CHAPTER XXI

 

'A month ago,' said Elinor, as their taxi drove out of Liverpool Street Station, 'we were in Udaipur.'

      'It certainly seems improbable,' said Philip, agreeing with the implications of her remark.

      'These ten months of travel have been like an hour in a cinema.  There's the Bank.  I begin to doubt whether I've ever been away.'  She sighed.  'It's rather a dreadful feeling.'

      'Is it?' said Philip.  'I suppose I'm used to it.  I never do feel that anything has really happened before this morning.'  He craned his neck out of the window.  'Why people should bother about the Taj Mahal when there's St Paul to look at, I can't imagine.  What a marvel!'

      'That wonderful black and white of the stone.'

      'As though it were an engraving.  Doubly a work of art.  Not merely architecture, but an etching of architecture.'  He leaned back.  'I often doubt whether I ever had a childhood,' he went on, returning to the previous conversation.

      'That's because you never think of it.  Lots of my childhood is more real to me than Ludgate Hill here.  But then I constantly think of it.'

      'That's true,' said Philip.  'I don't often try to remember.  Hardly ever, in fact.  I always seem to have too much to do and think about.'

      'You have no natural piety,' said Elinor.  'I wish you had.'

      They drove along the Strand.  The two little churches protested against Australia House, in vain.  In the courtyard of King's College a group of young men and women sat in the sun waiting for the Professor of Pastoral Theology.  At the pit door of the Gaiety there was already a queue; the placards advertised the four hundredth performance of 'The Girl from Biarritz.'  Next door to the Savoy, Philip noticed, you could still buy a pair of boots for twelve-and-six.  In Trafalgar Square the fountains were playing, Sir Edwin Landseer's lions mildly glared, the lover of Lady Hamilton stood perched among the clouds, like St Simeon the Stylite.  And behind the grim colonnade of the National Gallery Uccello's horsemen timelessly fought and Rubens raped his Sabines, Venus looked into her mirror and in the midst of Piero's choiring angels Jesus was born into a magically lovely world.

      The cab turned down Whitehall.

      'I like to think of all the bureaucrats.'

      'I don't,' said Elinor.

      'Scribbling away,' he went on, 'scribbling from morning till night in order that we may live in freedom and comfort.  Scribble, scribble - the result is the British Empire.  What a comfort,' he added, 'to live in a world where one can delegate everything tiresome, from governing to making sausages, to somebody else.'

      At the gate of the Horse Guards the mounted sentries looked as though they were stuffed.  Near the Cenotaph a middle-aged lady was standing with raised eyes, murmuring a prayer over the Kodak with which she proposed to take a snapshot of the souls of the nine hundred thousand dead.  A Sikh with a black beard and a pale mauve turban emerged from Grindley's as they passed.  The time, according to Big Ben, was twenty-seven minutes past eleven.  In the library of the House of Lords was there a dozing marquess?  A charabanc disgorged Americans at the door of Westminster Abbey.  Looking back through the little porthole in the hood they were able to see that the hospital was still urgently in need of funds.

      John Bidlake's house was in Grosvenor Road, overlooking the river.

      'Pimlico,' said Philip meditatively, as they approached the house.  He laughed.  'Do you remember that absurd song your father used always to quote?'

      ' "To Pimlico Then let us go," ' Elinor chanted.

      ' "One verse omitted here."  You mustn't forget that.'  They both laughed, remembering John Bidlake's comments.

      ' "One verse omitted here."  It's omitted in all the anthologies.  I've never been able to discover what happened when they'd got to Pimlico.  It's kept me wondering for years, feverishly.  Nothing like Bowderlerism for heating the imagination.'

      'Pimlico,' Philip repeated.  Old Bidlake, he was thinking, had made of Pimlico a sort of Rabelaisian Olympus.  He liked the phrase.  But 'Gargantuan' would be better for public use than 'Rabelaisian'.  For those who had never read him, Rebelais connoted nothing but smut.  Gargantuan Olympus, then.  They had at least heard rumours that Gargantua was large.

      But the John Bidlake they found sitting by the stove in his studio was not at all Olympian, seemed less instead of more than life size.  He suffered himself to be kissed by his daughter, limply shook hands with Philip.

      'Good to see you again,' he said.  But there was no resonance in his voice; the undertone of jovial thunders and jovial laughter was absent.  He spoke without gusto.  His eyes were without lustre, and bloodshot.  He looked thin and grey.

      'How are you, father?' Elinor was surprised and distressed.  She had never seen her father like this before.

      'Not well,' he answered, shaking his head, 'not well.  Something wrong with my insides.'  The old lion suddenly and recognizably roared.  'Making us go through life with a barrow-full of tripes!  I've always resented God's practical jokes.'  The roar became plaintive.  'I don't know what's happening to mine now.  Something very unpleasant.'  It degenerated almost into a whine.  'I feel wretched.'  Lengthily, the old man described his symptoms.

      'Have you see a doctor?' Elinor asked, when he had finished.

      He shook his head.  'Don't believe in them.  They never do one any good.'  The truth was that he had a superstitious terror of doctors.  Birds of evil omen - he hated to see them in the house.

      'But you really ought.'  She tried to persuade him.

      'All right,' he at last consented grumblingly.  'Let the quacks come.'  But secretly he was rather relieved.  He had been wanting to see the doctor for some time now; but his superstition had been stronger hitherto than his desire.  The ill-omened medicine man was now to come, but not on his invitation; on Elinor's.  The responsibility was not his; not on him, therefore, would fall the bad luck.  Old Bidlake's private religion was obscurely complicated.

      They began to talk of other things.  Now that he knew he could consult a doctor in safety, John Bidlake felt better and more cheerful.

      'I'm worried about him,' said Elinor, as they drove away.

      Philip nodded.  'Being seventy-three's no joke.  He's begun to look his age.'

