CHAPTER XXXIV

 

It was nearly eleven before Philip Quarles appeared at Sbisa’s.  Spandrell saw him as he was entering and beckoned him to the table where he was sitting with Burlap and Rampion.  Philip came limping across the room and sat down beside him.

      ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ said Spandrell ‘and, what’s more important,’ he felt in his pocket, ‘the key of your house.’  He handed it over, explaining how he had come into possession of it.  If the man knew what had happened in his house that evening … ‘And Elinor’s gone down to Gattenden,’ he went on.  ‘She had a telegram.  The child doesn’t seem to be well.  And she expects you tomorrow.’

      ‘The devil she does!’ said Philip.  ‘But I have at least fifteen engagements.  What’s wrong with the boy?’

      ‘Unspecified.’

      Philip shrugged his shoulders.  ‘If it had been serious, my mother-in-law wouldn’t have telegraphed,’ he said, yielding to the temptation to say something amusing.  ‘She’s like that.  She’ll take a case of double pneumonia with perfect calm and then get terribly excited about a headache or a pain in the belly.’  He interrupted himself to order an omelette and half a bottle of Moselle.  Still, Philip reflected, the boy hadn’t been very flourishing these last weeks.  He rather wished he hadn’t yielded to the temptation.  And what he had said hadn’t really been in the least amusing.  Wanting to be amusing – that was his chief literary defect.  His books would be much better if he would allow them to be much duller.  He sank into a rather gloomy silence.

      ‘These children!’ said Spandrell.  ‘If you will go in for them …’

      ‘Still, it must be wonderful to have a child,’ said Burlap with proper wistfulness.  ‘I often wish …’

      Rampion interrupted him.  ‘It must be still more wonderful to be one.  When one’s grown up, I mean.’  He grinned.

      ‘What do you do about your children?’ asked Spandrell.

      ‘As little as I can.  Unfortunately they have to go to school.  I only hope they won’t learn too much.  It’d be really awful if they emerged as little professors stuffed with knowledge, trotting out their smart little abstract generalizations.  They probably will.  Just to spite me.  Children generally do spite their parents.  Not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously, because they can’t help it, because the parents have probably gone too far in one direction and nature’s reacting, trying to get back to the state of equilibrium.  Yes, yes, I can feel it in my bones.  They’ll be professors the little devils.  They’ll be horrid little scientists.  Like your friend Illidge,’ he said, turning to Spandrell, who started uncomfortably at the name and was annoyed that he should have started.  ‘Horrid little brains that do their best to suppress the accompanying hearts and bowels.’

      Spandrell smiled his significant, rather melodramatically-ironic smile.  ‘Young Illidge hasn’t succeeded in suppressing his heart and bowels,’ he said.  ‘Not by a long chalk.’

      ‘Of course not.  Nobody can suppress them.  All that happens in the process is that they’re transformed from living organs into offal.  And why are they transformed?  In the interests of what?  Of a lot of silly knowledge and irrelevant abstractions.’

      ‘Which are after all quite amusing in themselves,’ said Philip, breaking his silence to come to the rescue of the intellect.  ‘Making generalizations and pushing knowledge are amusements.  And the most entertaining, to my mind.’  Philip went on to develop his hedonistic justification of the mental life.  ‘So why be so hard on our little diversions?’ he concluded.  ‘You don’t denounce golf; so why should you denounce the sports of the highbrows?’

      ‘That’s fairly rudimentary, isn’t it?’ said Rampion.  ‘The tree shall be known by its fruits.  The fruits of golf are either non-existent, harmless or positively beneficial.  A healthy liver, for example – that’s a very fine fruit.  Whereas the fruits of intellectualism – my God!’  He made a grimace.  ‘Look at them.  The whole of our industrial civilization – that’s their fruit.  The morning paper, the radio, the cinema, all fruits.  Tanks and trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mond – fruits again.  They’re all the result of the systematically organized, professional intellectualism of the last two hundred years.  And you expect me to approve of your amusements?  But, I tell you, I prefer bull-fighting.  What’s the torture of a few animals and the brutalizing of a few hundred spectators compared to the ruining and befouling and degrading of the whole world?  Which is what you highbrows have done since you professionalized and organized your amusements.’

      ‘Come, come,’ said Philip.  ‘The picture’s a little lurid.  And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results’

      ‘They are responsible.  Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition.  After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane.  A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science.  He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one.  And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration.  For of course,’ he added parenthetically, ‘the fruits of your amusements aren’t merely the external apparatus of modern industrial life.  They’re an inward decay; they’re infantilism and degeneracy and all sorts of madness and primitive reversion.  No, no, I have no patience with your precious amusements of the mind.  You’d be doing far less harm if you were playing golf.’

