Point Counter Point, Page 3

  ‘Do hurry up, mother,’ he had shouted impatiently. ‘We shall be late for tea.’

  Cook had baked scones for tea and there was yesterday’s plum cake and a newly opened pot of Tiptree’s cherry jam.

  ‘One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts.’ But an accident of birth had determined them for him. Justice was eternal; charity and brotherly love were beautiful in spite of the old man’s pipe and Wetherington’s sickroom. Beautiful precisely because of such things. The train slowed down. Leicester Square. He stepped out on to the platform and made his way towards the lifts. But the personal major premiss, he was thinking, is hard to deny; and the major premiss that isn’t personal is hard, however excellent, to believe in. Honour, fidelity-these were good things. But the personal major premiss of his present philosophy was that Lucy Tantamount was the most beautiful, the most desirable…

  ‘All tickets, please!’

  The debate threatened to start again. Deliberately he stifled it, the liftman slammed the gates. The lift ascended. In the street he hailed a taxi.

  ‘Tantamount House, Pall Mall.’

  CHAPTER II

  Three Italian ghosts unobtrusively haunt the eastern end of Pall Mall. The wealth of newly industrialized England and the enthusiasm, the architectural genius, of Charles Barry called them up out of the past and their native sunshine. Under the encrusting grime of the Reform Club the eye of faith recognizes something agreeably reminiscent of the Farnese Palace. A few yards further down the street, Sir Charles’s recollections of the house that Raphael designed for the Pandolfini loom up through the filmy London air-the Travellers’ Club. And between them, austerely classical, grim like a prison and black with soot, rises a smaller (but still enormous) version of the Cancelleria. It is Tantamount House.

  Barry designed it in I839. A hundred workmen laboured for a year or two. And the third marquess paid the bills. They were heavy; but the suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield had begun to spread over the land which his ancestors had stolen from the monasteries three hundred years before. ‘The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has from the sacred writings and the ancient traditions of the Fathers, taught that there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar’ Rich men with uneasy consciences had left their land to the monks that their souls might be helped through Purgatory by a perpetual performance of the acceptable sacrifice of the altar. But Henry vyi. had lusted after a young woman and desired a son; and because Pope Clement vu. was in the power of Henry’s first wife’s daughter’s cousin, he would not grant him a divorce. The monasteries were in consequence suppressed. An army of beggars, of paupers, of the infirm died miserably of hunger. But the Tantamounts acquired some scores of square miles of ploughland, forest and pasture. A few years later, under Edward VI., they stole the property of two disestablished grammar schools; children remained uneducated that the Tantamounts might be rich. They farmed their land scientifically with a view to the highest profit. Their contemporaries regarded them as ‘ men that live as though there were no God at all, men that would have all in their own hands, men that would leave nothing to others, men that be never satisfied.’ From the pulpit of St. Paul’s, Lever accused them of having ‘ offended God, and brought a common wealth into a common ruin.’ The Tantamounts were unperturbed. The land was theirs, the money came in regularly.

  The corn was sown, grew and was harvested, again and again. The beasts were born, fattened and went to the slaughter. The ploughmen, the shepherds, the cow-herds laboured from before dawn till sunset, year after year, until they died. Their children took their places. Tantamount succeeded Tantamount. Elizabeth made them barons; they became viscounts under Charles n., earls under William and Mary, marquesses under George n. They married heiress after heiressten square miles of Nottinghamshire, fifty thousand pounds, two streets in Bloomsbury, half a brewery, a bank, a plantation and six hundred slaves in Jamaica. Meanwhile, obscure men were devising machines which made things more rapidly than they could be made by hand. Villages were transformed into towns, towns into great cities. On what had been the Tantamounts’ pasture and ploughland, houses and factories were built. Under the grass of their meadows half-naked men hewed at the black and shining coal face. The laden trucks were hauled by little boys and women. From Peru the droppings of ten thousand generations of sea-gulls were brought in ships to enrich their fields. The corn grew thicker; the new mouths were fed. And year by year the Tantamounts grew richer and richer and the souls of the Black Prince’s pious contemporaries continued, no doubt, to writhe, unaided as they were by any acceptable sacrifice of the altar, in the unquenchable fires of Purgatory. The money that might, if suitably applied, have shortened their term among the flames served, among other things, to call into existence a model of the Papal Chancellery in Pall Mall.

