CHAPTER XXXIII
Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for
her at the station. ‘How is he?’ she
asked the chauffeur. But Paxton was
vague, didn’t rightly know. Privately,
he thought it was one of those ridiculous fusses about nothing, such as the
rich are always making, particularly where their children are concerned. They drove up to Gattenden
and the landscape of the Chilterns in the ripe evening light was so serenely
beautiful, that Elinor began to feel less anxious and
even half wished that she had stayed till the last train. She would have been able in that case to see Webley. But hadn’t
she decided that she was really almost glad not to be seeing him? One can be glad and sorry at the same
time. Passing the north entrance to the
Park, she had a glimpse through the bars of Lord Gattenden’s
bath-chair standing just inside the gate.
The ass had stopped and was eating grass at the side of the road the
reins hung loose and the marquess was too deeply
absorbed in a thick red morocco quarto to be able to think of driving. The car hurried on; but that second’s glimpse
of the old man sitting with his book behind the grey donkey, as she had so
often seen him sitting and reading; that brief revelation of life living itself
regularly, unvaryingly in the same old familiar way, was as reassuring as the
calm loveliness of beech-trees and bracken, of green-golden foreground and
violet distances.
And there
at last was the Hall! The old house
seemed to doze in the westering sun like a basking
animal; you could almost fancy that it purred.
And the lawn was like the most expensive green velvet; and in the
windless air the huge Wellingtonia had all the
dignified gravity of an old gentleman who sits down to meditate after an
enormous meal. There could be nothing
much wrong here. She jumped out of the
car and ran straight upstairs to the nursery.
Phil was lying in bed, quite still and with closed eyes. Miss Fulkes, who
was sitting beside him, turned as she entered, rose and came to meet her. One glance at her face was enough to convince
Elinor that the blue and golden tranquillity of the
landscape, the dozing house, the marquess and his ass
had been lying comforters. ‘All’s well,’ they had seemed to say. ‘Everything’s going on as usual.’ But Miss Fulkes
looked pale and frightened, as though she had seen a ghost.
‘What’s the
matter?’ Elinor whispered with a sudden return of all
her anxiety, and before Miss Fulkes had time to
answer, ‘Is he asleep?’ she added. If he
were asleep, she was thinking, it was a good sign; he looked as though he were
asleep.
But Miss Fulkes shook her head.
The gesture was superfluous. For the question was hardly out of Elinor’s
mouth, when the child made a sudden spasmodic movement under the sheets. His face contracted with pain. He uttered a little whimpering moan.
‘His head
hurts him so much,’ said Miss Fulkes. There was a look of terror and misery in her
eyes.
‘Go and
have a rest,’ said Elinor.
Miss Fulkes hesitated, shook her head. ‘I’d like to be useful …’
Elinor insisted.
‘You’ll be more useful when you’ve rested …’ She saw Miss Fulkes’s lips trembling, her eyes growing suddenly bright
with tears.
‘Go along,’
she said and pressed her arm consolingly.
Miss Fulkes obeyed with a sudden alacrity. She was afraid that she might start crying
before she got to her room.
Elinor sat down by the bed.
She took the little hand that lay on the turned-back sheet,
she pressed her fingers through the child’s pale hair caressingly,
soothingly. ‘Sleep,’ she whispered, as
her fingers caressed him, ‘sleep, sleep.’ But the child still stirred uneasily; and
every now and then his face was distorted with sudden pain; he shook his head,
as though trying to shake off the thing that was hurting him, he uttered his
little whimpering moan. And bending over
him, Elinor felt as though he heart were being
crushed within her breast, as though a hand were at her throat, choking her.
‘My
darling,’ she said beseechingly, imploring him not to suffer, ‘my darling.’
And she
pressed the small hand more tightly, she let her palm
rest more heavily on his hot forehead, as if to stifle the pain or at least to
steady the shuddering little body against its attacks. And all her will commanded the pain to cease
under her fingers, to come out of him – out of him, through her fingers, into
her own body. But still he fidgeted
restlessly in his bed, turning his head from one side to the other, now drawing
up his legs, now straightening them out with a sharp spasmodic kick under the
sheets. And still the pain returned,
stabbing; and the face made it grimace of agony, the parted lips gave utterance
to the little whimpering cry, again and again.