      What a head! he was thinking.  He wished he could paint.  Literature couldn't render it.  One could describe it, of course, down to the last wrinkle.  But where would one be then?  Nowhere.  Descriptions are slow.  A face is instantaneously perceived.  A word, a single phrase - that was what one needed.  'The glory that was Greece, grown old.'  That, for example, would give you something of the man.  Only of course it wouldn't do.  Quotations have some facetiously pedantic about them.  'A statue in parchment' would be better.  'The parchment statue of what had once been Achilles was sitting, crumpled, near the stove.'  That was getting nearer the mark.  No long-winded description.  But for anyone who had ever seen a cast of the Discobolus, handled a velum-bound book, heard of Achilles, John Bidlake was in that sentence visible.  And for those who had never seen a Greek statue or read about Achilles in a book with a crinkly sheepskin cover?  Well, presumably they could go to the devil.

      'All the same,' he thought, 'it's too literary.  Too much culture.'

      Elinor broke the silence.  'I wonder how I shall find Everard, now that he's become such a great man.'  With her mind's eye she saw the keen face, the huge but agile body.  Swiftness and violence.  And he was in love with her.  Did she like the man?  Or did she detest him?

      'I wonder if he's started pinching people's ears, like Napoleon?' Philip laughed.  'Anyhow, it's only a matter of time.'

      'All the same,' said Elinor, 'I like him.'  Philip's mockery had answered her question for her.

      'So do I.  But mayn't I laugh at what I like?'

      'You certainly laugh at me.  Is that because you like me?'

      He took her hand and kissed it.  'I adore you, and I never laugh at you.  I take you perfectly seriously.'

      Elinor looked at him, unsmiling.  'You make me desperate sometimes.  What would you do, if I went off with another man?  Would you care two pins?'

      'I should be perfectly wretched.'

      'Would you?'  She looked at him.  Philip was smiling; he was a thousand miles away.  'I've a good mind to make the experiment,' she added, frowning.  'But would you be wretched?  I'd like to be certain before I began.'

      'And who'd be your fellow experimenter?'

      'Ah, that's the trouble.  Most other men are so impossible.'

      'What a compliment!'

      'But you're impossible too, Phil.  The most impossible of them all, really.  And the worst of it is I love you, in spite of it.  And you know it.  Yes, you exploit it too.'  The cab drew up at the curb.  She reached for her umbrella.  'But you be careful,' she went on, as she rose to her feet.  'I'm not indefinitely exploitable.  I won't go on giving something for nothing for ever.  One of these days I shall start looking for somebody else.'  She stepped out on to the pavement.

      'Why not try Everard,' he chaffed, looking out at her through the window of the cab.

      'Perhaps I shall,' she answered.  'I know Everard would ask nothing better.'

      Philip laughed and blew her a kiss.  'Tell the man to drive to the Club,' he said.

      Everard kept her waiting nearly ten minutes.  When she had finished re-powdering her face, Elinor wandered inquisitively about the room.  The flowers were abominably arranged.  And the cabinet full of old swords and daggers and inlaid pistols was hideous, like a thing in a museum; a monstrosity, but at the same time rather touchingly absurd.  Everard had such a schoolboyish ambition to ride about on a horse and chop people's head off; the cabinet gave him away.  So did that glass-topped table with the trayful of coins and medals under the crystal lid.  How proudly he had shown her his treasures!  There was the Macedonian tetradrachm, with the head of Alexander the Great in the guise of Hercules; the sestertius of 44 B.C. with the formidable profile of Caesar, and next to it Edward III's rose noble stamped with the ship that symbolized the beginning of England's power at sea.  And there, on Pisanello's medal, was Sigismondo Malatesta, most beautiful of ruffians; and there was Queen Elizabeth [I] in her ruff and Napoleon with laurels in his hair, and the Duke of Wellington.  She smiled at the affectionately; they were old friends.  The satisfactory thing about Everard, she reflected, was that you always knew where you were with him.  He was always so definitely himself; he lived up to character.  She opened the piano and played a couple of chords; out of tune, as usual.  On the little table near the fireplace was a volume of Everard's latest Speeches and Addresses.  She picked it up, she turned over the pages.  'The policy of the British Freemen,' she read, 'may be summarized as Socialism without Political Democracy, combined with Nationalism without insularity.'  That sounded excellent.  But if he had written 'political democracy without socialism combined with insularity without nationalism' she would probably have admired just as sincerely.  These abstractions! she shook her head and sighed.  'I must be a fool,' she thought.  But really they meant nothing to her.  They were quite empty.  Words, nothing more.  She turned a page.  'The party system works well enough in cases where the parties are merely two groups of rival oligarchs, belonging to the same class and having fundamentally the same interests and ideals, competing with one another for power.  But when parties become identified with classes and develop strict party principles, the system becomes an insanity.  Because I sit on one side of the house and you sit on the other, I am compelled to believe in individualism to the exclusion of all state interference, you are compelled to believe in state interference to the exclusion of all individualism; I am compelled to believe in nationalism (which is an imbecility), and you are compelled to believe in internationalism, even political internationalism (which is no less of an imbecility); I am compelled to believe in the dictatorship of the rich (to the exclusion of the intelligent), you are compelled to believe in the dictatorship of the poor (also to the exclusion of the intelligent).  All this for the simple and politically irrelevant reason that I am on the Right and you are on the Left.  In our parliaments the claims of topography are stronger than those of sense.  Such are the blessings of the modern party system.  It is the aim of the British Freemen to abolish that system, along with the corrupt and inefficient parliamentarism which is its corollary.'  That sounded all right, she thought; but she wondered, nevertheless, why people should bother about this sort of thing.  Instead of just living.  But apparently, if one were a man, one found just living dull.  She re-opened the book in the middle.  'Every English liberty has been paid for by a new slavery.  The destruction of feudalism strengthened the Crown.  At the Reformation, we disposed of papal infallibility, but we saddled ourselves with the divine right of kings.  Cromwell smashed the divine right of kings, but imposed the tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes.  The tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes is rapidly being destroyed, in order that we may have the dictatorship of the proletariat.  A new infallibility, not of the Pope, but of the majority, has been propounded - an infallibility which we are compelled by law to believe in.  The British Freemen are pledged to a new reformation and a new political revolution.  We shall dispose of the dictatorship of the proletariat as our fathers disposed of the divine right of kings.  We shall deny majority infallibility as they denied papal infallibility.  The British Freemen stand for ...' Elinor had some difficulty in turning the page.  Stand for what? she wondered.  For the dictatorship of Everard and the infallibility of Webley?  She blew at the recalcitrant pages; they fluttered apart. '... for justice and liberty.  Their policy is that the best men shall rule, whatever their origin.  Careers, in a word, must be fully open to talents.  That is justice.  They demand that every problem shall be dealt with on its own merits, intelligently, without reference to traditional party prejudices or the worthless opinion of stupid majorities.  That is liberty.  Those who imagine that liberty is synonymous with universal suffrage ...' A door banged; a loud voice resounded in the hall.  There was a rush of feet on the stairs; the house shook.  The door of the drawing-room burst open, as though a bomb had exploded on the outside.  Everard Webley came in on a burst of loud apology and welcome.

