CHAPTER XXIV

 

Local government among the Indians under the Maurya emperors continued, week after week, to necessitate Mr Quarles's attendance at the British Museum for at least two full days in every seven.

      'I had no idyah,' he explained, 'that there was so much available matyahrial.'

      Gladys, meanwhile, was discovering that she had made a mistake.  The good time which she had looked forward to enjoying under Mr Quarles's protection was no better than the good time she might have enjoyed with 'boys' hardly richer than herself.  Mr Quarles, it seemed, was not prepared to pay for the luxury of feeling superior.  He wanted to be a great man, but for very little money.  His excuse for the cheap restaurant and the cheap seats at the theatre was always the necessity of secrecy.  It would never do for him to be seen by an acquaintance in Gladys's company; and since his acquaintances belonged to the world which is carried, repleat, from the Berkeley to the stalls of the Gaiety, Mr Quarles and Gladys ate at a Corner House and looked at the play remotely from the Upper Circle.  Such was the official explanation of the very unprincely quality of Sidney's treats.  The real explanation was not the need for secrecy, but Sidney's native reluctance to part with hard cash.  For though large sums meant little to him, small ones meant a great deal.  When it was a matter of 'improving the estate', he would light-heartedly sign away hundreds, even thousands of pounds.  But when it was a question of parting with two or three half-crowns to give his mistress a better seat at the play or a more palatable meal, a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, he became at once the most economical of men.  His avarice was at the root of a certain curious puritanism, which tinged his opinions about almost all pleasures and amusements other than the strictly sexual.  Dining with a seduced work-girl in the cheap obscurity of a Soho eating-hell, he would (with all the passion of a Milton reproving the sons of Belial, all the earnestness of a Wordsworth advocating low living and high thinking) denounce the hoggish guzzlers at the Carlton, the gluttons at the Ritz, who in the midst of London's serried miseries would carelessly spend a farm labourer's monthly wage of a tête-à-tête dinner.  Thus his inexpensive preferences in the matter of restaurants and theatre seats were made to assume a high moral as well as a merely diplomatic character.  Seduced by an ageing libertine, Mr Quarles's mistresses were surprised to find themselves dining with a Hebrew prophet, and taking their amusements with a disciple of Cator or Calvin.

      'One would think you were a blessed saint to hear you talk,' said Gladys sarcastically, when he had paused for breath in the midst of one of his Corner House denunciations of the extravagant and greedy.  'You!'  Her laughter was mockingly savage.

      Mr Quarles was disconcerted.  He was used to being listened to respectfully, as an Olympian.  Gladys's tone was ribald and rebellious; he didn't like it; it even alarmed him.

      He raised his chin with dignity and fired a dropping shot of rebuke upon her head.  'It isn't a question of myah personalities,' he pronounced.  'It's a question of general principles.'

      'I can't see any difference,' retorted Gladys, abolishing at one stroke all the solemn pretensions of all the philosophers and moralists, all the religious leaders and reformers and Utopia-makers from the beginning of human time.

      What exasperated Gladys most was the fact that even in the world of the Maison Lyons and cheap seats, Mr Quarles did not abandon his Olympian pretensions and his Olympian manners.  His indigestion, when one evening there was a crowd on the stairs leading to the Upper Circle was loud and righteous.  'A ryahl scandal,' he called it.

      'One would think you'd taken the royal box,' said Gladys sarcastically.