She stroked his forehead, she whispered tender words. And that was all she could do. The sense of her helplessness suffocated
her. At her throat and heart the
invisible hands tightened their grip.
‘How do you
find him?’ asked Mrs Bidlake, when her daughter came
down.
Elinor did not answer, but turned away her face. The question had brought the tears rushing
into her eyes. Mrs Bidlake
put her arms round her and kissed her. Elinor hid her face against her mother’s shoulder. ‘You must be strong,’ she kept saying to
herself. ‘You mustn’t cry, mustn’t break
down. Be strong. To help him.’ Her mother held her more closely. The physical contact comforted her, gave her
the strength for which she was praying.
She made an effort of will and with a deep intaken
breath swallowed down the sobs in her throat.
She looked up at her mother and gratefully smiled. Her lips still trembled a little; but the
will had conquered.
‘I’m
stupid,’ she said apologetically. ‘I
couldn’t help it. It’s so horrible to
see him suffer. Helplessly. It’s dreadful. Even if one knows that it’ll be all right in
the end.’
Mrs Bidlake sighed.
‘Dreadful,’ she echoed, ‘dreadful,’ and closed her eyes in a meditative
perplexity. There was a silence. ‘By the way,’ she went on, opening them again
to look at her daughter, ‘I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don’t know
whether her influence is always entirely good.’
‘Miss Fulkes’s influence?’ said Elinor,
opening her eyes in astonishment. ‘But
she’s the nicest, the most conscientious …’
‘Oh, not
that, not that!’ said Mrs Bidlake hastily. ‘Her artistic influence, I mean. When I went up to see Phil the day before
yesterday I found her showing him such dreadfully vulgar pictures of a dog.’
‘Bonzo?’ suggested Elinor.
Her mother
nodded. ‘Yes, Bonzo.’ She
pronounced the word with a certain distaste. ‘If he wants pictures of animals, there are
such excellent reproductions of Persian miniatures at the
Suddenly
and uncontrollably, Elinor had begun to laugh. To laugh and to cry,
uncontrollably. Grief alone she
had been able to master. But grief
allied with Bonzo was irresistible. Something broke inside her and she found
herself sobbing with a violent, painful and hysterical laughter.
Mrs Bidlake helplessly patted her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ she kept repeating. ‘Elinor!’
Roused from
uneasy and nightmarish dozing, John Bidlake shouted
furiously from the library. ‘Stop that
cackling,’ commanded the angry-plaintive voice.
‘For God’s sake.’
But Elinor could not stop.
‘Screaming
like parrots,’ John Bidlake went on muttering to
himself.
‘Some idiotic joke.
When one isn’t well …’
* *
* *
‘Now, for
God’s sake,’ said Spandrell roughly, ‘pull yourself together.’
Illidge pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; he was
afraid of being sick. ‘I think I’ll lie
down for a moment,’ he whispered. But
when he tried to walk, it was as though his legs were dead under him. It might have been a paralytic who dragged
himself to the sofa.
‘What you
need is a mouthful of spirits,’ said Spandrell. He crossed the room. A bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard,
and from the kitchen he returned with glasses.
He poured out two fingers of the spirit.
‘Here. Drink this.’ Illidge took and
sipped. ‘One would think we were
crossing the Channel,’ Spandrell went on with
ferocious mockery, as he helped himself to brandy. ‘Study in green and ginger – that’s how
Whistler would have described you now. Apple-green. Moss-green.’
Illidge looked at him for a moment, then
turned away, unable to face the steady glance of those contemptuous grey
eyes. He had never felt such hatred as
he now felt for Spandrell.
‘Not to say
frog-green, slime-green, scum-green,’ the other went on.
