tired of her - already.  But she decided to wait.

      'Almost too punctual,' Sidney went on.  'My train was scandalouslah late.  Scandalouslah!'  He radiated indignation.

      'Fancy!' said Gladys.  The refinements that hung around her speech, like a too genteel disguise, dropped away from time to time, leaving individual words and phrases nakedly cockney.

      'Ryahly disgraceful!' said Sidney.  'Trains have no business to be late.  I shall write to the Traffic Superintendent at Liverpool Street.  I'm not sure,' he added, still more importantly, 'that I shan't write to The Times as well.'

      Gladys was impressed.  Mr Quarles had intended that she should be.  Apart from all merely sensual satisfactions, the greatest charm of his sexual holidays resided in the fact that they were shared with impressible companions.  Sidney liked them, not only young, but of a lower class, and poor.  To feel himself unequivocally superior and genuinely admired was for Sidney a luxury almost as great as an embracement.  His escapades were holidays not only from chastity, but also from that sense of inferiority which, at home, in parliament, at the office, had always inveterately haunted him.  In relation to young women of the lower classes he was a great man, as well as a 'passionate' one.

      Gladys, on her side, was impressed by his thunderings.  But she was also amused.  Impressed, because she belonged to the world of poor and patient wage-slaves, who accept the unpleasantnesses of social life as so many natural phenomena, uncontrollable by human agency and recalcitrant to human desires.  But Sidney was one of the Olympian rich; the rich refuse to accept unpleasantness; they write letters to The Times about it, they pull wires, use influence, lodge formal complaints with an always friendly and obsequious police.  To Gladys it was wonderful - wonderful, but also very funny.  There was such a lot of loud haw-haw and lahdy-da about the whole performance.  It was so like the parody of itself on the music-hall stage.  She admired, she realized very accurately, the economic and social causes of Sidney's behaviour (it was that realization which had made her so promptly his mistress).  But she also laughed.  She lacked reverence.

      Mr Quarles opened the sitting-room door to let her pass.

      'Ta,' said Gladys and walked in.

      He followed.  On the nape of her neck, her dark cropped hair ended in a little triangle that pointed downwards along the spine.  She was wearing a thin green dress.  Through the fine stuff he could see, just below her shoulders, the line where the underclothes gave place to bare skin.  A belt of black shiny leather was fastened in a slant very low on her hips.  At every stride it rose and fell on her left hip with a rhythmical regularity.  Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh.  Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modern fashions a treat and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover.  His eyes followed the curves of the lustrous sunburn.  But what fascinated him most today was the black leather belt flicking up and down over the left haunch, with the regularity of a piece of machinery, every time she moved her leg.  In that rise and fall the whole unindividualized species, the entire sex semaphored their appeal.

      Gladys halted and turned towards him with a smile, expectantly coquettish.  But Mr Quarles made no responding gesture.

      'I've got the Corona hyah,' he said.  'Perhaps we had better begin at once.'

      For the second time Gladys was surprised, thought of making a comment, and again said nothing, but sat down in silence before the typewriter.

      Mr Quarles put on his tortoiseshell pince-nez and opened his despatch case.  He had found a mistress, but he did not see why that should entail the loss of a typist, for whose services, after all, he paid.

      'Perhaps,' he said, looking up at her over the top of his pince-nez, 'we'd better begin with those letters to the Traffic Superintendent and The Times.'  Gladys adjusted the paper, typed the date.  Mr Quarles cleared his throat and dictated.  There were some good phrases, he flattered himself, in the letters.  'Inexcusable slackness entailing the waste of time otherwise valuable than that of drowsy railway bureaucrats' - that, for example, was excellent.  And so (for the benefit of The Times) was 'the pampered social parasites of a protected industry.'

      'That'll teach the dogs,' he said with satisfaction, as he read the letters through.  'That'll make them squirm.'  He looked to Gladys for applause, and was not entirely satisfied with the smile on that impertinent face.  'Pity old Lord Hagworm's not alive,' he added, calling up strong allies.  'I'd have written to him.  He was a director of the company.'  But the last of the Hagworms had died in 1912.

      Mr Quarles dictated a dozen more letters, the answers to a correspondence which he had allowed to accumulate for several days before coming to London, so that the total might seem more important and also that he might get his full money's worth out of Gladys's secretaryship.

      'Thank goodness,' he said, when the last of the letters was answered.  'You've no idyah,' he went on (and the great thinker had come to reinforce the landed gentleman), 'you've no idyah how exasperating these trivial little things can be, when you've got something more syahrious and important to think about.'

      'I suppose they must be,' said Gladys, thinking how funny he was.

      'Take down,' commanded Mr Quarles, to whom a pensée had suddenly occurred.  He leaned back in his chair and, closing his eyes, pursued the elusive phrase.

      Gladys waited, her fingers poised above the keyboard.  She looked at the watch on her wrist.  Ten past twelve.  It would be lunch-time soon.  A new watch - that would be the first thing she'd make him give her.  The one she had was such a cheap, nasty-looking watch; and it kept such bad time.

      'Note for the volume of Reflections,' said Mr Quarles, without opening his eyes.  The keys briefly rattled.  'The ivory pinnacles of thought' - he repeated the words inwardly.  They made a satisfying reverberation along the corridors of his mind.  The phrase was caught.  He sat up briskly and opened his eyes - to become aware that the lisle-thread top of one of Gladys's sunburnt stockings was visible, from where he was sitting, to a considerable distance above the knee.

      'All my life,' he dictated, his eyes fixed on the lisle thread, 'I have suffered from the irrelevant - no, say "importunate" - interruptions of the wahld's trivialitah, full stop.  Some thinkers comma I know comma are able to ignore these interruptions comma to give them a fleeting but sufficient attention and return with a serene mind to higher things full stop.'

      There was silence.  Above the lisle thread, Mr Quarles was thinking, was the skin - soft, curving tightly over the firm curved flesh.  To caress and, caressing, to feel the fingertips silkily caressed; to squeeze a handful of elastic flesh.  Even to bite.  Like a round goblet, like a heap of wheat.

      Suddenly conscious of the direction of his glances, Gladys pulled down her skirt.

      'Where was I?' asked Mr Quarles.

      'Higher things with a serene mind,' Gladys answered, reading from the page in front of her.

      'H'm.'  He rubbed his nose.  'For me comma alas comma this serenitah has always been impossible semi-colon; my nahvous sensibilitah is too great full stop.  Dragged down from the ivorah pinnacles of thought' (he rolled out the phrase with relish) 'into the common dust comma, I am exasperated comma, I lose my peace of mind and am unable to climb again into my tower.'

      He rose and began to walk restlessly about the room.

      'That's always been my trouble,' he said.  'Too much sensibilitah.  A syahrious thinker ought to have no temperament, no nerves.  He has no business to be passionate.'

      The skin, he was thinking, the firm elastic flesh.  He halted behind her chair.  The little triangle of cropped hair pointed down along her spine.  He put his hands on her shoulders and bent over her.

      Gladys looked up, smiling impertinently, with triumph.  'Well?' she asked.

      Mr Quarles bent lower and kissed her neck.  She giggled.

      'How you tickle!'

      His hands explored her, sliding along her arms, pressing her body - the body of the species, of the entire sex.  The individual Gladys continued to giggle.

      'Naughty!' she said, and made a pretence of pushing his hands away.  'Naughty!'