CHAPTER XXXVI

 

The Webley Mystery, as the papers lost no time in calling it, was complete.  There was no clue.  At the offices of the British Freemen nobody knew anything.  Webley had left at the usual hour and by his usual mode of conveyance.  He was not in the habit of talking to his subordinates about his private affairs; nobody had been told where he was going.  And outside the office nobody had observed the car from the time Webley had told his chauffeur he could go and the time when the policeman in St James’s Square began to wonder, at about midnight, how much longer it was going to be left there unattended.  Nobody had noticed the car being parked, nobody had remarked the driver as he left it.  The only finger-prints on the paintwork and the steering wheel were those of the dead man.  The person who drove the car after the murder had evidently worn gloves.  No, there was no clue.  Direct evidence was absolutely lacking.  The police did what they could with the indirect.  The fact that the body had not been robbed seemed obviously to point to a political motive for the crime.  At the offices of the British Freemen reposed a whole collection of threatening letters.  Webley received two or three of them every week.  ‘They’re my favourite reading,’ he was fond of saying.  A search was made for the writers.  Two Russian Jews from Houndsditch, a Nottingham typist and an ardent young undergraduate of Balliol, were identified as the authors of the most menacing and arrested, only to be released again almost immediately.  The days passed.  The murderers remained at large.  Public interest in the crime was not allowed to abate.  In part of the conservative press it was openly affirmed that the Liberal-Labour Government had given orders to the police that the affair was not to be too closely looked into.  ‘Screening the Murderers.’  ‘Socialists fear the Light.’  ‘Politics before the Ten Commandments.’  The headlines were lively.  The crime was a godsend to the opposition.  The Daily Mail offered ten thousand pounds reward to any person who would give information leading to the arrest of Webley’s murderers.  Meanwhile, the British Freemen had almost doubled their numbers in a week.  ‘Are you on the side of Murder?  If not, join the British Freemen.’  The posters glared from every hoarding.  Troops of Freemen in uniform and plain clothes scoured London canvassing for recruits, making patriotic demonstrations, doing amateur detective work.  They also took the opportunity to beat a number of people with whose opinions they disagreed.  In Tottenham and East Ham they fought pitched battles with hostile crowds and damaged numerous policemen.  At Everard’s funeral a green procession more than three miles long followed the coffin to the grave.

      Spandrell read all the papers every morning.  They amused him.  What a farce!  What knockabout    !  What an incomparable idiocy!  To Illidge, who had gone down to Lancashire to stay with his mother, he sent a picture postcard of Everard in uniform on his white horse – the shops were full of them now; hawkers peddled them in the streets.  ‘The dead lion seems likely to do much more damage than the live dog.’ He wrote on the back.  ‘God was always a joker.’

      God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there.  Simply not there.  Neither God nor the devil.  For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too.  All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout.  First an affair of dustbins and then a farce.  But perhaps that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dustbins.  And God?  God in that case would be simply the absence of dustbins.

      ‘God’s not apart, not above, not outside.’  He remembered what Rampion had once said.  ‘At any rate, no relevant, humanly important aspect of God’s above and outside.  Neither is God inside, in the sense that the Protestants use the phrase – safely stowed away in the imagination, in the feelings and intellect, in the soul.  He’s there, of course, among other places.  But he’s also inside in the sense that a lump of bread’s inside when you’ve eaten it.  He’s in the very body, in the blood and bowels, in the heart and skin and loins.  God’s the total result, spiritual and physical, of any thought or action that makes for life, of any vital relation with the world.  God’s a quality of actions and relations – a felt, experienced quality.  At any rate, he’s that for our purposes, for purposes of living.  Because, of course for purposes of knowing and speculating, he may be dozens of other things as well.  He may be a Rock of Ages; he may be the Jehovah of the Old Testament; he may be anything you like.  But what’s that got to do with us living corporeal beings?  Nothing, nothing but harm, at any rate.  The moment you allow speculative truth to take the place of felt instinctive truth as a guide to living, you ruin everything.’

