CHAPTER XXXII

 

In the little house at the end of the mews Elinor was alone.  Faint rumblings of far-away traffic caressed the warm silence.  A bowl of her mother’s pot-pourri peopled the air for her with countless potential memories of childhood.  She was arranging roses in a vase; huge white roses with petals of malleable porcelain, orange roses like whorles of congealed and perfumed flame.  The chiming clock on the mantelpiece made a sudden and startling comment of eight notes and left the accorded vibrations to tingle mournfully away into nothingness, like music on a departing ship.  Half-past three.  And at six she was expecting Everard.  Expected Everard for a cocktail, she was at pains to explain to herself, before he took her out to dinner and the play.  Just an evening’s entertainment, like any other evening’s entertainment.  She kept telling herself so, because she knew, underneath, she was prophetically certain, that the evening wouldn’t be in the least like other evenings, but cardinal, decisive.  She would have to make up her mind, she would have to choose.  But she didn’t want to choose: that was why she tried to make herself believe that the evening was to be merely trivial and amusing.  It was like covering a corpse with flowers.  Mountains of flowers.  But the corpse was always there, in spite of the concealing lilies.  And a choice would have to be made, in spite of dinner at Kettner’s and the theatre.  Sighing, she picked up the heavy vase in both hands and was just lifting it on to the mantelpiece, when there was a loud knock at the door.  Elinor started so violently, that she almost dropped her burden.  And the terror persisted, even when she had recovered from her first shock of surprise.  A knock at the door, when she was alone in the lonely house, always set her heart uncomfortably beating.  The idea that there was somebody there, waiting, listening, a stranger, an enemy perhaps (for Elinor’s fancy was pregnant with horrible hairy faces peering round corners, with menacing hands, with knives and clubs and pistols) or perhaps a madman, listening intently for any sound of life within the house, waiting, waiting like a spider for her to open – this was a nightmare to her, a terror.  The knock was repeated.  Setting down the vase, she tiptoed with infinite precautions to the window and peeped between the curtains.  On days when she was feeling particularly nervous she lacked the courage even to do this, but sat motionless, hoping that the noise of her heart might not be audible in the street, until the knocker at last wore out his patience and walked away.  Next day the man from Selfridge’s would heap coals of fire upon her by apologizing for the retarded delivery.  ‘Called yesterday evening, madam, but there was nobody at home.’  And Elinor would feel ashamed of herself and a fool.  But the next time she was alone and nervous, she would do exactly the same thing.

      This afternoon she had courage; she ventured to look at the enemy – at as much of him, that is to say, as she could see, peeping sideways through the glass towards the door.  A grey trouser-leg and an elbow were all that entered her field of vision.  There was yet another knock.  Then the trouser-leg moved back, the whole coat came into view, the black hat and, with a turn of the head, Spandrell’s face.  She ran to the door and opened.

      ‘Spandrell!’ she called, for he had already turned to go.  He came back, lifting his hat.  They shook hands.  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she explained.  ‘I was alone.  I thought it was at least a murderer.  Then I peeped through the window and saw it was you.’

      Spandrell gave vent to brief and noiseless laughter.  ‘But it might still be a murderer, even though it is me.’  And he shook his knobbed stick at her with a playfulness which was, however, so dramatically like her imaginings of the genuinely homicidal article, that Elinor was made to feel quite uncomfortable.

      She covered her emotion with a laugh, but decided not to ask him into the house.  Standing on the doorstep she felt safer.  ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it would be better to be murdered by somebody one knows than by a stranger.’

      ‘Would it?’  He looked at her; the corners of his wide weal-like mouth twitched into a curious smile.  ‘It needs a woman to think of those refinements.  But if you should ever feel like having your throat cut in a thoroughly friendly fashion …’

      ‘My dear Spandrell!’ she protested, and felt gladder than ever that she was still on the doorstep and not inside the house.

      ‘… Don’t hesitate to send for me.  No matter what the inconvenience,’ he laid his hand on his heart, ‘I’d fly to your side.  Or rather to your neck.’  He clicked his heels and bowed.  ‘But tell me,’ he went on in another tone, ‘is Philip anywhere about?  I wanted him to come and dine tonight.  At Sbisa’s.  I’d ask you too.  Only it’s a purely masculine affair.’

      She thanked him.  ‘But I couldn’t come in any case.  And Philip’s gone down into the country to see his mother.  And will only be back just in time for Tolley’s concert at the Queen’s Hall.  But I know he said he was going round to Sbisa’s afterwards, on the chance of meeting someone.  You’ll see him then.  Late.’