  The interior of Tantamount House is as nobly Roman as its facade. Round a central quadrangle run two tiers of open arcades with an attic, lit by small square windows, above. But instead of being left open to the sky, the quadrangle is covered by a glass roof, which converts it into an immense hall rising the whole height of the building. With its arcades and gallery it makes a very noble room-but too large, too public, too much like a swimming bath or a roller-skating rink to be much lived in. To-night, however, it was justifying its existence. Lady Edward Tantamount was giving one of her musical parties. The floor was crowded with seated guests and in the hollow architectural space above them the music intricately pulsed.

  ‘What a pantomime! ‘ said old John Bidlake to his hostess. ‘My dear Hilda, you really must look.’

  ‘Sh-sh!’ Lady Edward protested behind her feather fan. ‘You mustn’t interrupt the music. Besides I am looking.’

  Her whisper was colonial and the r’s of ‘interrupt’ were rolled far back in the throat; for Lady Edward came from Montreal and her mother had been a Frenchwoman. In I897 the British Association met in Canada. Lord Edward Tantamount read a much-admired paper to the Biological Section. ‘One of the coming men,’ the professors had called him., But for those who weren’t professors, a Tantamount and a millionaire might be regarded as already having arrived. Hilda Sutton was most decidedly of that opinion. Lord Edward was the guest, during his stay in Montreal, of Hilda’s father. She took her opportunity. The British Association went home; but Lord Edward remained in Canada.

  ‘Believe me,’ Hilda had once confided to a friend, ‘ I never took so much interest in osmosis before or since.’

  The interest in osmosis roused Lord Edward’s attention. He became aware of a fact which he had not previously noticed; that Hilda was exceedingly pretty. Hilda also knew her woman’s business. Her task was not difficult. At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed. He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living. Hilda helped him over his paralysing twelve-year-old shynesses, and whenever terror prevented him from making the necessary advances, came half or even all the way to meet him. His ardours were boyish-at once violent and timid, desperate and dumb. Hilda talked for two and was discreetly bold. Discreetly-for Lord Edward’s notions of how young girls should behave were mainly derived from the Pickwick Papers. Boldness undisguised would have alarmed him, would have driven him away. Hilda kept up all the appearance of Dickensian younggirlishness, but contrived at the same time to make all the advances, create all the opportunities and lead the conversation into all the properly amorous channels. She had her reward. In the spring of i898 she was Lady Edward Tantamount.

  ‘But I assure you,’ she had once said to John Bidlake, quite angrily-for he had been making fun of poor Edward, ‘I’m genuinely fond of him, genuinely.’

  ‘In your own way, no doubt,’ mocked B
idlake. ‘In your own way. But you must admit it’s a good thing it isn’t everybody’s way. Just look at yourself in that mirror.’

  She looked and saw the reflection of her naked body lying, half sunk in deep cushions, on a divan.

  ‘Beast!’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference to my being fond of him.’

  ‘Oh, not to your particular way of being fond, I’m sure.’ He laughed. ‘But I repeat that it’s perhaps a good thing that—’

  She put her hand over his mouth. That was a quarter of a century ago. Hilda had been married five years and was thirty. Lucy was a child of four. John Bidlake was forty-seven, at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter; handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker and taker of virginities.

  ‘Painting’s a branch of sensuality,’ he’ retorted to those who reproved him for his way of life. ‘Nobody can paint a nude who hasn’t learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body. I take my art seriously. I’m unremitting in my preliminary studies.’ And the skin would tighten in laughing wrinkles round his monocle, his eyes would twinkle like a genial satyr’s.