      'How can I excuse myself?' he cried, as he took her hands.  'But if you knew what a whirl I live in!  How marvellous it is to see you again!  Not changed at all.  As lovely as ever.'  He looked intently into her face.  The same serene pale eyes, the same full and melancholy lips.  'And looking so wonderfully well!'

      She smiled back at him.  His eyes were a very dark brown; from a little distance they seemed all pupil.  Fine eyes, but rather disquieting, she found, in their intent, bright, watchful fixity.  She looked into them a moment, then turned away.  'You too,' she said.  'Just the same.  But then I don't know why we should be different.'  She glanced back into his face and found him still intently looking at her.  'Ten months and travelling in the tropics don't turn one into somebody else.'

      Everard laughed.  'Thank heaven for that!' he said.  'Let's come down to lunch.'

      'And Philip?' he asked, when the fish had been served.  'Is he also the same as ever.'

      'A little more so, if possible.'

      Everard nodded.  'A little more so.  Quite.  One would expect it.  Seeing blackamoors walking about without trousers must have made him still more sceptical about the eternal verities than he was.'

      Elinor smiled, but at the same time was a little offended by his mockery.  'And what's been the effect on you of seeing so many Englishmen walking about in pea-green uniforms?' she retorted.

      Everard laughed.  'Strengthened my believe in the eternal verities, of course.'

      'Of which you're one?'

      He nodded.  'Of which, naturally, I'm one.'  They looked at one another, smiling.  It was Elinor again who first averted her eyes.

      'Thanks for telling me.'  She kept up the note of irony.  'I mightn't have guessed by myself.'  There was a little silence.

      'Don't imagine,' he said at last in a tone that was no more bantering, but serious, 'that you can make me lose my temper by telling me that I've got a swelled head.'  He spoke softly; but you were conscious of huge reserves of power.  'Other people might succeed perhaps.  But then one doesn't like to be bothered by the lower animals.  One squashes them.  But with fellow humans one discusses things rationally.'

      'I'm most relieved to hear it,' laughed Elinor.

      'You think I've got a swelled head,' he went on.  'And I suppose it's true in a way.  But the trouble is, I know it's justified - experimentally.  Modesty's harmful if it's false.  Milton said that "nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right."  I know that mine is founded on just and right.  I know, I'm absolutely convinced that I can do what I want to do.  What's the good of denying the knowledge?  I'm going to be master, I'm going to impose my will.  I have the determination and the courage.  Very soon I shall have the organized strength.  And then I shall take control.  I know it; why should I pretend that I don't?'  He leaned back in his chair and there was a long silence.

      'It's absurd,' Elinor was thinking, 'it's ridiculous to talk like that.'  It was the protest of her critical intelligence against her feelings.  For her feelings had been strangely moved.  His words, the tone of his voice - so soft, yet with such vibrating latencies of power and passion divinable beneath its softness - had carried her away.  When he had said, 'I'm going to be master,' it was as though she had taken a gulp of mulled wine - such a warmth had suddenly tingled through her whole body.  'It's ridiculous,' she inwardly repeated, trying to avenge herself on him for his easy conquest, trying to punish the traitors within her own soul who had so easily surrendered.  But what had been done could not wholly be undone.  The words might be ridiculous; but the fact remained that, while he was uttering them, she had thrilled with sudden admiration, with excitement, with a strange desire to exult and laugh aloud.

      The servant changed the plates.  They talked of indifferent matters - of her travels, of doings in London while she had been away, of common friends.  The coffee was brought, they lit their cigarettes; there was a silence.  How would it be broken? Elinor wondered apprehensively.  Or rather did not wonder; for she knew and it was this prophetic knowledge that made her apprehensive.  Perhaps she could forestall him by breaking the silence herself.  Perhaps, if she rattled on, she could keep the conversation insignificant till it was time for her to go.  But there seemed suddenly to be nothing to say.  She felt as though paralysed by the approach of the inevitable event.  She could only sit and wait.  And at last the inevitable duly happened.

      'Do you remember,' he said slowly, without looking up, 'what I told you before you went away?'

      'I thought we'd agreed not to talk about it again.'

      He threw back his head with a little laugh.  'Well, you thought wrong.'  He looked at her and saw in her eyes an expression of distress and anxiety, an appeal for mercy.  But Everard was merciless.  He planted his elbows on the table and leaned towards her.  She dropped her eyes.

      'You said I hadn't changed to look at,' he said in his soft voice with its latencies of violence.  'Well, my mind hasn't changed either.  It's still the same, Elinor, still the same as it was when you went away.  I love you just as much, Elinor.  No, I love you more.'  Her hand lay limp on the table in front of her.  He stretched out one of his and took it.  'Elinor,' he whispered.