      ‘Well, better late than never.  Or at least,’ he uttered another of his soundless laughs, ‘so one piously hopes, where one’s friends are concerned.  Pious hopes!  But to tell you the truth, the proverb needs changing.  Better never than early.’

      ‘Then why go to the trouble of asking people to dine?’

      Spandrell shrugged his shoulders.  ‘Force of habit,’ he said.  ‘And besides, I generally make them pay, when I ask them out.’

      They were both laughing, when a loud ringing made them turn.  A telegraph boy on a red bicycle was shooting down the mews towards them.

      ‘Quarles?’ he asked, as he jumped off.

      Elinor took the telegram and opened it.  The laughter went out of her face as she read.  ‘No answer.’  The boy remounted and rode away.  Elinor stood staring at the telegram as though its words were written in an unfamiliar language difficult to interpret.  She looked at the watch on her wrist, then back at the flimsy paper.

      ‘Will you do something for me?’ she said at last, turning to Spandrell.

      ‘But of course.’

      ‘My baby’s ill,’ she explained.  ‘They want me to come.  If I hurry’ (she looked again at her watch), ‘I can just catch the four-seventeen to Euston.  But there’ll be no time for anything else.  Will you ring up Everard Webley for me and explain why I can’t dine with him this evening?’  It was a warning, she thought; a prohibition.  ‘Before six.  At his office.’

      ‘Before six,’ he repeated slowly.  ‘At his office.  Very well.’

      ‘I must rush,’ she said, holding out her hand.

      ‘But I’ll go and get you a cab, while you put on your hat.’

      She thanked him.  Spandrell hurried away along the mews.  A prohibition, Elinor repeated to herself, as she adjusted her hat in front of the Venetian mirror in the living-room.  The choice had been made for her.  It was at once a relief and a disappointment.  But made, she went on to reflect, at poor little Phil’s expense.  She wondered what was the matter with him.  Her mother’s telegram – such a characteristic one, that she could not help smiling now that she thought of it again – said nothing.  ‘PHILIP RATHER SOUFFRANT AND THOUGH UNALARMINGLY SHOULD ADVISE PROMPT HOME-COMING MOTHER.’  She remembered how nervous and difficult the child had been of late, how easily fatigued.  She reproached herself for not having realized that he was working up for an illness.  Now it had come.  A touch of influenza, perhaps.  ‘I ought to have taken more care,’ she kept repeating.  She scribbled a note for her husband.  ‘The accompanying telegram explains my sudden departure.  Join me at Gattenden tomorrow morning.’  Where should she put it so that Philip should be sure to see it when he came in?  Leaning against the clock on the mantelpiece?  But would he necessarily want to know the time?  Or on the table?  No; pin it to the screen; that was the thing!  He couldn’t miss it.  She ran upstairs in search of a pin.  On Philip’s dressing-table she saw a bunch of keys.  She picked them up and looked at them, frowning.  ‘The idiot’s forgotten his latch-key.  How will he get in tonight?’  The noise of a taxi under the window suggested a solution.  She hurried down, pinned the note and the telegram conspicuously to the screen that shut off the drawing-room part of the living-room from the door and let herself out into the mews.  Spandrell was standing at the door of the cab.

      ‘That is kind of you,’ she said.  ‘But I haven’t finished exploiting you even now.’  She held up the keys.  ‘When you see Philip this evening, give him these and tell him with my love that he’s an imbecile.  He wouldn’t have been able to get in without them.’  Spandrell took the keys in silence.  ‘And tell him why I’ve gone and that I’m expecting him tomorrow.’  She got into the cab.  ‘And don’t forget to ring up Webley.  Before six.  Because he was supposed to be meeting me here at six.’

      ‘Here?’ he asked with an expression of sudden interest and curiosity which Elinor found rather offensive and embarrassing.  Was he imagining something, was he daring to suppose …?’

      ‘Yes, here,’ she nodded curtly.

      ‘I won’t forget,’ he assured her emphatically, and there was still something about his expression which made her suspect a private significance behind the obvious words.

      ‘Thank you,’ said Elinor, without cordiality.  ‘And now I must fly.’  She gave the word to the driver.  The taxi backed up the mews, under the archway, turned and was gone.