      Spandrell had protested.  Men must have absolutes, must steer by fixed external marks.  ‘Music exists,’ he concluded, ‘even though you personally happen to be unmusical.  You must admit its existence, absolutely, apart from your own capacity for listening and enjoying.

      ‘Speculatively, theoretically, yes.  Admit it as much as you like.  But don’t allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life.  In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful.  But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel.  If you do, you become one of those idiotic music-snobs one meets at Lady Edward Tantamount’s.  Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up.  It’s exactly the same with God.  The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs.  People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is.  But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God.  Just a pack of God-snobs.  They’re as grotesque and contemptible as the music-snobs at Lady Edward’s.  But nobody has the sense to say so.  The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian.  When they’re merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.’

      Spandrell thought of the conversation now, as he addressed his postcard to Illidge.  God was not there, the devil was not there; only the memory of a piece of squalid knockabout among the dustbins, a piece of dirty dung-beetle’s scavenging.  A God-snob – that’s what Rampion would call him.  Dung-beetling in search of a non-existent God.  But no, but no, God was there, outside, absolute.  Else how account for the efficacy of prayer – for it was efficacious; how explain providence and destiny?  God was there, but hiding.  Deliberately hiding.  It was a question of forcing him to come out of his lair, his abstract absolute lair, and compelling him to incarnate himself as a felt experienced quality of personal actions.  It was a matter of violently dragging him from outsideness and aboveness to insideness.  But God was a joker.  Spandrell had conjured him with violence to appear; and out of the bloody stream of the magically compelling sacrifice had emerged only a dustbin.  But the very failure of the incantation had been a proof that God was there, outside.  Nothing happens to a man except that which is like himself.  Dustbin to dustbin, dung to dung.  He had not succeeded in compelling God to pass from outsideness to insideness.  But the appearance of the dustbin confirmed the reality of God as a providence, God as a destiny, God as the giver or withholder of grace, God as the predestinating saviour or destroyer.  Dustbins had been his predestined lot.  In giving him dustbins yet again, the providential joker was merely being consistent.

      One day, in the London library, he met Philip Quarles.

      ‘I was very sorry to hear about your little boy,’ he said.

      Philip mumbled something and looked rather uncomfortable, like a man who finds himself involved in an embarrassing situation.  He could not bear to let anyone come near his misery.  It was private, secret, sacred.  It hurt him to expose it, it made him feel ashamed.

      ‘It was a peculiarly gratuitous horror,’ he said, to bring the conversation away from the particular and personal to the general.

      ‘All horrors are gratuitous,’ said Spandrell.  ‘How’s Elinor standing it?’

      The question was direct, had to be answered.  ‘Badly.’  He shook his head.  ‘It’s quite broken her down.’  Why did his voice, he wondered, sound so strangely unreal and, as it were, empty?

      ‘What are you going to do now?’

      ‘We shall go abroad in a few days, if Elinor feels up to the journey.  To Siena, I’d thought.  And then perhaps to the seaside somewhere in the Maremma.’  It was a comfort to be able to go into these geographical details.

      ‘No more English domesticity then,’ said Spandrell after a little pause.

      ‘The reason of it has been taken away.’

      Spandrell nodded slowly.  ‘Do you remember that conversation we had at the Club, with Illidge and Walter Bidlake?  Nothing ever happens to a man except what’s like him.  Settling down in the country in England wasn’t at all like you.  It didn’t happen.  It’s been prevented.  Ruthlessly, by God!  But providence uses foul means as well as fair.  Travelling about, being unfixed, being a spectator – that as like you.  You’re being compelled to do what’s like you.’  There was a silence.  ‘And living in a kind of dust-heap,’ Spandrell added, ‘that’s like me.  Whatever I do, however hard I try to escape, I remain on the dust-heap.  I suppose I always shall.’  Yes, always, he went on thinking.  He had played the last card and lost.  No, not the last card; for there was one other.  The last but one.  Would he also loose with the last?