      She shook her head, without looking at him.

      Softly and passionately he talked on.  'You don't know what love can be,' he said.  'You don't know what I can give you.  Love that's desperate and mad, like a forlorn hope.  And at the same time tender, like a mother's love for a sick child.  Love that's violent and gentle, violent like a crime and as gentle as sleep.'

      'Words,' Elinor was thinking, 'absurd melodramatic words.'  But they moved her, as his boasting had moved her.  'Please, Everard,' she said aloud, 'no more.'  She didn't want to be moved.  With an effort she held her glance steady while she looked into his face, into those bright and searching eyes.  She essayed a laugh, she shook her head.  'Because it's impossible, and you know it.'

      'All I know,' he said slowly, 'is that you're afraid.  Afraid of coming to life.  Because you've been half dead all these years.  You haven't had a chance to come fully alive.  And you know I can give it you.  And you're afraid, you're afraid.'

      'What nonsense!' she said.  It was just ranting and melodrama.

      'And perhaps you're right, in a way,' he went on.  'Being alive, really alive, isn't entirely a joke.  It's dangerous.  But by God,' he added, and the latent violence in his soft voice suddenly broke out into ringing actuality, 'it's exciting.'

      'If you knew what a fright you gave me!' she said.  'Shouting like that!'  But it was not only a fright she had had.  Her nerves and her very flesh still crept and quivered with the obscure and violent exultations which his voice had evoked in her.  'It's ridiculous,' she assured herself.  But it was as though she had heard the voice directly with her body.  The echoes of it seemed to vibrate at her very midriff.  'Ridiculous,' she repeated.  And then what was this love he talked about so thrillingly?  Just an occasional brief violence in the intervals of business.  He despised women, resented them because they wasted a man's time and energy.  She had often heard him say that he had no time for love-making.  His advances were almost an insult - the propositions one makes to a woman of the streets.

      'Do be reasonable, Everard,' she said.

      Everard withdrew his hand from hers and, with a laugh, leaned back in his chair.  'Very well,' he answered.  'For today.'

      'For every day.'  She felt profoundly relieved.  'Besides,' she added, quoting a phrase of his, with a little ironical smile, 'you're not a member of the leisured class.  You've got more important things to do than make love.'

      Everard looked at her for a little in silence and his face was grave with a kind of lowering thoughtfulness.  More important things to do?  It was true, of course.  He was angry with himself for wanting so much to have her.  Angry with Elinor for keeping him unsatisfied.  'Shall we talk about Shakespeare?' he asked sarcastically.  'Or the musical glasses?'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      The fare was three-and-six.  Philip gave the driver two half-crowns and climbed the steps of the club's pillared portico pursued by the sound of thanks.  He made a habit of over-tipping.  It was not out of ostentation or because he had asked, or meant to ask, special services.  (Indeed, few men could have demanded less of their servants than did Philip, could have been more patient to put up with bad service, and more willing to excuse remissness.)  His over-tipping was the practical expression of a kind of remorseful and apologetic contempt.  'My poor devil!' the superfluous gratuity seemed to imply, 'I'm sorry to be your superior.'  And perhaps also there was a shilling's worth of apology for his very considerateness as an employer.  For if he was unexacting in his demands, that was due as much to a dread and dislike of unnecessary human contacts as to consideration and kindness.  From those who served him Philip demanded little, for the good reason that he wanted to have as little as possible to do with them.  Their presence disturbed him.  He did not like to have his privacy intruded upon by alien personalities.  To be compelled to speak with them, to have to establish a direct contact - not of intelligences, but of wills, feelings, intuitions - with these intruders was always disagreeable to him.  He avoided it as much as he could; and when contact was necessary, he did his best to dehumanize the relation.  Philip's generosity was in part a compensation for his inhuman kindness towards its recipients.  It was conscience money.

      The doors stood open; he entered.  The hall was vast, dim, pillared and cool.  Sir Francis Chantrey's allegorical marble group of Science and Virtue subduing the Passions writhed with classical decorum in a niche on the stairs.  He hung up his hat and went to the smoking-room to look at the papers and await the arrival of his guests.  Spandrell was the first to arrive.

      'Tell me,' said Philip, as soon as the greetings were over and the vermouth ordered, 'tell me quickly, before he comes, what about my absurd young brother-in-law.  What's happening with him and Lucy Tantamount?'

      Spandrell shrugged his shoulders.  'What does usually happen on these occasions?  And in any case, is this the place and time to go into details?'  He indicated the other occupants of the smoking-room.  A cabinet minister, two judges and a bishop were within earshot.

      Philip laughed.  'But I only wanted to know how serious the affair really was, how long it's likely to last ...'

      'Very serious as far as Walter's concerned.  As for duration - who knows?  But Lucy's going abroad very soon.'

      'Thank heaven for small mercies!  Ah, here you are!'  It was Walter.  'And there's Illidge.'  He waved his hand.  The newcomers refused an aperitif.  'Let's come and eat at once, then,' said Philip.

      The dining-room at Philip's club was enormous.  A double row of stucco Corinthian pillars supported a gilded ceiling.  From the pale chocolate-brown walls, the portraits of distinguished members, now deceased, glared down.  Curtains of claret-coloured velvet were looped up at either side of the six windows, a claret-coloured carpet muffled the floor and in their claret-coloured liveries the waiters darted about almost invisibly, like leaf-insects in a forest.

      'I always like this room,' said Spandrell as they entered.  'It's like a scene for Belshazzar's feast.'

      'But a very Anglican Belchazzar,' Walter qualified.

      'Gosh!' exclaimed Illidge, who had been looking round.  'This is the sort of thing that really does make me feel pleb-ish.'