      Spandrell walked slowly up to Hyde Park Corner.  From the public call-box in the station he telephoned to Illidge.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Everard Webley was striding about the room, dictating.  Sedentary composition he found impossible.  ‘How do people write when they’re grafted to chairs all day long, year in year out?’  He found it incomprehensible.  ‘When I’m sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, I become like the furniture I’ve combined myself with – mere wood and stuffing.  My mind doesn’t move unless my muscles move.’  On days when his correspondence was large, when there were articles to dictate, speeches to compose, Everard’s working day was an eight-hour walking tour.  ‘Doing the lion,’ was how his secretary described his methods of dictation.  He was doing the lion now – the restless lion, a little before feeding time – pacing from wall to wall of his big bare office.

      ‘Remember,’ he was saying, frowning, as he spoke, at the grey carpet; under his secretary’s pencil the shorthand scurried across the page, ‘remember that the final authority is in all cases mine and that, so long as I remain at the head of the B.B.F., every attempt at insubordination will be promptly and ruthlessly suppressed.  Yours etcetera.’  He was silent and, walking back to his desk from the spot where the conclusion of his thoughtful and leonine pacing had left him, he turned over the scattered papers.  ‘That seems to be all,’ he said and looked at his watch.  It was just after a quarter to six.  ‘Have these last letters ready for me in the morning,’ he went on.  ‘I’ll sign them then.’  He took his hat from the peg.  ‘Good evening.’  And, slamming the door, he descended the stairs two at a time.  Outside the house he found his chauffeur waiting with the car.  It was a powerful machine (for Everard was a lover of furious driving) and, since he also enjoyed the sensation of battling with the weather and the wind of his own speed, open.  A tightly-stretched waterproof sheet covered the whole of the back part of the touring body like a deck, leaving only the two front seats available for passengers.  ‘I shan’t need you any more this evening,’ he said to the chauffeur, as he settled into the driver’s seat.  ‘You can go.’

      He touched the self-starter, threw the car into gear and shot off with a violent impetuosity.  Several dozens of horses were bottled in the three litres of Everard’s cylinders; he liked to make them work their hardest.  Full speed ahead and then, a yard from the impending accident, jam on the brakes, that was his method.  Driving with Everard in town was almost too exciting.  Elinor had protested the last time he took her out.  ‘I don’t so much mind dying,’ she had said.  ‘But I really should object to passing the rest of my life with two wooden legs and a broken nose.’  He had laughed.  ‘You’re quite safe with me.  I don’t have accidents.’  ‘You’re above such things, are you?’ she had mocked.  ‘Well, if you like to put it like that …’  The brakes were applied with such violence that Elinor had had to clutch at the arms of her seat to prevent herself from being thrown against the windscreen.  ‘Imbecile,’ he had shouted at the bewildered old gentleman whose hen-like indecisions in the roadway had so nearly landed him under Everard’s Dunlops.  ‘If you like to put it like that –‘ and the car had shot forward again with a jerk that flattened Elinor against the back of her seat – ‘you may.  I don’t have accidents.  I manufacture my own luck.’