  To Hilda, John Bidlake brought the revelation of her own body, her physical potentialities. Lord Edward was only a kind of child, a fossil boy preserved in the frame of a very large middleaged man. Intellectually, in the laboratory, he understood the phenomena of sex But in practice and emotionally he was a child, a fossil mid-Victorian child, preserved intact, with all the natural childish timidities and all the taboos acquired from the two beloved and very virtuous maiden aunts, who had taken the place of his dead mother, all the amazing principles and prejudices sucked in with the humours of Mr. Pickwick and Micawber He loved his young wife, but loved her as a fossil child of the’sixties might love-timidly and very apologetically; apologizing for his ardours, apologizing for his body, apologizing for hers. Not in so many words, of course; for the fossil child was dumb with shyness; but by a silent ignoring, a silent pretending that the bodies weren’t really involved in the ardours, which anyhow didn’t really exist. His love was one long tacit apology for itself; and being nothing more than an apology was therefore quite inexcusable. Love must justify itself by its results in intimacy of mind and body, in warmth, in tender contact, in pleasure. If it has to be justified from outside, it is thereby proved a thing without justification. John Bidlake made no apologies for the kind of love he had to offer. So far as it went, it entirely justified itself. A healthy sensualist, he made his love straightforwardly, naturally, with the good animal gusto of a child of nature.

  ‘Don’t expect me to talk about the stars and madonna lilies and the cosmos,’ he said. ‘They’re not my line. I don’t believe in them. I believe in—’ And his language became what a mysterious convention has decreed to be unprintable.

  It was a love without pretensions, but warm, natural, and, being natural, good so far as it went—a decent, good-humoured, happy sensuality. To Hilda, who had never known anything but a fossil child’s reticent apology for love, it was a revelation. Things which had been dead in her came alive. She discovered herself, rapturously. But not too rapturously. She never lost her head. If she had lost her head, she might have lost Tantamount House and the Tantamount millions and the Tantamount title as well. She had no intention of losing these things. So she kept her head, coolly and deliberately; kept it high and secure above the tumultuous raptures, like a rock above the waves. She enjoyed herself, but never to the detriment of her social position. She could look on at her own enjoyment; her cool head, her will to retain her social position remained apart from and above the turmoil. John Bidlake approved the way she made the best of both worlds.

  ‘Thank God, Hilda,’ he had often said, ‘you’re a sensible woman.’

  Women who believed the world well lost for love were apt to be a terrible nuisance, as he knew only too well by personal experience. He liked women; love was an indispensable enjoyment. But nobody was worth involving oneself in tiresome complications for, nothing was worth messing up one’s life for. With the women who hadn’t been sensible and had taken love too seriously, John Bidlake had been ruthlessly cruel. It was the battle of ‘all for love’ against ‘anything for a quiet life.’ John Bidlake always won. Fighting for his quiet life, he drew the line at no sort of frightfulness.

  Hilda Tantamount was as much attached to the quiet life as John himself. Their affair had lasted, pleasantly enough, for a space of years and slowly faded out of existence. They had been good lovers, they remained good friends—conspirators, even, people called them, mischievous conspirators leagued together to amuse themselves at the world’s expense. They were laughing now. Or rather old John, who hated music, was laughing alone. Lady Edward was trying to preserve the decorums.

  ‘You simply must be quiet,’ she whispered

  ‘But you’re not realizing how incredibly comic it is,’ Bidlake insisted.

  ‘Sh-sh.’

  ‘But I’m whispering.’ This continual shushing annoyed him. ‘Like a lion.’

  ‘I can’t help that,’ he answered crossly. When he took the trouble to whisper, he assumed that his voice was inaudible to all but the person to whom his remarks were addressed. He did not like to be told that what he chose to assume as true was not true.

  ‘Lion, indeed!’ he muttered indignantly. But his face suddenly brightened again. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Here’s another late arrival. What’s the betting she’ll do the same as all the others?’