      Philip laughed, rather uncomfortably.  Changing the subject, he pointed out the protectively coloured waiters.  They proved the Darwinian hypothesis.  'Survival of the fittest,' he sat as they sat down at their appointed table.  'The men in other colours must have been killed off by infuriated members.'  One of the claret-coloured survivors brought the fish.  They began to eat.

      'It's curious,' said Illidge, pursuing the train of thought suggested by his first impressions of the room, 'it's really extraordinary that I should be here at all.  Sitting with you, at any rate, as a guest.  For there wouldn't have been anything so very surprising about my being here in one of these wine-coloured coats.  That at least would have been in harmony with what the parsons would call "my station in life".'  He uttered a brief resentful laugh.  'But to be sitting with you - that's really almost incredible.  And it's all due to the fact that a Manchester shopkeeper had a son with tendencies to scrofula.  If Reggie Wright had been normally healthy, I'd probably be cobbling shoes in Lancashire.  But luckily Reggie had tubercle bacilli in his lymph-system.  The doctors prescribed a country life.  He father took a cottage in our village for his wife and child, and Reggie went to the village school.  But his father was ambitious for Reggie.  (What a disgusting little rat he was!)' Illidge remarked parenthetically.  'Wanted him to go to Manchester Grammar School, later on.  With a scholarship.  Paid our schoolmaster to give him special coaching.  I was a bright boy; the master liked me.  While he was coaching Reggie, he thought he might as well coach me.  Gratis, what's more.  Wouldn't let my mother pay a penny.  Not that she could have done so very easily, poor woman.  The time came, and it was I who got the scholarship.  Reggie failed.'  Illidge laughed.  'Miserable scrofulous little squit!  But I'm eternally grateful to him and the busy bacilli in his glands.  But for them I'd be carrying on my uncle's cobbling business in a Lancashire village.  And that's the sort of thing one's life hinges on - some absolutely absurd, million-to-one chance.  An irrelevance, and your life's altered.'

      'Not an irrelevance,' objected Spandrell.  'Your scholarship wasn't irrelevant; it was very much to the point, it was in harmony with you.  Otherwise you wouldn't have won it, you wouldn't be here.  I doubt if anything is really irrelevant.  Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.'

      'That's a bit oracular, isn't it?' Philip objected.  'Perceiving events, men distort them - put it like that - so that what happens seems to be like themselves.'

      Spandrell shrugged his shoulders.  'There may be that sort of distortion.  But I believe that events come ready-made to fit the people they happen to.'

      'What rot!' said Illidge, disgustedly.

      Philip dissented more politely.  'But many people can be influenced by the same event in entirely different and characteristic ways.'

      'I know,' Spandrell answered.  'But in some indescribable way the event's modified, qualitatively modified, so as to suit the character of each person involved in it.  It's a great mystery and a paradox.'

      'Not to say an absurdity and impossible,' put in Illidge.

      'Absurd, then, and impossible,' Spandrell agreed.  'But all the same, I believe that's how it happens.  Why should things be logically explainable?'

      'Yes, why indeed?' Walter echoed.

      'Still,' said Philip, 'your providence that makes the same event qualitatively different for different people - isn't that a bit thick?'

      'No thicker than our being here at all.  No thicker than all this.'  With a wave of his hand he indicated the Belchazzaresque dining-room, the eaters, the plum-coloured waiters and the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy, who happened at that moment to be entering the room with the Professor of Poetry at the University of Cambridge.

      But Philip was argumentatively persistent.  'But assuming, as the scientists do, that the simplest hypothesis is the best - though I could never for the life of me see what justification, beyond human ineptitude, they had for doing so ...'

      'Hear, hear.'

      'What justification?' repeated Illidge.  'Only the justification of observed fact, that's all.  It happens to be found experimentally that nature does do things in the simplest way.'

      'Or else,' said Spandrell, 'that human beings understand only the simplest explanations.  In practice, you couldn't distinguish between these alternatives.'

      'But if a thing has a simple, natural explanation, it can't at the same time have a complicated supernatural one.'

      'Why not?' asked Spandrell.  'You mayn't be able to understand or measure the supernatural forces behind the superficially natural ones (whatever the difference between natural and supernatural may be).  But that doesn't prove they're not there.  You're simple raising your stupidity to the rank of a general law.'

      Philip took the opportunity to continue his argument.  'But, assuming all the same,' he broke in before Illidge could speak again, 'that the simpler explanation is likely to be the truer - aren't the facts more simply explained by saying it's the individual, with his history and character, who distorts the event into his own likeness?  We can see individuals, but we can't see providence; we have to postulate it.  Isn't it best, if we can do without it, to omit the superfluous postulate?'

      'But is it superfluous?' said Spandrell.  'Can you cover the facts without it?  I have my doubts.  What about the malleable sort of people - and we're all more or less malleable, we're all more or less made as well as born?  What about the people whose characters aren't given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type?  A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones.  After the run has gone on long enough (and it's astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it's the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness.  But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of - what then?  Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?'

      'Who decides whether a penny shall come down heads or tails?' asked Illidge contemptuously.

      'But why bring in pennies?' Spandrell retorted.  'Why bring in pennies, when we're talking about human beings?  Consider yourself.  Do you feel like a penny when things happen to you?'

      'It doesn't matter how I feel.  Feelings have nothing to do with objective facts.'

      'But sensations have.  Science is the rationalization of sense-perceptions.  Why should one class of psychological intuitions be credited with scientific value and all others denied it?  A direct intuition of providential action is just as likely to be a bit of information about objective facts as a direct intuition of blueness and hardness.  And when things happen to one, one doesn't feel like a penny.  One feels that events are significant; that they've been arranged.  Particularly when they occur in series.  Tails a hundred times in succession, shall we say?'

      'Give us the credit of coming down heads,' said Philip laughing.  'We're the intelligentsia, remember.'

      Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity as an irrelevance.  The subject for him was a serious one.  'When I think of myself,' he said, 'I feel sure that everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance.  As a young boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something entirely different from this actual Me.'

      'A little angel, what?' said Illidge.

      Spandrell ignored the interruption.  'But from the time that I was fifteen onwards, things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.'  He was silent.

      'And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings.  A sad story.  Has it ever struck you,' Illidge went on, turning towards Walter, 'you who are an expert on art, or at least ought to be - has it ever struck you that the paintings of angels are entirely incorrect and unscientific?'  Walter shook his head.  'A seventy-kilogram man, if he developed wings, would have to develop colossal muscles to work them.  And big flying muscles would mean a correspondingly large sternum, like a bird's.  A ten-stone angel, if he wanted to fly as well as a duck, would have to have a breast-bone projecting at least four or five feet.  Tell your father that, next time he wants to paint a picture of the Annunciation.  All the existing Gabriels are really shockingly improbable.'

      Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and how they were all - the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the spectacle of a flower or a landscape - in some way bound up with his sentiment for his mother, somehow rooted and implied in it.  He remembered that Girls' School in Paris, those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets.  The book had been written in the age when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic fashion, when 'kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt'.  The seductive and priapic major's moustaches had been long, curly and waxed.  What shame he had felt and what remorse!  Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for strength!  And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother.  To resist temptation was to be worthy of her.  Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God.  He had begun to triumph.  And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was going to marry Major Knoyle.  Major Knoyle's moustaches were also curly.

      'Augustine and the Calvinists were right,' he said aloud, breaking in on the discussion of Seraphim's breastbones.

      'Still harping?' said Illidge.

      'God means to save some people and damn others.'

      'Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation, and (c) ...'

      'When I think of the War,' Spandrell went on, interrupting him, 'what it might have been for me and what in fact it was ...'  He shrugged his shoulders.  'Yes, Augustine was right.'

      'Well, I must say,' said Philip, 'I've always been very grateful to Augustine, or whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg.  It prevented me from being a hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.'

      Spandrell looked at him; the corners of his wide mouth ironically twitched.  'Your accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life.  In other words, the event was like you.  Just as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me.  I'd been up at Oxford a year, when it began,' he went on.

      'The dear old College, what?' said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some derisive comment.

      'Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs - discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination.  Such an apocalypse, the first real woman!' he added parenthetically.  'And at the same time, such a revolting disappointment!  So flat, in a way, after the superheated fancy and the pornographic book.'

      'Which is a tribute to art,' said Philip.  'As I've so often pointed out.'  He smiled at Walter, who blushed, remembering what his brother-in-law had said about the dangers of trying to make love after high poetic models.  'We're brought up topsy-turvy,' Philip went on.  'Art before life; Romeo and Juliet and filthy stories before marriage or its equivalents.  Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned.  Inevitably.  In the good old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it.  We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical.  If boys and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare's day, there'd be a revival of the Elizabethan love lyric.'

      'You may be right,' said Spandrell.  'All I know is that, when I discovered the reality, I found it disappointing - but attractive, all the same.  Perhaps so attractive just because it was so disappointing.  The heart's a curious sort of manure-heap; dung calls to dung, and the great charm of vice consists in its stupidity and sordidness.  It attracts because it is so repellent.  But repellent it always remains.  And I remember when the War came, how exultantly glad I was to have a chance of getting out of the muck and doing something decent, for a change.'

      'For King and Country!' mocked Illidge.

      'Poor Rupert Brooke!  One smiles now at that thing of his about honour having come back into the world again.  Events have made it seem a bit comical.'

      'It was a bad joke even when it was written,' said Illidge.

      'No, no.  At the time it was exactly what I felt myself.'

      'Of course you did.  Because you were what Brooke was - a spoilt and blasé member of the leisured class.  You needed a new thrill, that was all.  The War and that famous "honour" of yours provided it.'

      Spandrell shrugged his shoulders.  'Explain it like that if you want.  All I say is that in August 1914 I wanted to do something noble.  I'd even have been quite pleased to get killed.'

      ' "Rather death than dishonour," what?'

      'Yes, quite literally,' said Spandrell.  'For I can assure you that all the melodramas are perfectly realistic.  There are certain occasions when people do say that sort of thing.  The only defect of melodrama is that it leads you to believe that they say it all the time.  They don't, unfortunately.  But "rather death than dishonour" was exactly what I was thinking in August 1914.  If the alternative to death was the stupid kind of life I'd been leading, I wanted to get killed.'

      'There speaks the gentleman of leisure again,' said Illidge.

      'And then, just because I'd been brought up a good deal abroad and knew three foreign languages, because I had a mother who was too fond of me and a stepfather with military influence, I was transferred willy-nilly into the Intelligence.  God was really bent on damning me.'

      'He was very kindly trying to save your life,' said Philip.

      'But I don't want it saved.  Not unless I could do something decent with it, something heroic for preference, or at least difficult and risky.  Instead of which they put me on to liaison work and then to hunting spies.  Of all the sordid and ignoble businesses ...'

      'But after all the trenches weren't so very romantic.'

      'No, but they were dangerous.  Sitting in a trench, you needed courage and endurance.  A spy catcher was perfectly safe and didn't have to display any of the nobler virtues; while as to his opportunities for vice ... Those towns behind the lines, and Paris, and the ports - whores and alcohol were their chief products.'

      'But after all,' said Philip, 'those are avoidable evils.'  Naturally cold, he found it easy to be reasonable.

      'Not avoidable by me,' Spandrell answered.  'Particularly in those circumstances.  I'd wanted to do something decent, and I'd been prevented.  So it became a kind of point of honour to do the opposite of what I'd desired.  A point of honour - can you understand that?'

      Philip shook his head.  'A little too subtle for me.'

      'But just imagine yourself in the presence of a man you respect and like and admired more than you've ever admired and liked anyone before.'