      Remembering the incident, Everard smiled to himself as he drove along Oxford Street.  A railway delivery van held up his progress.  Horses oughtn’t to be allowed in the street.  ‘Either you take me,’ he would say to her, ‘and in the end that means you’ll have to make the thing public – leave Philip and come to me’ – (for he intended to be entirely honest with her; there were to be no false pretences of any kind); ‘either that, or else …’  There was an opportunity to pass the delivery van; he pressed the accelerator and darted forward with a swerve to the right and another, past the nose of the old and patiently trotting horse, to the left again.  ‘Or else we don’t see one another again.’  It was to be an ultimatum.  Brutal.  But Everard hated situations that were neither one thing nor the other.  He preferred definite knowledge, however unpleasant, to even the most hopefully blissful of uncertainties.  And in this case the uncertainty wasn’t at all blissful.  At the entry to Oxford Circus a policeman lifted his hand.  It was seven minutes to six.  She was too squeamish, he thought, looking round, too sensitive about these new buildings.  Everard found nothing displeasing in the massively florid baroque of modern commerce.  It was vigorous and dramatic; it was large, it was expensive, it symbolized progress.  ‘But it’s so revoltingly vulgar!’ she had protested.  ‘But it’s difficult,’ he had answered, ‘not to be vulgar when one isn’t dead.  You object to these people doing things.  And I agree: doing things is rather vulgar.’  She had the typical consumer’s point of view, not the producer’s.  The policeman dropped his hand.  Slowly at first, but with gathering impetus, the pent-up flood of traffic rumbled forward.  A luxury mind – that was what she had; not a necessity mind.  A mind that thought of the world only in terms of beauty and enjoyment, not of use; a mind preoccupied with sensations and shades of feeling, and preoccupied with them for their own sake, not because sharp eyes and intuition are necessary in the struggle for life.  Indeed, she hardly knew that there was a struggle.  He ought to have disapproved of her; and he would have disapproved (Everard smiled to himself as he made the reflection) if he hadn’t been in love with her.  He would have … Flop! From the roof of a passing ‘bus a banana skin fell like a draggled starfish on to the bonnet in front of him.  A whoop of laughter sounded through the roaring.  Lifting his eyes he saw two young girls looking down at him over the rail, open-mouthed, like a pair of pretty little gargoyles, and laughing, laughing as though there had never been a joke in the world before that moment.  Everard shook his fist at them and laughed too.  How much Elinor would have enjoyed that! he thought.  She who so loved the streets and their comedies.  What an eye she had for the odd, the amusing, the significant!  Where he perceived only a mass of undifferentiated humanity, she distinguished individuals.  And her talent for inventing life histories for her once-glimpsed oddities was no less remarkable than her detecting eye.  She would have known all about those young girls – their class, the sort of homes they came from, where they bought their clothes and how much they paid for them, whether they were still virtuous, what books they read, and which were their favourite cinema actors.  Imagining to himself what Elinor would have said, remembering her laughter and the look in her eyes and her tricks of speech, he was suddenly filled with so much tenderness, such a violent yet delicately affectionate longing to be with her, that he could hardly bare to be separated from her for even a moment longer.  He hooted at the taxi in front of him, he tried to thrust past on the right.  An obstructing street island compelled him to fall back, but not before the taxi-driver had had time to throw doubts on his legitimacy, his heterosexuality and his prospects of happiness in another world.  With as much gusto and incomparably more originality, Everard swore back.  He felt himself overflowing with life, extraordinarily vigorous and strong, inexplicably and (but for the fact that it would be at least five minutes before he saw Elinor) perfectly happy.  Yes, perfectly happy; for he knew (with what calm conviction!) that she would say yes, that she loved him.  And his happiness became more intense, more poignant and at the same time more serene, as he swung round past the Marble Arch into the Park.  His prophetic conviction deepened into something like remembered certainty, as though the future were already history.  The sun was low and wherever its rosily golden light touched earth, it was as if a premature and more luminous autumn had fired the leaves and grass.  Great shafts of powdery radiance leaned down from the west between the trees and in the shadows the twilight was a mist of lavender, a mist of blue and darkening indigo, plane after plane into the hazy London distance.  And the couples strolling across the grass, the children playing were alternately eclipsed and transfigured as they passed from shade to sunlight, were alternately insignificant and brilliantly miraculous.  It was as though a capricious god, now bored and now enchanted by his creatures, had turned upon them at one moment an eye of withering indifference and at the next, with his love, had bestowed upon them some of his own divinity.  The road stretched clear and polished before him; but Everard hardly exceeded the speed limit – in spite of his longing; in a sense because he loved her so much.  For it was all so beautiful; and where beauty was, there too, for Everard, by some private logic, some personal necessity, was Elinor.  She was with him now, because she would have enjoyed this loveliness so much.  And because she would have wanted to prolong the pleasure, he crept along.  The engine was turning at a bare fifteen hundred revolutions a minute; the dynamo was hardly charging.  A Baby Austin passed him as though he were standing still.  Let them pass!  Everard was thinking of the phrases in which he would describe to her this marvel.  Through the railings, the ‘buses in Park Lane blazed scarlet and glittered like triumphal cars in a pageant.  Faintly, through the noise of the traffic, a clock struck six; and before it had finished, another chimed in, melodious, sweet and with a touch of melancholy – the very voice of the bright evening and of his happiness.  And now, for all his creeping, the marble gateways of Hyde Park Corner were before him.  Offered, in spite of the nakedness and the more than Swedish development of his abdominal muscles, by the Ladies of England to the Victor of Waterloo, the bronze Achilles, whose flesh had once been Napoleon’s cannons, stood with shield raised, sword brandished, menacing and defending himself against the pale and empty sky.  It was almost regretfully, though he longed to be at his journey’s end, that Everard left the Park.  Once more the towering ‘buses roared before him and behind.  Rounding the archipelago of islands he vowed that tomorrow, if Elinor said Yes, he would send five pounds to St George’s Hospital.  He knew she would.  The money was as good as given already.  He turned out of Grosvenor Place; the roaring faded behind him.  Belgrave Square was an oasis of trees; the starling chattered in a rural silence.  Everard turned once, twice and yet again.  On the left, between the houses, was an archway.  He passed it by a yard or two, stopped and, pulling the wheel over, backed under it into the mews, back, back to the very end of the blind alley.  He stopped the car and got out.  How charming the yellow curtains looked!  His heart was beating very fast.  He felt as he had felt when he made his first speech, half-frightened, half-exultant.  Mounting the doorstep, he knocked and waited twenty heartbeats; the house gave forth no answering sound.  He knocked again and, remembering what Elinor had told him of her terrors, accompanied the rap with a whistle and, as though in answer to an unspoken challenge of her fears, a call of ‘Friend!’  And then, suddenly, he noticed that the door was not latched, but only ajar.  He pushed; it swung open.  Everard stepped over the threshold.