‘Oh shut
up!’ cried Illidge in a voice that had recovered some
of its resonance and hardly wavered. Spandrell’s mockery had steadied his nerves. Hate, like brandy, is a stimulant. He took another burning gulp. There was silence.
‘When you
feel like it,’ said Spandrell, putting down his
emptied glass, ‘you can come and help me clear up.’ He rose and walked round the screen, out of
sight.
Everard Webley’s body was lying
where it had fallen, on its side, with the arms reaching out across the
floor. The chloroform-soaked
handkerchief still covered the face. Spandrell bent down and twitched it away. The temple which had been struck was against
the door; seen from above the face seemed unwounded.
His hands
in his pockets, Spandrell stood looking down at the
body.
‘Five
minutes ago,’ he said to himself, formulating his thoughts in words, that his
realization of their significance might be the more complete, ‘five minutes
ago, it was alive, it had a soul.
Alive,’ he repeated and balancing himself unsteadily on one leg, with
the other foot he touched the dead cheek, he pushed
forward the ear and let it flick back again.
‘A soul.’
And for a moment he allowed some of his weight to rest on what had been Everard Webley’s face. He withdrew his foot; the print of it
remained, dust-grey, on the white skin.
‘Trampling on a dead face,’ he said to himself. Why had he done it? ‘Trampling.’ He raised his foot again and pressed his heel
into the socket of the eye, gently, tentatively, as though experimenting with
outrage. ‘Like grapes,’ he thought. ‘Trampling wine out of
grapes.’ It was in his power to
trample this thing into a pulp. But he
had done enough. Symbolically, he had
trodden out the essential horror from his murder; it flowed from under his
trampling feet. The
essential horror? But it was more
stupid and disgusting than horrible.
Pushing the toe of his boot under the chin, he rolled the head over
until the face was looking up, open-mouthed and with half-shut eyes, at the
ceiling. Above and behind the left eye
was a huge red contusion. There were
trickles of blood on the left cheek, already dry, and where the forehead had
rested on the floor, a little poor – hardly even a pool – a smear.
‘Incredibly
little blood,’ said Spandrell aloud.
At the
sound of his calm voice Illidge violently started.
Spandrell withdrew his supporting foot. The dead face fell back with a little thump
on to its side.
‘It’s a
complete justification for Bishop Odo’s mace,’ he
went on dispassionately. That he should
find himself recalling, at this of all moments, the comical prancings
of that conscientious churchman in the
Illidge heard him walk into the kitchen. There was the gradually sharpening note of
water running into a pail. The tap was
turned off; there were footfalls; the bucket was set down with a metallic
clink.
‘Luckily,’ Spandrell went on, in comment on his last remark. ‘Or else I don’t know what we should have
done about the mess.’
Illidge listened with a strained and horrified attention to
the sounds that came to him from the other side of the screen. A limp and meaty thud: was that an arm lifted
and dropped? The
sibilant sliding of a soft and heavy object across the floor. Then the splash of water,
the homely noise of scrubbing.
And at these sounds, so incomparably more horrible, more profoundly
significant than any words, however brutal, however calmly cynical, that Spandrell could say, he felt a recrudescence of that
sinking, that heart-fluttering faintness of the first minutes, when the dead
man was lying there, still twitching, at his feet. He remembered, he
lived over again those moments of breathless and sick anticipation before the
horrible event. The noise of the car backing
down the street; the gritty scrape of feet on the doorstep, and then the knock,
and then a long, long silence of heartbeats and visceral creepings
and imaginative forebodings, of justifying thoughts of revolution and the
future, justifying hatred of oppression and the vileness of wealth. And at the same time ridiculous incongruous
recollections, as he crouched behind the screen, of those childish games of
hide-and-seek on school-treat days, among the gorse and juniper bushes of the
common. ‘One, two, three …’; the seekers convered their
faces and began to count their hundred, aloud; the hiders scattered. You thrust yourself into a prickly bush, you
lay in the bracken. Then came the shout
of ‘ninety-nine, a hundred, Cooee!’;
and the seekers were off, were after you.
