CHAPTER XXVII

 

John Bidlake and his third wife had never definitely or officially parted company.  They simply didn't see one another very often, that was all.  The arrangement suited John very well.  He hated everything in the nature of a fuss, and he was the enemy of every definite and irrevocable contract.  And arrangement that bound him down, that imposed responsibilities and kept him in mind of duties, was intolerable to him.  'God knows what I should have done,' he used to say, 'if I'd had to go to an office every day, or get work done by a certain date.  I think I should have run amok after a few months of it.'  Of marriage he had always consistently disapproved.  Unfortunately, however, he could not have had all the women he wanted, without marriage.  He had had to enter into no less than three of what he called, in Ciceronian language, 'those inopportune and obscene contracts'.  The idea of divorce or an official separation was hardly less disagreeable to him than that marriage; it was too definite, it committed you.  Why not leave things to settle themselves, instead of trying to give an arbitrary shape to them?  The ideal was to live, emotionally and socially speaking, from hand to mouth - without plans, without a status, in good company of one's own daily choosing, not the choosing of others or of some dead self.  'Sleeping around' - that was how he had heard a young American girl describe the amorous side of the ideal life, as lived in Hollywood.  Its other aspects might be lumped under the head of 'waking around'.  The unideal life, the life which John Bidlake had always refused to lead, was that which consisted of waking and sleeping not 'around', but definitely here or there, day after day, according to a fixed foreseeable schedule that only death, or at the least the act of God or the king's enemies, could alter.