      Philip nodded.  But in point of fact, he reflected, he had never deeply and wholeheartedly admired anyone.  Theoretically, yes; but never in practice, never to the point of wanting to make himself a disciple, a follower.  He had adopted other people's opinions, even their modes of life - but always with the underlying conviction that they weren't really his, that he could and certainly would abandon them as easily as he had taken them up.  And whenever there had seemed any risk of his being carried away, he had deliberately resisted, had fought or fled for his liberty.

      'You're overcome with your feelings for him,' Spandrell continued.  'And you go towards him with outstretched hands, offering your friendship and devotion.  His only response is to put his hands in his pockets and turn away.  What would you do then?'

      Philip laughed.  'I should have to consult Vogue's Book of Etiquette.'

      'You'd knock him down.  At least that's what I would do.  It would be a point of honour.  And the more you're admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcass.  That's why the whores and the alcohol weren't avoidable.  On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them.  That life in France was like the life I'd been leading before the War - only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature.  And after a year of it, I was desperately wrangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death.  Augustine was right, I tell you; we're damned or saved in advance.  The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.'

      'Providential balderdash!' said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second oldest judge of the High Court just behind him.  Twenty years before the odds against his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at any rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one.  But there, all the same, he was.  He took another draught of claret.

      And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and ears laid back; and how it suddenly started forward, dragging the carter along with it; and the rumble of the wheels; and 'Aie!' his own scream; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and 'Aie, aie!' the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.

      And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount's drawing-room.  'Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'But what's her secret?' Marjorie asked.  'Why should he have gone mad about her?  Because he has gone mad.  Literally.'

      'Isn't it rather an obvious secret?' said Elinor.  What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should ever have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie.  'After all,' she continued, 'Lucy's very amusing and alive.  And besides,' she added, remembering Philip's exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, 'she has a bad reputation.'

      'But is that attractive?  A bad reputation?'  The teapot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.

      'Of course.  It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible.  No sugar, thanks.'

      'But surely,' said Marjorie, handing her the cup, 'men don't want to share their mistress with other lovers.'

      'Perhaps not.  But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope.  "Where others have succeeded, I can succeed."  That's the man's argument.  And at the same time a bad reputation make him immediately think of the woman in terms of love-making.  It gives a twist to his imaginations about her.  When you met Lola Montes, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms.  You didn't think of bedrooms when you met Florence Nightingale.  Only sickrooms.  Which are rather different,' Elinor concluded.

      There was a silence.  It was horrid of her, Elinor was thinking, not to feel more sympathetic.  But there it was; she didn't.  She reminded herself of the abominable life the poor woman had had - first with her husband, and now with Walter.  Really abominable.  But those dreadful, dangling, sham jade earrings!  And the voice, the earnest manner ...

      Marjorie looked up.  'But is it possible that men can be so easily taken in?  By such a cheap bait?  Men like Walter.  Like Walter,' she insisted.  'Can men like that be such ... such ...'

      'Pigs?' suggested Elinor.  'Apparently they can.  It seems odd, certainly.'  Perhaps it would be better, she reflected, if Philip were rather more of a pig and less of a hermit crab.  Pigs are human - all too much so, perhaps; but still human.  Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.

      Marjorie shook her head and sighed. 'It's extraordinary,' she said with a conviction that struck Elinor as rather ludicrous.  'What sort of an opinion can she have of herself?' she wondered.  But Marjorie's good opinion was not for herself so much as for virtue.  She had been brought up to believe in the ugliness of vice and the animal part of human nature, the beauty of virtue and the spirit.  And cold by nature, she had the cold woman's utter incomprehension of sensuality.  That Walter should suddenly cease to be the Walter she had known and behave 'like a pig', as Elinor rather crudely put it, was to her really extraordinary, quite apart from any personal considerations of her own attractiveness.

      'And then you must remember,' Elinor said aloud, 'Lucy has another advantage where men like Walter are concerned.  She's one of those women who have the temperament of a man.  Men can get pleasure out of casual encounters.  Most women can't; they've got to be in love, more or less.  They've got to be emotionally involved.  All but a few of them.  Lucy's one of the few.  She has the masculine detachment.  She can separate her appetite from the rest of her soul.'

      'What a horror!' Marjorie shuddered.

      Elinor observed the shudder and was annoyed by it into contradiction.

      'Do you think so?  It seems to me sometimes rather an enviable talent.'  She laughed and Marjorie was duly shocked by her cynicism.  'For a boy with Walter's shyness and timidity,' she went on, 'there's something very exciting about that kind of bold temperament.  It's the opposite of his.  Reckless, without scruple, wilful, unconscientious.  I can so well understand its going to his head.'  She thought of Everard Webley.  'Force is always attractive,' she added.  'Particularly if one lacks it oneself, as Walter does.  Lucy's obviously a force.  You may not like that kind of force.'  She herself didn't much like Webley's energetic ambition.  'But you can't help admiring the force in itself.  It's like Niagara.  Fine, even though you mayn't want to be standing underneath.  May I take another piece of bread and butter?'  She helped herself.  Out of politeness Marjorie also took another slice.  'Delicious brown bread,' Elinor commented and wondered how Walter could have lived with anyone who crooked the little finger of the hand that held the teacup and who took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea-pig - as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.

      'But what do you think I ought to do?' Marjorie brought herself finally to ask.

      Elinor shrugged her shoulders.  'What can you do, but hope he'll get what he wants and soon be sick of it.'

      It was obvious; but Marjorie thought her rather unfeeling, hard and cruel to have said it.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      In London the Quarleses sketchily inhabited what had once been the last of a row of stables in a Belgravian mews.  You passed under an archway.  A cliff of cream-coloured stucco rose sheer on your left - windowless, for the Belgravians had declined to be aware of the squalid domesticity of their dependants.  On the right stretched the low line of stables with the single storey of living rooms above, tenanted now by enormous Daimlers and the families of their chauffeurs.  The mews ended in a wall, over the top of which you could see the waving plane-trees of Belgravian gardens.  The Quarleses' doorstep lay in the shadow of this wall.  Set between the gardens and the sparsely inhabited mews, the little house was very quiet.  The coming and going of limousines and the occasional yelling of a child were the only disturbances.