      ‘But truth?’ queried Burlap, who had been listening to the discussion without speaking.  ‘What about truth?’

      Spandrell nodded approval.  ‘Isn’t that worth looking for?’

      ‘Certainly,’ said Rampion.  ‘But not where Philip and his scientific and scholarly friends are looking for it.  After all, the only truth that can be of any interest to us, or that we can know, is a human truth.  And to discover that, you must look for it with the whole being, not with a specialized part of it.  What the scientists are trying to get at is non-human truth.  Not that they can ever completely succeed; for not even a scientist can completely cease to be human.  But they can go some way towards abstracting themselves from the human world of reality.  By torturing their brains they can get a faint notion of the universe as it would seem if looked at through non-human eyes.  What with their quantum theory, wave mechanics, relativity and all the rest of it, they do really seem to have got a little way outside humanity.  Well, what the devil’s the good of that?’

      ‘Apart from the fun of the thing,’ said Philip, ‘the good may be some astonishing practical discovery, like the secret of disintegrating the atom and the liberation of endless supplies of energy.’

      ‘And the consequent reduction of human beings to absolute imbecility and absolute subservience to their machines,’ jeered Rampion.  ‘I know your paradises.  But the point for the moment is truth.  This non-human truth that the scientists are trying to get at with their intellects – it’s utterly irrelevant to ordinary human living.  Our truth, the relevant human truth is something you discover by living – living completely, with the whole man.  The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications – they’ve got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters.  And the non-human truth isn’t merely irrelevant; it’s dangerous.  It distracts people’s attention from the important human truth.  It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory.  For example, it’s an established non-human truth – or at least it was established in my young days – that secondary qualities have no real existence.  The man who takes that seriously denies himself, destroys the whole fabric of his life as a human being.  For human beings happen to be so arranged that secondary qualities are, for them, the only real ones.  Deny them and you commit suicide.’

      ‘But in practice,’ said Philip, ‘nobody does deny them.’

      ‘Not completely,’ Rampion agreed.  ‘Because it can’t be done.  A man can’t abolish his sensations and feelings completely without physically killing himself.  But he can disparage them after the event.  And, in fact, that’s what a great number of intelligent and well-educated people do – disparage the human in the interests of the non-human.  Their motive’s different from that of the Christians; but the result’s the same.  A sort of self-destruction.  Always the same,’ he went on with a sudden outburst of anger in his voice.  ‘Every attempt at being something better than a man – the result’s always the same.  Death, some sort of death.  You try to be more than you are by nature and you kill something in yourself and become much less.  I’m so tired of all this rubbish about the higher life and moral and intellectual progress and living for ideals and all the rest of it.  It all leads to death.  Just as surely as living for money.  Christians and moralists and cultured aesthetes, and bright young scientists and Smilesian business men – all the poor little human frogs trying to blow themselves up into balls of pure spirituality, pure idealism, pure efficiency, pure conscious and intelligence, and just going pop, ceasing to be anything but the fragments of a little frog – decaying fragments at that.  The whole thing’s a huge stupidity, a huge disgusting lie.  Your little stink-pot of a St Francis, for example.’  He turned to Burlap, who protested.  ‘Just a little stink-pot,’ Rampion insisted.  ‘A silly vain little man trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency there was in him, only succeeding in turning himself the nasty smelly fragments of a real human being.  Going about getting thrills of excitement out of licking lepers!  Ugh!  The disgusting little pervert!  He thinks himself too good to kiss a woman; he wants to be above anything so vulgar as natural healthy pleasure, and the only result is that he kills whatever core of human decency he ever had in him and becomes a smelly little pervert who can only get a thrill out of licking lepers’ ulcers.  Not curing the lepers, mind you.  Just licking them.  For his own amusement.  Not theirs.  It’s revolting!’

      Philip leaned back in his chair and laughed.  But Rampion turned on him in a fury.