And the excitement was so painfully intense, as you crouched or squatted
in your lair, peeping, listening for a chance to make a bolt for Home, that you
felt an almost irrepressible desire to ‘do something’, though something had
been done, behind the junipers, only five minutes before. Absurd memories! And because absurd, dreadful! For the hundredth time he felt in his pocket
to make sure that the bottle of chloroform was still there and safely
corked. The second knock startlingly
resounded and, with it, the whistle and that humorous call (you could hear,
from the tone of his voice, that he was smiling) of ‘Friend!’ Behind his screen Illidge
had shuddered. ‘Friend!’ And remembering now, he shuddered again, more
violently, with all the shame and horror and humiliation which he had had no
time then to feel. No time; for before
his mind could realize all the implications upon implications of that laughing
call, the door had creaked on its hinges there was the noise of feet on the
boards, and Webley was shouting Elinor’s
name. (Illidge
suddenly found himself wondering if he had been in love with her). ‘Elinor!’ There followed a silence; Webley
had seen the note. Illidge
had heard his breathing, only a foot or two away, on the other side of the
screen. And then there was the rustle of
a quick movement, the beginning of an exclamation and that sudden dry
concussion, like the noise of a slap, but duller, deader and at the same time
much louder. There followed a fraction
of a second’s silence, then the noise of falling – not a single sound, but a
series of noises spread over an appreciable period of time; the bony collapse
of the knees, the scrape of shoes sliding away across the polished floor, the
muffled thud of the body and arms, and the sharp hard rap of the head against
the boards. ‘Quick!’ had come the sound
of Spandrell’s voice, and he had darted out of his
hiding-place. ‘Chloroform.’ Obediently, he had soaked the handkerchief,
he had spread it over the twitching face … He shuddered again, he took another
sip of brandy.
The sound
of scrubbing was succeeded by the squelch of a wetted cloth.
‘There,’
said Spandrell, appearing round the screen. He was drying his hands on a duster. ‘And how’s the invalid?’ he added in the parody
of a bedside manner, smiling ironically.
Illidge averted his face.
The hatred flared up in him, expelling for the moment every other
emotion. ‘I’m all right,’ he said
curtly.
‘Just taking it easy while I do the dirty work. Is that it?’
Spandrell threw the duster on to a chair and
began to turn down his shirt cuffs.
In two
hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax
only eight thousand times. The earth
travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And the prickly pear has had time to invade
only another hundred acres of Australian territory. Two hours are as nothing. The time to listen to the Ninth Symphony and
a couple of the posthumous quartets, to fly from London to Paris, to transfer a
luncheon from the stomach to the small intestine, to read Macbeth, to
die of snake bite or earn one-and-eight-pence as a charwoman. No more.
But to Illidge, as he sat waiting, with the
dead body lying there behind the screen, waiting for the darkness, they seemed
unending.
‘Are you an
idiot?’ asked Spandrell, when he had suggested that
they should go away at once and leave the thing lying there. ‘Or are you particularly anxious to die of
hanging?’ The sneer, the cool ironic amusement were maddening to Illidge. ‘It would be found tonight when Philip came
home.’
‘But
Quarles hasn’t got a key,’ said Illidge.
‘Then
tomorrow, as soon as he’d got hold of a locksmith. And three hours later, when Elinor had explained what she had done with the key, the
police would be knocking at my door. And
I promise you, they’d knock at yours very soon afterwards.’ He smiled at Illidge,
who averted his eyes. ‘No,’ Spandrell went on, ‘Webley’s got
to be taken away. And with his car
standing outside, it’s child’s play, if we wait till after dark.’
‘But it
won’t be dark for another two hours.’ Illidge’s voice was shrill with anger and complaint.
‘Well, what
of it?’
‘Why …’ Illidge began and checked himself; he realized that if he
was going to answer truthfully, he would have to say that he didn’t want to
stay those two hours because he was frightened.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s
stay.’ Spandrell
picked up the silver cigarette box, opened and sniffed. ‘They smell very nice,’ he said. ‘Have one.’