      ‘Elinor!’ he called, thinking that she must be upstairs.  ‘Elinor!’

      There was still no answer.  Or was she playing a joke?  Would she suddenly pounce out at him from behind one of the screens?  He smiled to himself at the thought and was advancing to explore the silent root, when his eye was caught by the papers pinned so conspicuously to a panel of the screen on the right.  He approached and had just begun to read, ‘The accompanying telegram will explain …’ when a sound behind him made him turn his head.  A man was standing within four feet of him, his hands raised; the club which they grasped had already begun to swing sideways and forward from over the right shoulder.  Everard threw up his arm, too late.  The blow caught him on the left temple.  It was as though a light had suddenly been turned out.  He was not even conscious of falling.

 

 *     *     *     *

 

      Mrs Quarles kissed her son.  ‘Dear Phil,’ she said.  ‘It’s good of you to have come so quickly!’

      ‘You’re not looking very well, mother.’

      ‘A little tired, that’s all.  And worried,’ she added after a moment’s pause and with a sigh.

      ‘Worried?’

      ‘About your father.  ‘He’s not well,’ she went on, speaking slowly and as if with reluctance.  ‘He wanted very specially to see you.  That was why I wired.’

      ‘He isn’t dangerously ill?’

      ‘Not physically,’ Mrs Quarles replied.  ‘But his nerves … It’s a kind of breakdown.  He’s very excited.  Very unstable.’

      ‘But what’s the cause?’

      Mrs Quarles was silent.  And when at last she spoke it was with an obvious effort, as though each word had to force its way past some inward barrier.  Her sensitive face was fixed and strained.  ‘Something has happened to upset him,’ she said.  ‘He’s had a great shock.’  And slowly, word by word, the story came out.

      Bent forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, Philip listened.  After a first glance at his mother’s face, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground.  He felt that to look at her, to meet her eyes would be the infliction of an unnecessary embarrassment.  Speaking was already a pain to her and a humiliation; let her at least speak unseen, as though there were nobody there to witness her distress.  His averted eyes left her a kind of spiritual privacy.  Word after word, in a colourless soft voice, Mrs Quarles talked on.  Incident succeeded sordid incident.  When she began to tell the story of Glady’s visit of two days before, Philip could not bare to listen any longer.  It was too humiliating for her; he could not permit her to go on.

      ‘Yes, yes, I can imagine,’ he said, interrupting her.  And jumping up, he limped with quick nervous steps to the window.  ‘Don’t go on.’  He stood there for a minute, looking out at the lawn and the thick yew-tree walls and the harvest-coloured hills beyond, on the further side of the valley.  The scene was almost exasperatingly placid.  Philip turned, limped back across the room and standing for a moment behind his mother’s chair laid a hand on her shoulder; then walked away again.

      ‘Don’t think about it any more,’ he said.  ‘I’ll do whatever has to be done.’  He looked forward with an enormous distaste to loud and undignified scenes, to disputes and vulgar hagglings.  ‘Perhaps I’d better go and see father,’ he suggested.

      Mrs Quarles nodded.  ‘He was very anxious to see you.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I don’t quite know.  But he’s been insisting.’

      ‘Does he talk about … well, this business?’

      ‘No.  Never mentions it.  I have the impression that he forgets about it deliberately.’

      ‘Then I’d better not speak about it.’

      ‘Not unless he begins,’ Mrs Quarles advised.  ‘Mostly he talks about himself.  About the past, about his health – pessimistically.  You must try to cheer him.’  Philip nodded.  ‘And humour him,’ his mother went on; ‘don’t contradict.  He easily flares up.  It isn’t good for him to get excited.’

      Philip listened.  As though he were a dangerous animal, he was thinking; or a naughty child.  The misery of it, the anxiety, the humiliation for his mother!

      ‘And don’t stay too long,’ she added.