      And when, at a tea-shop, he complained that the one-and-four-penny slice of salmon tasted as though it had come from British Columbia rather than Scotland, she advised him to write to The Times about it.  The discovery tickled her fancy and, after that, she was always ironically telling him to write to The Times.  Did he complain, a noble and disillusioned philosopher, of the shallowness of politicians and the sordid triviality of political life, Gladys bade him write to The Times.  He was eloquent about iniquitous Mrs Grundy and English illiberality; let him write to The Times.  It was a ryahl scandal that neither Sir Edward Grey nor Lloyd George should have been able to speak French; The Times again was indicated.  Mr Quarles was hurt and outraged.  Nothing like this had ever happened before.  In the company of his other mistresses the consciousness of his superiority had been a serene happiness.  They had worshipped and admired; he had felt himself a god.  And during the first days Gladys too had seemed a worshipper.  But coming to pray, she had stayed to mock.  His spiritual happiness was ruined.  If it had not been for the bodily solace which the species in her provided, Mr Quarles would have quickly exhausted the subject of local self-government under the Mauryas and stayed at home.  But there was in Gladys a more than usually large admixture of undifferentiated species.  It was too much for Mr Quarles.  The derisive individual in her pained and repelled him; but the attraction of what was generic, of the whole feminine species, the entire sex, was stronger than that individual repulsion.  In spite of her mockery, Mr Quarles returned.  The claims of the Indians became increasingly peremptory.

      Realizing her power, Gladys began to withhold what he desired.  Perhaps he could be blackmailed into the generosity which it was not in his nature to display spontaneously.  Returning from a very inexpensive evening at Lyons' and the pictures, she pushed him angrily away when, in the taxi, he attempted the usual endearments.

      'Can't you leave me in peace?' she snapped.  And a moment later, 'Tell the driver to go to my place first and drop me.'

      'But, my dyah child!' Mr Quarles protested.  Hadn't she promised to come back with him?

      'I've changed my mind.  Tell the driver.'

      The thought that, after three days of fervid anticipation, he would have to pass the evening in solitude was agonizing.  'But, Gladys, my darling ...'

      'Tell the driver.'

      'But it ryahly too cruel; you're too unkind.'

      'Better write to The Times about it,' was all her answer.  'I'll tell the driver myself.'

      After a night of insomnia and suffering Mr Quarles went out as soon as the shops were open and bough a fourteen-guinea wristwatch.

 

*     *     *     *

     

      The advertisement was for a dentifrice.  But as the picture represented two fox-trotting young people showing their teeth at one another in an amorous and pearly smile and as the word began with a D, little Phil unhesitatingly read 'dancing'.

      His father laughed.  'You old humbug!' he said.  'I thought you said you could read.'

      'But they are dancing,' the child protested.

      'Yes, but that isn't what the word says.  Try again.'  He pointed.

      Little Phil glanced again at the impossible word and took a long look at the picture.  But the fox-trotting couple gave him no help.  'Dynamo,' he said at last in desperation.  It was the only other word beginning with a D that he could think of at the moment.

      'Or why not dinosaurus, while you're about it?' mocked his father.  'Or doliococephalous?  Or dicotyledon?'  Little Phil was deeply offended; he could not bear to be laughed at.  'Try again.  Try to read it this time.  Don't guess.'

      Little Phil turned his head away.  'It bores me,' he said.  His vanity made him reluctant to attempt what he could not achieve successfully.  Miss Fulkes, who believed in teaching by rational persuasion and with the reasoned consent of the taught (she was still very young), had lectured him on his own psychology, in the hope that, once he had realized his defects, he would mend them.  'You've got the wrong sort of pride,' she told him.  'You're not ashamed of being a dunce and not knowing things.  But you are ashamed of making mistakes.  You'd rather not do a thing at all than do it badly.  That's quite wrong.'  Little Phil would nod his head and say 'Yes, Miss Fulkes' in the most rational and understanding way imaginable.  But he continued to prefer doing things not at all to doing them with difficulty and badly.  'It bores me,' he repeated.  'But would you like me to make you a drawing?' he suggested, turning back to his father with a captivating smile.  He was always ready to draw; he drew well.

      'No thanks.  I'd like you to read,' said Philip.

      'But it bores me.'

      'Never mind.  You must try.'

      'But I don't want to try.'

      'But I want you to.  Try.'

      Little Phil burst into tear.  Tears, he knew, were an irresistible weapon.  And, sure enough, they proved their value yet once more.