      With his third wife John Bidlake's relations were, and had been for years, most satisfyingly indefinite.  They did not live together, but they were not separated.  They rarely communicated, but they had never quarrelled.  John had been sleeping and waking 'around' for upwards of twenty years, and yet they met, whenever they did meet, on friendly terms; and if ever he desired to refresh his memories of the landscape of the northern Chilterns, his arrival at Gattenden was accepted without comment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  The arrangement entirely suited John Bidlake; and, to do him justice, he was grateful to his wife for making it possible.  He refrained, however, from expressing his gratitude; for to have done so would have been to comment on the arrangement; and a comment would have brought a touch of destructive definition into a situation whose fragile excellence consisted precisely in its virgin and beautifully unsullied vagueness.  Few women, as her husband gratefully recognized, would have been willing or even able to preserve the indefiniteness of the situations so chronically inviolate as Janet Bidlake.  Another wife would have demanded explanations, would have wanted to know where she stood, would have offered the irrevocable choice of peace or war, life in common or separation.  But Mrs Bidlake had permitted her husband to fade out of their married life without a quarrel, with hardly a word.  And his brief spasmodic re-entries were accepted by her with as little comment.  She had been from childhood more at home in the fictitious world of her invention than in the real.  As a little girl she had had an imaginary sister who lived in the signal-box by the level crossing.  Between the ages of ten and thirteen, her inability to distinguish between the testimony of her senses and that of her fancy had often resulted in her being punished for lying.  Pictures and books gave a new turn to her imagining, which became less personal and more classically artistic, literary and speculative.  From sixteen onwards she was an inhabitant of the country of art and letters and was little more than a reluctant stranger in mere England.  It was because she had imagined John Bidlake a spiritual compatriot that she had fallen in love with him - artistically, poetically in love - and consented to become his wife.  Her parents, who considered him only as a fellow-subject of the Queen and attached more importance, in the circumstances, to his career as a husband than as an artist, did their best to dissuade her.  But Janet was of an age and had the obstinacy of those who can simply retire from the plane on which the argument is taking place, leaving the opponent to waste his energy on a mere untenanted body.  She ended by doing what she wanted.  When she discovered, as she discovered only too soon, that there was very little connection between the admirable artist she had loved and the husband she had married, Janet Bidlake was restrained by a very natural pride from complaining.  She had no wish to giver her relations the pleasure of saying, 'I told you so.'  John slept and woke 'around', faded more and more completely out of conjugality.  She held her peace and herself retired for consolation into those reasons of artistic and literary fancy, where she was native and felt most at home.  A private income, supplemented by the irregular and fluctuating contributions which John Bidlake made whenever he remembered and felt he could afford to support a wife and family, allowed her to make a habit of this foreign travel of the imagination.  Elinor was born a year after their marriage.  Four years later an ulcerated stomach brought John Bidlake home, a temporarily reformed character, to be nursed.  Walter was the result of his still domestic convalescence.  The ulcers healed, John Bidlake faded away again.  Nurses and governesses looked after their children.  Mrs Bidlake superintended their upbringing dimly and as though from a distance.  From time to time she swooped across the border dividing her private country from the world of common fact; and her interferences with the quotidian order of things had always a certain disconcerting and almost supernatural quality.  Incalculable things were liable to happen whenever she descended, a being from another plane and judging events by other standards than those of the common world, into the midst of the children's educational routine.  Once, for example, she dismissed a governess because she had heard her playing Dan Leno's song about the Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg on the schoolroom piano.  She was a good girl, taught well and supported a paralytic father.  But great artistic principles were at stake.  Elinor's musical taste might be irretrievably ruined (incidentally Elinor resembled her father in detesting music); and the fact that she was very fond of Miss Dempster made the danger of contamination even greater.  Mrs Bidlake was firm.  'The Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg' could not be permitted.  Miss Dempster was sent away.  When he heard the news, her old father had another stroke and was picked up blind in one eye and unable to speak.  But Mrs Bidlake's returns from imaginative travel were generally less serious in their results.  When she interfered with the practical business of her children's upbringing, it was usually only to insist that they should read classical authors usually considered incomprehensible or unsuitable for the very young.  Children, it was her theory, should be brought up only with the very best in the way of philosophy and the arts.  Elinor had had Hamlet read to her when she was there, her picture-books were reproductions of Giotto and Rubens.  She had been taught French out of Candide, had been given Tristram Shandy and Bishop Berkeley's Theory of Vision when she was seven, Spinoza's Ethics, Goya's etchings and, as a German textbook, Also sprach Zarathustra when she was nine.  The result of this premature introduction to the best philosophy was to produce in Elinor that slightly amused contempt for the grand abstractions and highfalutin idealisms, which had come to be so characteristic of her.  Brought up at the same time on the unexpurgated classics, she had acquired in childhood a complete theoretical knowledge of all those matters which it is thought least suitable for the young to know.  This knowledge had reinforced rather than tempered the coldness and practical incuriosity about all amorous matters which were natural to her; and she had grown up in a state of well-informed and superficially cynical innocence, like one of those Shakespearean heroines, whose scientific and Rabelaisian speech accompanies actions of the most delicately virtuous refinement.  Mrs Bidlake was a little distressed by Elinor's irreverent attitude towards her cherished fancies; but, wise in her way, she did not comment, did not try to reform, only ignored and retired, as she had ignored her husband's shortcomings, had retired from the realization of them into the happier realms of art and imagination.  There can be no cancellation of accomplished facts; but for practical purposes a conspiracy of silence is almost as effective as cancellation.  Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.  When John Bidlake arrived at Gattenden, a sick man made sicker by dejection, terror and an all-absorbing self-pity, Mrs Bidlake passed over in silence the fact, upon which she might so easily have commented: that he only came to her when he needed a nurse.  His room was made ready, he settled in.  It was as though he had never been away.  In the privacy of the kitchen the housemaids grumbled a little at the extra work, while Mrs Inman sighed and Dobbs was massively and Anglicanly indignant over old Mr Bidlake's treatment of his wife.  At the same time all felt a kind of gloating pity for the old man.  His disease and its symptoms were talked of in lowered voices, religiously.  Aloud, the servants might grumble and disapprove.  But secretly they were all rather pleased.  John Bidlake's arrival broke the daily monotony, and the fact that he was going to die made them all feel somehow more important.  To the domesticities of Gattenden his approaching death gave a new significance.  That future event was the sun round which the souls of the household now meaningfully and almost stealthily revolved.  They might grumble and disapprove, but they looked after him solicitously.  In an obscure way they were grateful to him.  Dying, he was quickening their life.