He pushed the box across the table.
‘And there are lots of books. And The Times.
And the New Statesman. And the latest number of Vogue. It’s positively a dentist’s
waiting-room. And we might even make
ourselves a cup of tea.’ The time of
waiting began. Heartbeat followed
heartbeat. Each second the earth
travelled twenty miles and the prickly pears covered another five rods of
Australian ground. Behind the screen lay
the body. Thousands upon thousands of
minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their
mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had
been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the
component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have
perished. And meanwhile, from the air,
the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun
their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they
would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all
the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and
complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was
finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little
phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts –
all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world – would be all that
remained of Everard Webley’s
ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his
thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and
good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating
smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of
whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his
belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable
determinations and his knowledge of Russian.
Illidge turned over the advertisement pages of Vogue. A young lady in a fur coat priced at two
hundred guineas was stepping into a motor car; on the opposite page another
young lady in nothing but a towel was stepping out of a bath impregnated with
Dr Vergruggen’s Reducing Salts. There followed a still-life of scent bottles
containing Songe Nègre
and the maker’s latest creation, Relent d’Amour. The names of Worth, Lanvin,
Patou sprawled across three more pages. Then there was a picture of a young lady in a
rubber reducing belt, looking at herself in the
glass. A group of young ladies admired
one another’s slumber wear from Crabb and Lushington’s lingerie department. Opposite them another young lady reclined on
a couch at Madame Adrena’s Beauty Laboratory, while
the hands of a masseuse stroked the menace of a double chin. Then followed a still-life
of rolling pins and rubber stergils for rolling and
rubbing away young ladies’ superfluous fat, and another still-life of jars and
gallipots containing skin foods to protect their faces from the ravages of time
and the weather.
‘Revolting!’ Illidge said to
himself as he turned the pages.
‘Criminal!’ And he cherished his
indignation, he cultivated it. To be
angry was a distraction, and at the same time a justification. Raging at plutocratic callousness and
frivolity, he could half forget and half excuse to himself
the horrible thing that had happened. Webley’s body was lying on the other side of the
screen. But there were women who paid
two hundred guineas for a fur coat. Two
hundred guineas! His Uncle Joseph would
have thought himself happy if he could have made as much in eighteen months of
cobbling. And they bought scent at
twenty-five shillings the quarter-pint.
He remembered the time when his little brother Tom had had pneumonia
after influenza. Ghastly! And when he was convalescent, the doctor had
said he ought to go away to the sea for a few weeks. They hadn’t been able to afford it. Tom’s lungs had never been too strong after
that. He worked in a motor factory now
(making machines for those bitches in two-hundred-guinea coats to sit in); Illidge had paid for him to go to a technical school – paid,
he reflected, beating up his anger, that the boy might have the privilege of
standing eight hours a day in front of a milling machine. The air of
‘Good Lord !’ exclaimed Spandrell
suddenly, looking up from his book. The sound of his voice in
the silence made Illidge start with an uncontrollable
terror. ‘I’d absolutely
forgotten. They get stiff, don’t
they?’ He looked at Illidge. ‘Corpses, I mean.’
Illidge nodded. He
drew a deep breath and steadied himself with an effort of will.
‘What about
getting him into the car, then?’ He
sprang up and walked quickly round the screen, out of sight. Illidge heard the
latch of the house door rattling. He was
seized with a sudden horrible terror: Spandrell was
going to make off, leaving him locked in with the body.
‘Where are
you going?’ he shouted and darted off in panic pursuit. ‘Where are you going?’ The door was open, Spandrell
was not to be seen, and the thing lay on the floor, its face uncovered,
open-mouthed and staring secretly, significantly, as though through spyholes, between half-closed eyelids. ‘Where are you going?’ Illidge’s voice had
risen almost to a scream.