      Philip left her.  The fool, he said to himself as he crossed the hall, the damned fool!  The sudden anger and contempt with which he thought of his father were tempered by no previous affection.  Neither, for that matter, were they exacerbated by any previous hatred.  Up to this time Philip had neither loved nor disliked his father.  Unreflectingly tolerant or, at the worst, with a touch of amused resignation, he had just accepted his existence.  There was nothing in his memories of childhood to justify more positive emotions.  As a father, Mr Quarles had shown himself no less erratic and no less ineffectual than as a politician or as a man of business.  Brief periods of enthusiastic interest in his children had alternated with long periods during which he almost ignored their existence.  Philip and his brother had preferred him during the seasons of neglect; for he had ignored them benevolently.  They liked him less when he was interested in their well-being.  For the interest was generally not so much in the children as in a theory of education or hygiene.  After meeting an eminent doctor, after reading the latest book on pedagogical methods, Mr Quarles would wake up to the discovery that, unless something were drastically done, his sons were likely to grow up into idiots and cripples, weak-minded and with bodies poisoned by the wrong food and distorted by improper exercise.  And then, for a few weeks, the two boys would be stuffed with raw carrots or overdone beef (it depended on the doctor Mr Quarles happened to have met); would be drilled, or taught folk-dancing or eurhythmics; would be made to learn poetry by rote (if it happened to be the memory that was important at the moment) or else (if it happened to be the ratiocinative faculties) would be turned out into the garden, told to plant sticks in the lawn and, by measuring the shadow at different hours of the day, discover for themselves the principles of trigonometry.  While the fit lasted, life for the two boys was almost intolerable.  And if Mrs Quarles protested, Sidney flew into a rage and told her that she was a selfishly doting mother, to whom the true welfare of her children meant nothing.  Mrs Quarles did not insist too strongly; for she knew that, thwarted, Sidney would probably become more obstinate; humoured, he would forget his enthusiasm.  And in fact, after a few weeks, Sidney would duly tire of labours which produced no quick and obvious results.  His hygiene had not made the boys perceptibly larger or stronger; they had not grown appreciably more intelligent for his pedagogy.  All that they quite indubitably were was a daily and hourly bore. ‘Affairs of greater moment’ would occupy more and more of his attention, until gradually, like the Cheshire cat, he had faded altogether out of the world of the schoolroom and the nursery into higher and more comfortable spheres.  The boys settled down again to happiness.

      Arrested at the door of his father’s room by the sounds from within, Philip listened.  His face took on an expression of anxiety, even of alarm.  That voice?  And his father, he had been told, was alone.  Talking to himself?  Was he as bad as all that?  Bracing himself, Philip opened the door and was immediately reassured to find that what he had taken for insanity was only dictation to the dictaphone.  Propped up on pillows, Mrs Quarles was half-sitting, half-lying in his bed.  His face, his very scalp were flushed and shining, and his pink silk pyjamas were like an intensified continuation of the same fever.  The dictaphone stood on the table by his bed; Mr Quarles was talking into the mouthpiece of its flexible speaking-tube.  ‘True greatness,’ he was saying sonorously, ‘is inversely proportional to myah immediate success.  Ah, hyah you are!’ he cried, looking round as the door opened.  He stopped the clockwork of the machine, hung up the speaking-tube and stretched out a welcoming hand.  Simple gestures.  But there was something, it seemed to Philip, extravagant about all his movements.  It was as though he were on the stage.  The eyes which he turned on Philip were unnaturally bright.  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come.  So glad, dyah boy.’  He patted Philip’s hand; the loud voice suddenly trembled.

      Unused to such demonstrations, Philip was embarrassed.  ‘Well, how are you feeling?’ he asked with an assumption of cheeriness.

      Mr Quarles shook his head and pressed his son’s hand without speaking.  Philip was more than ever embarrassed at seeing that the tears had come into his eyes.  How could one go on hating and being angry?’

      ‘But you’ll be all right,’ he said, trying to be reassuring.  ‘It’s just a question of resting for a bit.’

      Mr Quarles tightened the clasp of his hand.  ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said.  ‘But I feel that the end’s nyah.’

      ‘But that’s nonsense, father.  You mustn’t talk like that.’

      ‘Nyah,’ Mr Quarles repeated, obstinately nodding, ‘very nyah.  That’s why I’m so glad you’re hyah.  I should have been unhappah to die when you were at the other end of the wahld.  But with you hyah, I feel I can go’ – his voice trembled again – ‘quite contentedlah.’  Once more he squeezed Philip’s hand.  He was convinced that he had always been a devoted father, living for nothing but his children.  And so he had been, every now and then.  ‘Yes, quite contentedlah.’  He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and while he was doing so surreptitiously wiped his eyes.