      ‘You may laugh,’ he said.  ‘But don’t imagine you’re any better, really.  You and your intellectual, scientific friends.  You’ve killed just as much of yourselves as the Christian maniacs.  Shall I read you your programme?’  He picked up the book that was lying beside him on the table and began to turn the pages.  ‘I came upon it just now, as I was coming here in the ‘bus.  Here we are.’  He began to read, pronouncing the French words carefully and clearly.  ‘Plus en obstacle materiel, toutes les rapidités gagnées par la science et la richesse.  Pas une tare à l’indépendance.  Voir en crime de lèse-moi dans toute fréquentation, homme ou pays, qui ne serait pas expressément voulu.  L’énergie, le recueillement, la tension de la solitude, les transporter dans ses rapports avec des vrais semblables.  Pas d’amour peur-être, mais des amitiés rare, difficiles, exaltées, nerveuses; vivre comme on revivrait en esprit de détachement, d’inquiétude et de revanche.’  Rampion closed the book and looked up.  ‘That’s your programme,’ he said to Philip.  ‘Formulated by Marie Lenéru in 1901.  Very brief and neat and complete.  And, my God, what a horror!  No body, no contact with the material world, no contact with human beings except through the intellect, no love …’

      ‘We’ve changed that a little since 1901,’ said Philip, smiling.

      ‘Not really.  You’ve admitted promiscuous fornication, that’s all.  But not love, not the natural contact and flow, not the renunciation of mental self-consciousness, not the abandonment to instinct.  No, no.  You stick to your conscious will.  Everything must be expressément voulu, all the time.  And the connections must be purely mental.  And life must be lived, not as though it were life in a world of living people, but as though it were solitary recollection and fancy and meditation.  An endless masturbation, like Proust’s horrible great book.  That’s the higher life.  Which is the euphemistic name of incipient death.  It’s significant, it’s symbolic that the Lenéru woman was deaf and purblind.  The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth.  Poor creature!  She had some excuse for spirituality.  But the other Higher-Lifers, the ones who haven’t any physical defect – they’re not so forgivable.  They’ve maimed themselves deliberately, for fun.  It’s a pity they don’t develop visible hunchbacks or wall-eyes.  One would know better who one was dealing with.’

      ‘Quite,’ said Philip, nodding, and laughed with an affectation of amusement that was meant to cover the embarrassment he felt at Rampion’s references to physical disability.  ‘Quite.’  Nobody should think that, because he had a game leg, he didn’t entirely appreciate the justice of Rampion’s remarks about deformity.

      The irrelevant loudness of his laugh made Rampion glance questiongly at him.  What was up?  He couldn’t be bothered to discover.

      ‘It’s all a damned lie,’ he went on, ‘and an idiotic lie at that – all this pretending to be more than human.  Idiotic because it never comes off.  You try to be more than human, but you only succeed in making yourself less than human.  Always …’

      ‘Hear, hear!’ said Philip.  ‘”We walk on earth and have no need of wings.”’  And suddenly he heard his father’s loud voice saying, ‘I had wings.  I had wings’; he saw his flushed face and feverishly pink pyjamas.  Ludicrous and deplorable.  ‘Do you know who that’s by?’ he went on.  ‘That’s the last line of the poem I wrote for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, when I was twenty-one.  The subject was “King Arthur”, if I remember rightly.  Needless to say I didn’t get the prize.  But it’s a good line.’

      ‘A pity you didn’t live up to it,’ said Rampion, ‘instead of whoring after abstractions.  But of course, there’s nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions.  He knows by experience how life-destroying they are.  The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride.  He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he’s got feet.  It’s when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong.  They’re ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos or geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion on the other.’

      ‘But all this,’ said Spandrell, breaking a long silence, ‘is just the gospel of animalism.  You’re just advising us to behave like beasts.’

      ‘I’m advising you to behave like human beings,’ said Rampion.  ‘Which is slightly different.  And anyhow,’ he added, ‘it’s a damned sight better to behave like a beast – a real genuine undomesticated animal, I mean – than to invent a devil and then behave like one’s invention.’

      There was a brief silence.  ‘Suppose I were to tell them,’ Spandrell was thinking, ‘suppose I were to tell them that I’d just jumped out on a man from behind a screen and hit him on the side of the head with an Indian club.’  He took another sip of brandy.  ‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m not so sure of what you say.  Behaving like an animal is behaving like a creature that’s below good and evil.  You must know what good is before you can start behaving like the devil.’  And yet it had all been just stupid and sordid and disgusting.  Yes, and profoundly silly, an enormous stupidity.  At the core of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he had found, not fire and poison, but only a brown disgusting putrefaction and a few small maggots.  ‘Things exist only in terms of their opposites,’ he went on, frowning at his own thoughts.  ‘The devil implies God.’