‘What is
the excitement about?’ asked Spandrell as the other
appeared, pale and with desperation in his looks, on the doorstep. Standing by Webley’s
car, he was engaged in undoing the tightly stretched waterproof which decked in
all that part of the open body lying aft of the front seats. ‘These thingumbobs
are horribly hard to unfasten.’
Illidge put his hands in his pockets and pretended that it
was merely an idle curiosity that had brought him out with such precipitation.
‘What are
you doing?’ he asked off-handedly.
Spandrell gave a final tug; the cover came loose along the
whole length of one side of the car. He
turned it back and looked in. ‘Empty,
thank goodness,’ he said and, stretching his hand, he played imaginary octaves,
span after span, over the coachwork.
‘Say four feet wide,’ he concluded, ‘by about the same in length. Of which half is taken up by the seat. With two foot six of space under the
cover. Plenty of room
to curl up in and be very comfortable.
But if one were stiff?’ He looked
enquiringly at Illidge. ‘A man could be got in, but not a statue.’
Illidge nodded. Spandrell’s last words had made him suddenly remember
Lady’s Edwards mocking commentary on Webley. ‘He wants to be treated like his own colossal
statue – posthumously, if you see what I mean.’
‘We must do
something quickly, Spandrell went on. ‘Before the stiffness sets in.’ He pulled back the cover and laying a
hand on Illidge’s shoulder, propelled him gently into
the house. The door slammed behind
them. They stood looking down at the
body.
‘We shall
have to pull the knees up and the arms down,’ said Spandrell.
He bent
down and moved one of the arms towards the side. It returned, when he let go, half-way to its
former position. Like a puppet, Spandrell reflected, with elastic joints. Grotesque rather than
terrible; not tragical, but only rather tiresome and
even absurd. That was the
essential horror – that it was all (even this) a kind of bad and tedious
jape. ‘We shall have to find some
string,’ he said. ‘Something
to tie the limbs into place.’ It
was like amateur plumbing, or mending the summerhouse oneself; just rather
unpleasant and ludicrous.
They
ransacked the house. There was no string
to be found. They had to be content with
three bandages, which Spandrell found among the
aspirin and iodine, the boracic powder and vegetable
laxatives of the little medicine cupboard in the bathroom.
‘Hold the
arms in place while I tie,’ commanded Spandrell.
Illidge did as he was told.
But the coldness of those dead wrists against his fingers was horrible; he
felt sick again, he began to tremble.
‘There!’
said Spandrell, straightening himself up. ‘Now the legs. Thank goodness we didn’t leave it much
longer.’
‘Treated
like his own statue.’
The words reverberated in Illidge’s
memory. ‘Posthumously,
if you see what I mean.’
Posthumously … Spandrell bent one of the legs
till the knees almost touched the chin.
‘Hold it.’
Illidge grasped the ankle; the socks were grey and clocked
with white. Spandrell
let go, and Illidge felt and sudden and startlingly
powerful thrust against his retaining hand.
The dead man was trying to kick.
Black voids began to expand in front of his eyes, eating out holes in
the solid world before him. And the
solid world itself swayed and swam round the edges of those interstellar
vacancies. His gorge turned, he felt
horribly giddy.
‘Look
here,’ he began, turning to Spandrell, who had
squatted down on his heels and was tearing the wrapping off another
bandage. Then shutting his eyes, he
relinquished his grasp.
The leg
straightened itself out like a bent spring, and the foot, as it shot forward,
caught Spandrell on the shoulder and sent him,
unsteadily balanced as he was, sprawling backwards on to the floor.
He picked
himself up. ‘You bloody fool!’ But the anger aroused by that first shock of
surprise died down. He uttered a little
laugh. ‘We might be at the circus,’ he
said. It was not only
not tragic; it was a clownery.
By the time
the body was finally trussed, Illidge knew that Tom’s
weak lungs and two-hundred-guinea coats, that superfluous fat and his mother’s
life-long slaving, that rich and poor, oppression and revolution, justice,
punishment, indignation – all, as far as he was concerned, were utterly
irrelevant to the fact of these stiffening limbs, this mouth that gaped, these
half-shut, glazed and secretly staring eyes.