      ‘But you’re not going to die.’

      ‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Quarles insisted.  ‘I can feel it.’  He genuinely did feel it; he believed he was going to die, because there was at least a part of his mind that desired to die.  These complications of the last weeks had been too much for him; and the future promised to be worse, if that were possible.  To fade out, painlessly – that would be the best solution of all his problems.  He wished, he believed; and, believing in his approaching death, he pitied himself as a victim and at the same time admired himself for the resigned nobility with which he supported his fate.

      ‘But you’re not going to die,’ Philip duly insisted, not knowing what consolation, beyond mere denial, to offer.  He had no gift for dealing extempore with the emotional situations of practical life.  ‘There’s nothing …’ He was going to say, ‘There’s nothing the matter with you’; but checked himself, reflecting, before it was too late, that his father might be offended.

      ‘Let’s say no more about it.’  Mr Quarles spoke tartly; there was a look of annoyance in his eye.  Philip remembered what his mother had said about humouring him.  He kept silence.  ‘One can’t quarrel with Destinah,’ Mr Quarles went on in another tone.  ‘Destinah,’ he repeated with a sigh.  ‘You’ve been fortunate, dyah boy; you discovered your vocation from the farst.  Fate has treated you well.’

      Philip nodded.  He had often thought so himself, with a certain apprehension even.  He had an obscure belief in nemesis.

      ‘Whereas in my case …’ Mr Quarles did not finish the sentence, but raised his hand and let it fall again, hopelessly, on to the coverlet.  ‘I wasted yahs of my life on false scents.  Yahs and yahs before I discovered my ryahl bent.  A philosopher’s wasted on practical affairs.  He’s even absard.  Like what’s-his-name’s albatross.  You know.’

      Philip was puzzled.  ‘Do you mean the one in The Ancient Mariner?’

      ‘No, no,’ said Mr Quarles impatiently.  ‘That Frenchman.’

      ‘Oh, of course.’  Philip had caught the reference.  ‘Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées.  Baudelaire, you mean.’

      ‘Baudelaire, of course.’

     

                                                  ‘Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,

                                                  Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher,’

 

Philip quoted, glad to be able to divert the conversation if only for a moment from personalities to literature.

      He father was delighted.  ‘Exactlah!’ he cried triumphantly.  ‘It’s the same with philosophers.  Their wings prevent them from walking.  For tharty yahs I tried to be a walker – in politics, in business.  I didn’t ryahlize that my place was in the air, not on the ground.  In the air!’ he repeated, raising his arm.  ‘I had wings.’  He agitated his hand in a rapid tremolo.  ‘Wings, and didn’t know it.’  His voice had grown louder, his eyes brighter, his face pinker and more shiny.  His whole person expressed such an excitement, such restlessness and exaltation, that Philip was seriously disquieted.

      ‘Hadn’t you better rest a little?’ he anxiously suggested.

      Mr Quarles disregarded the interruption.  ‘Wings, wings,’ he cried.  ‘I had wings and if I’d ryahlized it as a young man, what heights I might have flown to!  But I tried to walk.  In the mud.  For tharty yahs.  Only after tharty yahs did I discover that I was meant to be flying.  And now I must give up almost before I’ve begun.’  He sighed and, leaning back against his pillows, he shot the words almost perpendicularly up into the air.  ‘My work unfinished.  My dreams unryahlized.  Fate’s been hard.’

      ‘But you’ll have all the time you need to finish your work.’

      ‘No, no,’ Mr Quarles insisted, shaking his head.  He wanted to be one of fate’s martyrs, to be able to point to himself and say: There, but for the malignity of providence, goes Aristotle.  Destiny’s unkindness justified everything – his failure in sugar, in politics, in farming, the coldness with which his first book and been received, the indefinite delay in the appearance of the second; it even justified in some not easily explicable fashion his having put Gladys in a family way.  To be a seducer of servants, secretaries, peasant girls was part of his unhappy destiny.  And now that, to crown the edifice of his misfortune, he was about to die (prematurely but stoically, like the noblest Roman of them all), how trivial, how wretchedly insignificant was this matter of lost virginities and impending babies!  And how unseemly, at the philosophic deathbed, was all the outcry!  But he could only ignore it on condition that this was genuinely his deathbed and that destiny was universally admitted to have been cruel.  A martyred philosopher on the point of death was justified in refusing to be bothered with Gladys and her baby.  That was why (though the reason was felt not formulated) Mr Quarles repudiated, so vigorously and even with annoyance, his son’s consoling assurances of long life; that was why he arraigned malignant providence and magnified with even more than his ordinary self-complaisance the talents which providence had prevented him from using.