  ‘Sh-sh,’ Lady Edward repeated.

  But John Bidlake paid no attention to her. He was looking in the direction of the door, where the latest of the late-comers was still standing, torn between the desire to disappear unobtrusively into the silent crowd and the social duty of making her arrival known to her hostess. She looked about her in embarrassment. Lady Edward hailed her over the heads of the intervening crowd with a wave of her long feather and a smile. The late arrival smiled back, blew a kiss, laid a finger to her lips, pointed to an empty chair at the other side of the room, threw out both hands in a little gesture that was meant to express apologies for being late and despairing regret at being unable in the circumstances to come and speak to Lady Edward, then shrugging up her shoulders and shrinking into herself so as to occupy the smallest possible amount of space, tiptoed with extraordinary precautions down the gangway towards the vacant seat.

  Bidlake was in ecstasies of merriment. He had echoed the poor lady’s every gesture as she made it. Her blown kiss he had returned with extravagant interest, and when she laid a finger to her lips, he had covered his mouth with a whole hand. He had repeated her gesture of regret, grotesquely magnifying it until it expressed a ludicrous despair. And when she tiptoed away, he began to count on his fingers, to make the gestures that, in Naples, avert the evil eye, and to tap his forehead. He turned to Lady Edward in triumph.

  ‘I told you so,’ he whispered, and his whole face was wrinkled with suppressed laughter. ‘It’s like being in a deaf and dumb asylum. Or talking to pygmies in Central Africa.’ He opened his mouth and pointed into it with a stretched forefinger; he went through the motions of drinking from a glass. ‘Me hungly,’ he said, ‘me velly velly thirsty.’

  Lady Edward flapped her ostrich at him.

  Meanwhile the music played on—Bach’s Suite in B minor, for flute and strings. Young Tolley conducted with his usual inimitable grace, bending in swan-like undulations from the loins, and tracing luscious arabesques on the air with his waving arms, as though he were dancing to the music. A dozen anonymous fiddlers and ‘cellists scraped at his bidding. And the great Pongileoni glueily kissed his flute. He blew across the mouth hole and a cylindrical air column vibrated; Bach’s meditations filled the Roman quadrangle. In the opening largo John Sebastian had, with the help of Pongileoni’s snout and the air column, made a statement: There are grand things in the world, noble things; there are men born kingly; there are real conquerors, intrinsic lords of the ea
rth. But of an earth that is, oh! complex and multitudinous, he had gone on to reflect in the fugal allegro. You seem to have found the truth; clear, definite, unmistakable, it is announced by the violins; you have it, you triumphantly hold it. But it slips out of your grasp to present itself in a new aspect among the ‘cellos and yet again in terms of Pongileoni’s vibrating air column. The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment to create a seemingly final and perfected harmony, only to break apart again. Each is always alone and separate and individual. ‘I am I,’ asserts the violin; ‘the world revolves round me.’ ‘Round me,’ calls the ‘cello. ‘Round me,’ the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.

  In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts. The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist. It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything. Here, for example, is one particular part; and John Sebastian puts the case. The Rondeau begins, exquisitely and simply melodious, almost a folk-song. It is a young girl singing to herself of love, in solitude, tenderly mournful. A young girl singing among the hills, with the clouds drifting overhead. But solitary as one of the floating clouds, a poet had been listening to her song. The thoughts that it provoked in him are the Sarabande that follows the Rondeau. His is a slow and lovely meditation on the beauty (in spite of squalor and stupidity), the profound goodness (in spite of all the evil), the oneness (in spite of such bewildering diversity) of the world. It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to time suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced. A girl singing to herself under the clouds suffices to create the certitude. Even a fine morning is enough. Is it illusion or the revelation of profoundest truth? Who knows? Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers drew their rosined horse-hair across the stretched intestines of lambs; through the long Sarabande the poet slowly meditated his lovely and consoling certitude.