      Elinor looked up from where she was sitting, dissociated, book in hand, at the other end of the room. 'Don't make him cry,' she called.  'It's bad for him.'

      Philip shrugged his shoulders.  'If you imagine that's the way to educate a child ...' he said with a bitterness that the occasion did not justify, a bitterness gradually accumulated during the past weeks of silence and distant hostility, of self-questioning and ineffective self-reproach, and finding now an almost irrelevant expression.

      'I don't imagine anything,' said Elinor in a cold hard voice.  'I only know that I don't want him to cry.'  Little Phil redoubled his noise.  She called him to her and took him on to her knee.

      'But seeing that he has the misfortune to be an only child, one really ought to make the effort not to spoil him.'

      Elinor pressed her cheek against the boy's hair.  'Seeing that he is an only child,' she said, 'I don't see why he shouldn't be treated as one.'

      'You're hopeless,' said Philip.  'It's high time we settled down, so that the boy can have a chance of being brought up rationally.'

      'And who's going to do the rational upbringing?' asked Elinor.  'You?'  She laughed sarcastically.  'At the end of a week you'd be so bored that you'd either commit suicide or take the first aeroplane to Paris and not come back for six months.'

      'Naughty father!' put in the child.

      Philip was offended, the more so as he was secretly aware that what she said was true.  The ideal of a rustic domesticity, filled with small duties and casual human contacts, was one that, for him, precariously verged on absurdity.  And though the idea of supervising little Phil's upbringing was interesting, he knew that the practice would be intolerably tedious.  He remembered his own father's spasmodic essays at education.  He'd be just the same.  Which was precisely why Elinor had no business to say so.

      'I'm not quite so childishly frivolous as you seem to imagine,' he said with dignity and bottled anger.

      'On the contrary,' she answered, 'you're too adultly serious.  You couldn't manage a child because you're not enough of a child yourself.  You're like one of those dreadfully grown-up creatures in Shaw's Methuselah.'

      'Naughty father!' repeated little Phil exasperatingly, like a parrot with only one phrase.

      Philip's first impulse was to seize the child out of his mother's arms, smack him for his impertinence, drive him from the room and then turn on Elinor and violently 'have things out' with her.  But a habit of gentlemanly self-control and a dread of scenes made him keep his temper.  Instead of healthily breaking out he made an effort of will and more than ever tightly shut himself in.  Preserving his dignity and his unexpressed grievance, he got up and walked through the French window into the garden.  Elinor watched his departure.  Her impulse was to run after him, take him by the hand and make peace.  But she too checked herself.  Philip limped away out of sight.  The child continued to whimper.  Elinor gave him a little shake.

      'Stop, Phil,' she said almost angrily.  'That's enough now.  Stop at once.'

 

*     *     *     *

 

      The two doctors were examining what to an untrained eye might have seemed the photograph of a typhoon in the Gulf of Siam, of an explosion of black smoke in the midst of clouds, or merely of an ink stain.

      ‘Particularly clear,' said the young radiographer.  'Look.'  He pointed at the smoke cloud.  'There's a most obvious new growth there, at the pylorus.'  He glanced with a certain enquiring deference at his distinguished colleague.

      Sir Herbert nodded.  'Obvious,' he repeated.  He had an oracular manner; what he said, you felt, was always and necessarily true.

      'It couldn't very well be large.  Not with the symptoms so far recorded.  There's been no vomiting yet.'

      'No vomiting?' exclaimed the radiographer with an almost excessive display of interest and astonishment.  'That would explain the smallness.'

      'The obstruction's only slight.'

      'It would certainly be worth opening up the abdomen for exploration purposes.'

      Sir Herbert made a little pointing grimace and dubiously shook his head.  'One has to think of the patient's age.'

      'Quite,' the radiographer made haste to agree.

      'He's older than he seems.'

      'Yes, yes.  He certainly does look his age.'

      'Well, I must be going,' said Sir Herbert.