      ‘No doubt,’ said Rampion impatiently.  ‘A devil of absolute evil implies a God of absolute good.  Well, what of it?  What’s that got to do with you or me?’

      ‘A good deal, I should have thought.’

      ‘It’s got about as much to do with us as the fact of this table being made of electrons, or an infinite series of waves undulating in an unknown medium, or a large number of point-events in a four-dimensional continuum, or whatever else Philip’s scientific friends assure us it is made of.  As much as that.  That is to say, practically nothing.  Your absolute God and absolute devil belong to the class of irrelevant non-human facts.  The only things that concern us are the little relative gods and devils of history and geography, the little relatives goods and evils of individual casuistry.  Everything else is non-human and beside the point; and if you allow yourself to be influenced by non-human, absolute considerations, then you inevitably make either a fool of yourself, or a villain, or perhaps both.’

      ‘But that’s better than making an animal of oneself,’ insisted Spandrell.  ‘I’d rather be a fool or a villain than a bull or a dog.’

      ‘But nobody’s asking you to be a bull or a dog,’ said Rampion impatiently.  ‘Nobody’s asking you to be anything but a man.  A man, mind you.  Not an angel or a devil.  A man’s a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with a mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that’s unconscious and earthly and mysterious at the other.  Balanced.  Which is damnably difficult.  And the only absolute he can ever really know is the absolute of perfect balance.  The absolute of perfect relativity.  Which is a paradox and nonsense intellectually.  But so is all real, genuine, living truth – just nonsense according to logic.  And logic is just nonsense in the light of living truth.  You can choose which you like, logic or life.  It’s a matter of taste.  Some people prefer being dead.’

      ‘Prefer being dead.’  The words went echoing through Spandrell’s mind.  Everard Webley lying on the floor, trussed up like a chicken.  Did he prefer being dead?  ‘All the same,’ he said slowly, ‘some things must always remain absolutely and radically wrong.  Killing, for example.’  He wanted to believe that it was more than merely low and sordid and disgusting.  He wanted to believe that it was also terrible and tragic.  ‘That’s an absolute wrong.’

      ‘But why more absolute than anything else?’ said Rampion.  ‘There are circumstances when killing’s obviously necessary and right and commendable.  The only absolutely evil act, so far as I can see, that a man can perform, is an act against life, against his own integrity.  He does wrong if he perverts himself, if he falsifies his instincts.’

      Spandrell was sarcastic.  ‘We’re getting back to the beasts again,’ he said.  ‘Go ravening round fulfilling all your appetites as you feel them.  Is that the last word in human wisdom?’

      ‘Well, it isn’t really so stupid as you try to make out,’ said Rampion.  ‘If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human being behave today.  It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that makes men so beastly – no, “beastly” is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals – so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then.  It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, it’s principles, it’s tradition and education.  Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief.  If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession – why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation.  It’s not the instinct that makes Cassanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence.  If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs.  They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous.  And it’s the same with the other instincts.  It’s not the possessive instinct that’s made modern civilization insane about money.  The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles.  The money-grubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian Service.  Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime.  It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect.  And then, think of civilized war.  It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness.  Men have to be compelled by law and then tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight.  You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.’

      ‘You’d do still more,’ said Burlap, ‘by telling them to obey Jesus.’

      ‘No, you wouldn’t.  Telling them to obey Jesus is telling them to be more than human.  And, in practice, trying to be more than human always means succeeding in being less than human.  Telling men to obey Jesus literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like idiots and finally like devils.  Just consider the examples.  Old Tolstoy – a great man who deliberately turned himself into an idiot by trying to be more than a great man.  Your horrid little St Francis.’  He turned to Burlap.  ‘Another idiot.  But already on the verge of diabolism.  With the monks of Thebaid you see the process carried a step further.  They went over the verge.  They got to the stage of being devils.  Self-torture, destruction of everything decent and beautiful and living.  That was their programme.  They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness.  They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts.  But they wanted to be more than human.  So they just became devils.  Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils.  Ugh!’  Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust.  ‘And to think,’ he went on indignantly, ‘that the world’s full of these creatures!  Not quite so far gone as St Anthony and his demons or St Francis and his half-wits.  But of the same kind.  Different only in degree.  And all perverted in the same way – by trying to be non-human.  Non-humanly religious, non-humanly moral, non-humanly intellectual and scientific, non-humanly specialized and efficient, non-humanly the business man, non-humanly avaricious and property-loving, non-humanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, non-humanly the conscious individual even in love.  All perverts.  Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity.  The world’s an asylum of perverts.  There are four of them at this table now.’  He looked round with a grin.  ‘A pure little Jesus pervert.’  Burlap forgivingly smiled.  ‘An intellectual-aesthetic pervert.’

      ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Philip.

      ‘A morality-philosophy pervert.’  He turned to Spandrell.  ‘Quite the little Stavrogin.  Pardon my saying so, Spandrell; but you really are the most colossal fool.’  He looked intently into his face.  ‘Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one!  But it won’t do.  It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.’

      Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed.  If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew … But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?

      ‘Laugh away, old Dostoievsky!  But let me tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin.  He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.’

      ‘And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?’ asked Philip.

      ‘What indeed!’ Rampion shook his head.  His fine hair floated up silkily.  He smiled.  ‘A pedagogue pervert.  A Jeremiah pervert.  A worry-about-the-bloody-old-world pervert.  Above all a gibber pervert.’  He got up.  ‘That’s why I’m going home,’ he said.  ‘The way I’ve been talking – it’s really non-human.  Really scandalous.  I’m ashamed.  But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against non-human things and people, you inevitably become non-human yourself.  It’s all your fault.’  He gave a final grin, waved goodnight and was gone.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him.  Sitting – for such was the engagingly child-like habit he had formed during the last few weeks – on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion.  An extraordinary man, a great man, even.  Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly.  She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself.  Hardly great, she insisted jealously.  Well, perhaps not quite.  But very nearly.  If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot.  The attitude was comprehensible.  Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other.  His incapacity to understand St Francis, for example.  The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint.  That was extraordinary and deplorable.

      ‘What does he say?’ asked Beatrice severely.  Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St Francis under her protection.

      Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said.  Beatrice was indignant.  How could he say such things?  How did he dare?  It was an outrage.  Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real defect.  But so few people, he added in charitable palliation, were born with a real feeling for spiritual beauty.  Rampion was an extraordinary man in many ways, but it was as though he lacked that extra sense-organ which enables men like St Francis to see the beauty that is beyond earthly beauty.  In a rudimentary form he himself, he thought, had the power.  How rarely he met anyone who seemed to be like him!  Almost everybody was in this respect a stranger.  It was like seeing normally in a country where most people were colour blind.  Didn’t Beatrice feel that too?  For of course she was one of the rare clear-seeing ones.  He had felt it at once, the first time he met her.  Beatrice nodded gravely.  Yes, she too felt like that.  Burlap smiled up at her; he knew it.  She felt proud and important.  Rampion’s idea of love, for example; Burlap shook his head.  So extraordinarily gross and animal and corporeal.

      ‘Dreadful,’ said Beatrice feelingly.  Denis, she was thinking was so different.  Tenderly she looked down at the head that reposed, so trustingly, against her knee.  She adored the way his hair curled, and his very small, beautiful ears, and even the pink bare spot on the top of his crown.  That little pink tonsure was somehow rather engagingly pathetic.  There was a long silence.

      Burlap at last profoundly sighed.  ‘How tired I am!’ he said.

      ‘You ought to go to bed.’

      ‘Too tired even to move.’  He pressed his cheek more heavily against her knee and shut his eyes.

      Beatrice raised her hand, hesitated a moment, dropped it again, then raised it once more and began to run her fingers soothingly through his dark curls.  There was another long silence.

      ‘Ah, don’t stop,’ he said, when at last she withdrew her hand.  ‘It’s so comforting.  Such a virtue seems to go out from you.  You’d almost cured my headache.’

      ‘You’ve got a headache?’ asked Beatrice, her solicitude running as usual to a kind of anger.  ‘Then you simply must go to bed,’ she commanded.

      ‘But I’m so happy here.’

      ‘No, I insist.’  Her protective motherliness was thoroughly aroused.  It was a bullying tenderness.

      ‘How cruel you are!’ Burlap complained, rising reluctantly to his feet.  Beatrice was touched with compunction.  ‘I’ll stroke your head when you’re in bed,’ she promised.  She too now regretted that soft warm silence, that speechless intimacy, which her outburst of domineering solicitude had too abruptly shattered.  She justified herself by an explanation.  The headache would return if he didn’t go to sleep the moment it was cured.  And so on.

      Burlap had been in bed nearly ten minutes when she came to keep her promise.  She was dressed in a green dressing-gown and her yellow hair was plaited into a long thick pigtail that swung heavily as she moved, like the heavy plaited tail of a cart-horse at a show.

      ‘You look about twelve with that pigtail hanging down your back,’ said Burlap, enchanted.