      ‘No, no, dyah boy,’ he repeated.  ‘I shall never finish. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to have a talk with you.’

      Philip looked at him with a certain apprehension.  What was coming next? he wondered.  There was a little silence.

      ‘One doesn’t want to shuffle off entirely unrecorded,’ said Mr Quarles in a voice made husky be a recrudescence of self-pity.  ‘Shyahr extinction – it’s difficult to face.’  Before his mind’s eye the void expanded, lampless and abysmal.  Death.  It might be the end of his troubles; but in was none the less appalling.  ‘You understand the feeling?’ he asked.

      ‘Perfectly,’ said Philip, ‘perfectly.  But in your case, father …’ Mr Quarles who had been blowing his nose again raised a protesting hand.  ‘No, no.’  He had made up his mind that he was going to die; it was useless for anyone to attempt to dissuade him.  ‘But if you understand my feeling, that’s all that matters.  I can depart in peace with the knowledge that you won’t allow all memory of me to disappyah completely.  Dyah boy, you shall be my literary executor.  There are some fragments of my writing …’

      ‘The book on democracy?’ asked Philip, who saw himself being called upon to complete the largest work on the subject yet produced.  His father’s answer took a load off his mind.

      ‘No, not that,’ Mr Quarles hastily replied.  ‘Only the bare matyahrials of that book exist.  And to a great extent not on paper.  Only in my mind.  In fact,’ he went on, ‘I was just going to tell you that I wanted all my notes for the big book destroyed.  Without being looked at.  They’re myah jottings.  Meaningless except to me.’  Mr Quarles was not anxious that the emptiness of his files and the prevailing blankness of the cards in his card-index should be posthumously discovered and commented on.  ‘They must all be destroyed, do you understand?’

      Philip made no protest.

      ‘What I wanted to entrust to you dyah boy,’ Mr Quarles went on, ‘was a collection of more intimate fragments.  Reflections on life, records of pahsonal expyahriences.  Things like that.’

      Philip nodded.  ‘I see.’

      ‘I’ve been jotting them down for a long time past,’ said Mr Quarles.  ‘Memories and Reflections of Fifty Yahs – that might be a good title.  There’s a lot in my notebooks.  And these last days I’ve been recording on this.’  He tapped the dictaphone.  ‘When one’s ill, you know, one thinks a lot.’  He sighed.  ‘Syahriously.’

      ‘Of course,’ Philip agreed.

      ‘If you’d care to listen …’ he indicated the dictaphone.

      Philip nodded.  Mr Quarles prepared the machine.  ‘It’ll give you an idyah of the kind of thing.  Thoughts and memories.  Hyah.’  He pushed the machine across the table and, pushing, sent a piece of paper fluttering to the ground.  It lay there on the carpet, chequered, a puzzle.  ‘This is where you listen.’

      Philip listened.  After a moment of scratchy roaring, the Punch and Judy parody of his father’s voice said, ‘The key to the problem of sex: - passion is sacred, a manifestation of the divinitah.’  And then, without stop or transition, but in a slightly different tone: ‘The wahrst thing about politics is the frivolitah of politicians.  Meeting Asquith one evening at dinner, I forget now where, I took the opportunitah of ahrging on him the necessitah of abolishing capital punishment.  One of the most syahrious questions of modern life.  But he myahrly suggested that we should go and play bridge.  Unit of measure seven metres long: Verchok.  Fastidious men do not live in pigsties, nor can they long remain in politics or business.  There are nature’s Greeks and nature’s Mrs Grundies.  I never shared the mob’s high opinion of Lloyd George.  Every man is born with a natural right to be happy; but what ferocious repression when anybody tried to claim his right!  Brazilian stork, six letters: jabiru.  True greatness is inversely proportional to myahr immediate success.  Ah, hyah you …!’  The scratchy roar supervened.

      ‘Yes, I see the style of the thing,’ said Philip, looking up.  ‘How does one stop this affair?  Ah, that’s it.’  He stopped it.

      ‘So many thoughts occur to me as I lie hyah,’ said Mr Quarles, aimed upwards, as though speaking against aircraft.  ‘Such a wealth!  I could never record them all but for the machine.  It’s wonderful.  Ryahly wonderful!’