Irrelevant, and beside the point.
* *
* *
Philip was
dining alone. In front of his plate half
a bottle of claret and the water-jug propped up an open volume. He read between the mouthfuls, as he
masticated. The book was Bastian’s On
the Brain. Not very up to date,
perhaps, but the best he could find in his father’s library to keep him amused
in the train. Halfway through the fish,
he came upon the case of the Irish gentleman who had suffered from paraphasia, and was so much struck by it that he pushed
aside his plate and, taking out his pocket-book, made a note of it at
once. The physician had asked the
patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of
At the
Queen’s Hall Tolley began with Erik Satie’s Borborygmes Symphoniques.
Philip found the joke only moderately good. A section of the audience improved it,
however, by hissing and booing.
Ironically polite, Tolley bowed with more than
his usual grace. When the hubbub
subsided, he addressed himself to the second item on the programme. It was the Coriolan
overture. Tolley
prided himself on a catholic taste and omnicompetence. But, oh dear! thought
Philip as he listened, how abominably he conducted real music! As though he were rather ashamed of
Beethoven’s emotions and were trying to apologize for them. But fortunately Coriolanus was practically Tolley-proof. The
music was heroically beautiful, it was tragic and
immense in spite of him. The last of the
expiring throbs of sound died away, a demonstration of man’s indomitable
greatness and the necessity, the significance of suffering.
In the
interval Philip limped out for a smoke in the bar. A hand plucked at his sleeve.
‘The melomaniac discovered,’ said a familiar voice. He turned and saw Willie Weaver twinkling all
over with good-humour, kindliness and absurdity. ‘What did you think of our
modern Orpheus?’
‘If you’re
referring to Tolley, I don’t think he can conduct
Beethoven.’
‘A shade
too light and fantastic for old man Ludwig’s portentosities?’
suggested Willie.
‘That’s
about it,’ said Philip smiling. ‘Not up
to him.’
‘Or too far
up. Portentosity
belongs to the prepositivistic epoch. It’s bourgeois as Comrade Lenin would
say. Tolley’s
nothing if not contemporaneous. Didn’t
you like him in the Satie? Or did you,’ he went on, in response to
Philip’s contemptuous shrug, ‘did you wish he’d committed it?’ He coughed his own appreciation of the pun.
‘He’s
almost as modern as the Irish genius whose works I discovered this
evening.’ Philip took out his
pocket-book and, after a word of explanation, read aloud. ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo …’ At the foot of the page were his own
comments of an hour before. ‘The text of the whole sermon. The final word about life.’ He did not read them out. He happened to be thinking quite differently
now. ‘The difference between portentosity and Satie-cum-Tollyism,’
he said, ‘is the same as the difference between the statues of
He was
blankly contradicting himself. But, after all, why not?
* *
* *
Illidge wanted to go home and to bed; but Spandrell had insisted that he should spend at least an
hour or two at Tantamount House.
‘You must
get yourself seen,’ he said. ‘For the sake of the alibi.
I’m going on to Sbisa’s. There’ll be a dozen people to vouch for me.’
Illidge agreed only under the threat of violence. He dreaded the ordeal of talking with anyone
– even with someone so incurious, preoccupied and absent as Lord Edward. ‘I shan’t be able to stand it,’ he kept
repeating, almost in tears. They had had
to carry the body, trussed into the posture of a child in the womb – carry it
amorously pressed in a close and staggering embrace – out of the door, down the
steps into the roadway. A single
greenish gas-lamp under the archway threw but a feeble light up the mews;
enough, however, to have betrayed them, if anyone had happened to be passing
the entrance as they carried their burden out and lifted it into the car. They had begun by dumping the thing on its
back on the floor; but the up-drawn knees projected above the level of the
carriage-work. Spandrell
had to climb into the car and push and lug the heavy body on to its side, so
that the knees rested on the edge of the back seat. They shut the doors, pulled the cover over
and fastened it tautly into place.