      Beatrice laughed, rather nervously, and sat down on the edge of the bed.  He raised his hand and took hold of the thick plait.  ‘Too charming,’ he said.  ‘It simply invites pulling.’  He gave a little tug at it, playfully.

      ‘Look out,’ she warned.  ‘I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.’  She took hold of one of his dark curls.

      ‘Pax, pax!’ he begged, reverting to the vocabulary of the preparatory school.  ‘I’ll let go.  The real reason,’ he added, ‘why little boys don’t like fighting with little girls is simply that little girls are so much more ruthless and ferocious.’

      Beatrice laughed again.  There was a silence.  She felt a little breathless and fluttering, as one feels when one is anxiously expecting something to happen.  ‘Head bad?’ she asked.

      ‘Rather bad.’

      She stretched out a hand and touched his forehead.

      ‘Your hand’s magical,’ he said.  With a quick unexpected movement he wriggled round sideways under the sheets and laid his head on her lap.  ‘There,’ he whispered and, with a sigh of contentment, closed his eyes.

      For a moment Beatrice was taken aback, almost frightened.  That dark head lying hard and heavy on her thighs – it seemed strange, terrifying.  She had to suppress a little shudder before she could feel glad at the confiding childishness of his movement.  She began stroking his forehead, stroking his scalp through the thick dark curls.  Time passed.  The soft warm silence enveloped them once more, the dumb intimacy of contact was re-established.  She was no longer domineering in her protective solicitude, only tender.  The armour of her hardness was as though melted away from her, melted away in this warm intimacy along with the terrors which made it necessary.

      Burlap sighed again.  He was in a kind of blissful doze of sensual passivity.

      ‘Better?’ she asked in a soft whisper.

      ‘Still rather bad on the side,’ he whispered back.  ‘Just over the ear.’  And he rolled his head over so that she could more easily reach the painful spot, rolled it over so that his face was pressed against her belly, her soft belly that stirred so livingly with her breathing, that was so warm and yielding against his face.

      At the touch of his face against her body Beatrice felt a sudden renewal of those spasmodic creepings of apprehension.  Her flesh was terrified by the nearness of that physical intimacy.  But as Burlap did not stir, as he made no dangerous gesture, no movement towards a closer contact, the terrors died gradually down and their flutterings served only to enhance and intensify that wonderful warm emotion of tenderness which succeeded them.  She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again.  The warmth of his breathing was against her belly.  She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with apprehension and anticipations.  Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through his terrors, timidly desired.

      ‘Better?’ she whispered again.

      He made a little movement with his head and pressed his face closer to her soft flesh.

      ‘Shall I stop now?’ she went on, ‘shall I go away?’

      Burlap raised his head and looked at her.  ‘No, no,’ he implored.  ‘Don’t go.  Not yet.  Don’t break the magic.  Stay her for a moment longer.  Lie down here for a moment under the quilt.  For a moment.’

      Without speaking she stretched herself out beside him and he drew the quilt over her, he turned out the light.

      The fingers that caressed her arm under its wide sleeve touched delicately, touched spiritually and as it were disembodiedly, like the fingers of those inflated rubber gloves that brush so thrillingly against one’s face in the darkness of séances, bringing comfort from the Great Beyond and a message of affection from the loved ones who had passed over.  To caress and yet be a spiritualized rubber glove at a séance, to make love but as though from the Great Beyond – that was Burlap’s talent.  Softly, patiently, with an infinite disembodied gentleness he went on caressing.  Beatrice’s armour was melted quite away.  It was the soft young-girlish, tremulous core of her that Burlap caressed with that delicate touch of spirit fingers from the Great Beyond.  Her armour was gone; but she felt so wonderfully safe with Denis.  She felt no tears, or at least only such faint breathless flutterings of her still almost childish flesh as served to quicken her happiness. She felt so wonderfully safe even when – after what had seemed a delicious eternity of patiently repeated caresses from wrist to shoulder and back again – the spirit hand reached out of the Beyond and touched her breast.  Delicately, almost disembodiedly it touched, like a skin of rubber stuffed with air; spiritually it slid over the rounded flesh, and its angelic fingers lingered along the skin.  At the first touch the round breast shuddered; it had its private terrors within Beatrice’s general happiness and sense of security.  But patiently, gently, unalarmingly, the spirit hand repeated its caress again, again, till the reassured and at last eager breast longed for its return and her whole body was alive with the tingling ramifications of the breast’s desires.  In the darkness the eternities prolonged themselves.