      'But fortunately,' Philip had remarked, 'the rich can afford to buy silent cars.  And there's something about internal combustion engines that makes for birth control.  Who ever heard of a chauffeur with eight children?'  Coach-house and horseboxes had been knocked together in the reconstruction of the stable, into a single spacious living-room.  Two screens hinted at a division.  Behind the screen on the right, as you entered, was the drawing-room end of the apartment - chairs and a sofa grouped around the fireplace.  The screen on the left concealed the dining-table and the entrance to a tiny kitchen.  A little staircase slanted up across one of the walls, leading to the bedrooms.  Yellow cretonnes mimicked the sunshine that never shone through the northward-looking windows.  There were many books.  Old Bidlake's portrait of Elinor as a young girl hung over the mantelpiece.

      Philip was lying on the sofa, book in hand.  'Very remarkable,' he read, 'is Mr Tate Regan's account of pigmy parasitic males three species of Cerativid Angler-fishes.  In the Arctic Ceratias holbolli a female about eight inches in length carried on her ventral surface two males of about two-and-a-half inches.  The snout and chin region of the dwarf male was permanently attached to a papilla of the female's skin, and the blood-vessels of the two were confluent.  The male is without teeth; the mouth is useless; the alimentary canal is degenerate.  In Photocarynus spiniceps the female, about two-and-a-half inches in length bore a male under half an inch long on the top of her head in front of her right eye.  In Edriolychnus schmidti the dimensions were about the same as in the last case, and the female carried the pigmy male upside down on the inner surface of her gill-cover.'

      Philip put down the book and feeling in his breast pocket pulled out his pocket diary and his fountain-pen.  'Female Angler-fishes,' he wrote, 'carry dwarf parasitic males attached to their bodies.  Draw the obvious comparison, when my Walter rushes after his Lucy.  What about a scene at an aquarium?  They go in with a scientific friend who shows them the female Anglers and their husbands.  The twilight, the fishes - perfect background.'  He was just putting his diary away, when another thought occurred to him.  He re-opened it.  'Make it the aquarium at Monaco and describe Monte Carlo and the whole Riviera in terms of deep-sea monstrosity.'  He lit a cigarette and went on with his book.

      There was a rap at the door.  He got up and opened; it was Elinor.

      'What an afternoon!'  She dropped into a chair.

      'Well, what news of Marjorie?' he asked.

      'No news,' she sighed, as she took off her hat.  'The poor creature's as dreary as ever.  But I'm very sorry for her.'

      'What did you advise her to do?'

      'Nothing.  What else could she do?  And Walter?' she asked in her turn.  'Did you get a chance to be the heavy father?'

      'The middle-weight father, shall we say.  I persuaded him to come down to Chamford with Marjorie.'

      'Did you?  That was a real triumph.'

      'Not quite such a triumph as you think.  I had no enemy to fight with.  Lucy's going to Paris next Saturday.'

      'Let's hope she'll stay there.  Poor Walter!'

      'Yes, poor Walter.  But I must tell you about Angler-fishes.'  He told her.  'One of these days,' he concluded, 'I shall really have to write a modern Bestiary.  Such moral lessons!  But tell me, how was Everard?  I quite forgot you'd seen him.'

      'You would have forgotten,' she answered scornfully.

      'Would I?  I don't know why.'

      'No, you wouldn't.'

      'I'm crushed,' said Philip with a mock humility.  There was a silence.

      'Everard's in love with me,' said Elinor at last without looking at her husband and in the flattest, most matter-of-fact of voices.

      'Is that news?' asked Philip.  'I thought he was an old admirer.'

      'But it's serious,' Elinor went on.  'Very serious.'  She waited anxiously for his comment.  It came, after a little pause.

      'That must be less amusing.'

      Less amusing!  Couldn't he understand?  After all, he wasn't a fool.  Or perhaps he did understand and was only pretending not to; perhaps he was secretly glad about Everard.  Or was it just indifference that made him blind?  Nobody understands what he does not feel.  Philip couldn't understand her because he didn't feel as she felt.  He was confident in the belief that other people were as reasonably lukewarm as he was himself.  'But I like him,' she said aloud in a last desperate attempt to provoke him at least into a semblance of caring.  If only he'd shown himself jealous, or sad, or angry, how happy she'd be, how grateful!  'Very much,' she went on.  'There's something very attractive about him.  That passionateness of his, that violence ...'

      Philip laughed.  'Quite the irresistible caveman, in fact.'

      Elinor rose with a little sigh, picked up her hat and bag, and bending over her husband's chair, kissed him on the forehead, as though she were saying goodbye; then turned away and still without a word went upstairs to her bedroom.

      Philip picked up his abandoned book.  'Bonellia viridis,' he read, 'is a green worm, not uncommon in the Mediterranean.  The female has a body about the size of a prune, bearing a string-like, terminally bifid, very contractile proboscis, which may be two feet long.  But the male is microscopic and lives in what may be called the reproductive duct (modified nephridium) of the female.  It has no mouth and depends on what it absorbs parasitically through its ciliated surfaces ...'

      Philip once more put down the book.  He was wondering whether he oughtn't to go upstairs and say something to Elinor.  He was sure she'd never really care for Everard.  But perhaps he oughtn't to take it so much for granted.  She had seemed rather upset.  Perhaps she had expected him to say something - how much he cared for her, how wretched he'd be, how angry, if she were to stop caring for him.  But these precisely were the almost unsayable things.  In the end he decided not to go upstairs.  He'd wait and see, he'd put it off to another time.  He went on reading about Bonellia viridis.