      The young radiographer darted to the door, handed him his hat and gloves, personally escorted him to the attendant Daimler.  Returning to his desk he glanced again at the black-blotched, grey-cloudy photograph.

      'A really remarkably successful exposure,' he said to himself with satisfaction and, turning the picture over, he wrote a few words in pencil on the back.

      'J. Bidlake, Esq.  Stomach after barium meal.  New growth at pylorus, small but v. clear.  Photographed ...' He looked up at his calendar for the date, recorded it and put the photograph away in his file for future reference.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      The old manservant announced the visitor and retired, closing the door of the studio behind him.

      'Well, John,' said Lady Edward, advancing across the room.  'How are you?'  I heard you'd been seedy.  Nothing serious, I hope.'

      John Bidlake did not even get up to receive her.  From the depth of the armchair in which he had spent the day meditating in terror the themes of disease and death, he held out a hand.

      'But, my poor John!' exclaimed Lady Edward sitting down beside him.  'You look very low and wretched.  What is it?'

      John Bidlake shook his head.  'God knows,' he said.  He had guessed, of course, from Sir Herbert's vaguely professional words about 'slight obstruction in the neighbourhood of the pylorus', he knew what was the matter.  Hadn't his son Maurice died of the same thing five years ago, in California?  He knew; but he would not speak his knowledge.  Uttered, the worst was more frightful, more irrevocable.  Besides, one should never formulate one's knowledge of coming evil; for then fate would have, so to speak, a model on which to shape events.  There was always a kind of impossible chance that, if one didn't put one's foreboding of evil into words, the evil wouldn't happen.  The mysteries of John Bidlake's personal religion were quite as obscure and paradoxical as any of those in the 'theolatrous' orthodoxies which he liked to deride.

      'But haven't you seen a doctor?'  Lady Edward's tone was accusatory; she knew her friend's strange prejudice against doctors.

      'Of course I have,' he answered irritably, knowing that she knew.  'Do you take me for a fool?  But they're all charlatans.  I went to one with a knighthood.  But do you suppose he knew anything more than the others?  He just told me in quack jargon what I'd told him in plain words; that I'd got something wrong with my innards.  Stupid rogue!'  His hatred of Sir Herbert and all doctors had momentarily revived him.

      'But he must have told you something,' Lady Edward insisted.

      The words brought him back to the thought of that 'slight obstruction in the neighbourhood of the pylorus', of disease and pain and the creeping approach of death.  He relapsed into his old misery and terror.  'Nothing of significance,' he muttered, averting his face.

      'Then perhaps it's nothing really serious,' Lady Edward comfortingly suggested.

      'No, no!'  To the old man her light-hearted hopefulness seemed an outrage.  He would not put himself into the power of fate by formulating the horrible truth.  But at the same time he wanted to be treated as though the truth had been formulated.  Treated with a grave commiseration.  'It's bad.  It's very bad,' he insisted.

      He was thinking of death; death in the form of a new life growing and growing in his belly, like an embryo in a womb.  The one thing fresh and active in his old body, the one thing exuberantly and increasingly alive was death.

      All round, on the walls of the studio, hung fragmentary records of John Bidlake's life.  Two little landscapes painted in the Pincian Gardens in the days when Rome had only just ceased to be the Pope's - a view of belfries and cupolas seen through a gap in the ilex trees, a pair of statues silhouetted against the sky.  Next to them a satyr's face, snubby and bearded - the portrait of Verlaine.  A London street scene, full of hansoms and top hats and lifted skirts.  Three sketches of the plump, bright-coloured Mary Betterton of thirty years ago.  And Jenny, loveliest of models, lying naked on a long chair, with a window behind her, white clouds beyond, a bowl of roses on the window-sill and a great blue Persian cat stretched like a couchant lion, on Jenny's white belly, dozing, its paws between her round and shallow breasts.

      Lady Edward brightly changed the subject.  'Lucy's just flown off to Paris again,' she began.