‘Perfect,’ said Spandrell. He took his companion by the elbow. ‘You need a little more brandy,’ he
added. But in spite of the brandy Illidge was still faint and tremulous when they drove
away. Nor was Spandrell’s
bungling with the mechanism of the unfamiliar car at all calculated to soothe
his nerves. They had begun by backing
violently into the wall at the end of the mews; and before he discovered the secret
of the gears, Spandrell twice inadvertently stopped
the engine. He relieved his irritation
by a few curses and laughed. But to Illidge these
little mishaps, entailing as they did a minute’s delay in escaping from the
horrible and accursed place, were catastrophes.
His terror, his anxious impatience became almost hysterical.
‘No, I
can’t, I really can’t,’ he protested when Spandrell
had told him that he must spend the evening at Tantamount House.
‘All the
same,’ said the other, ‘you’re damned well going to,’ and he headed the car
into the Mall. ‘I’ll drop you at the
door.’
‘No, really!’
‘And if
necessary kick you in.’
‘But I
couldn’t stand being there, I couldn’t stand it.’
‘This is an
extremely nice car,’ said Spandrell pointedly
changing the subject. ‘Delightful
to drive.’
‘I couldn’t
stand it,’ Illidge whimperingly
repeated.
‘I believe
the makers guarantee a hundred miles an hour on the track.’
They turned
up past St James’s Palace into
‘Here you
are,’ said Spandrell, drawing up at the kerb. Obediently, Illidge
got out, crossed the pavement, climbed the steps and rang the bell. Spandell waited
till the door had closed behind him, then drove on
into St James’s Square. Twenty or thirty
cars were parked round the central gardens.
He backed in among them, stopped the engine, got out and walked up to
* *
* *
‘Ah, here
you are,’ said Lord Edward. ‘So glad
you’ve come.’
Illidge mumbled vague apologies for not having come sooner. An appointment with a man. About business. But suppose, he wondered in terror while he
spoke, suppose Lord Edward should ask what man, what business? He wouldn’t know what to answer; he would
utterly break down. But the Old Man
seemed not even to have heard his excuses.
‘Afraid I
must ask you to do a little arithmetic for me,’ he said in his deep blurred
voice. Lord Edward had made himself a
tolerably good mathematician; but ‘sums’ had always been beyond his powers. He had never been able to multiply
correctly. And as for long division – it
was fifty years since he had even attempted it.
‘I’ve got the figures here.’ He
tapped the notebook that lay open in front of him on the desk. ‘It’s for the chapter on phosphorus. Human interference with the
cycle. How much P2Os did we find
out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?’
He turned a page. ‘Four hundred thousand tons.
That was it. Practically
irrecoverable. Just
thrown away. Then there’s the
stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three-quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide
in every body. Restored to the
earth, you may say.’ Lord Edward was
ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut,
every shift of advocacy. ‘But how
inadequately!’ he swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to
bits. ‘Huddling bodies
together in cemeteries! How can
you expect the phosphorus to get distributed?
It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency. Now, given three-quarters of a kilo of P2Os
for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an
average death-rate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored
every year to the earth? You can do
sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.’ Illidge sat in
silence, shielding his face with his hand.
‘But then one has to remember,’ the Old Man continued, ‘that there are a
lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that
the phosphorus is taken out of circulation.
Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick
vaults. The only
people more wasteful than we are the Indians. Burning bodies and throwing the ashes into
rivers! But the Indians are stupid about
everything. The way
they burn all the cow-dung instead of putting it back on the land. And then they’re surprised that half the population hasn’t enough
to eat. We shall have to make a separate
calculation about the Indians. I haven’t
got the figures, though. But meanwhile
will you work out the grand total for the world? And another, if you don’t
mind, for the white races. I’ve
got a list of the populations here somewhere.
And, of course, the death-rate will be lower than the average for the whole
world, at any rate in
‘Do you
mind,’ said Illidge faintly, ‘if I lie down for a
minute. I’m not feeling well.’