Point Counter Point, Page 34

  Mr. Quarles opened the sittingroom door to let her pass.

  ‘Ta,’ said Gladys and walked in.

  He followed. On the nape of her neck, her dark cropped hair ended in a little triangle that pointed downwards along the spine. She was wearing a thin green dress. Through the fine stuff he could see, just below her shoulders, the line where the underclothes gave place to bare skin. A belt of black shiny leather was fastened in a slant very low on her hips. At every stride it rose and fell on her left hip with a rhythmical regularity. Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh. Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on. wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modem fashions a treat and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover. His eyes followed the curves of the lustrous sunburn. But what fascinated him most to-day was the black leather belt flicking up and down over the left haunch, with the regularity of a piece of machinery, every time she moved her leg. In that rise and fall the whole unindividualized species, the entire sex semaphored their appeal.

  Gladys halted and turned towards him with a smile, expectantly coquettish. But Mr. Quarles made no responding gesture.

  ‘I’ve got the Corona hyah,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we had better begin at once.’

  For the second time Gladys was surprised, thought of making a comment, and again said nothing, but sat down in silence before the typewriter.

  Mr. Quarles put on his tortoiseshell-rimmed pince-nez and opened his despatch case. He had found a mistress, but he did not see why that should entail the loss of a typist, for whose services, after all, he paid.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking up at her over the top of his pince-nez, ‘we’d better begin with those letters to the Traffic Superintendent and the Times.’ Gladys adjusted the paper, typed the date. Mr. Quarles cleared his throat and dictated. There were some good phrases, he flattered himself, in the letters. ‘Inexcusable slackness entailing the waste of time otherwise valuable than that of drowsy railway bureaucrats’—that, for example, was excellent. And so (for the benefit of the Times) was ‘the pampered social parasites of a protected industry.’

  ‘That’ll teach the dogs,’ he said with satisfaction, as he read the letters through. ‘That’ll make them squirm.’ He looked to Gladys for applause, and was not entirely satisfied with the smile on that impertinent face. ‘Pity old Lord Hagworm’s not alive,’ he added, calling up strong allies

  ‘I’d have written to him. He was a director of the company.’ But the last of the Hagworms had died in 1912. And Gladys continued to be more amused than admiring.

  Mr. Quarles dictated a dozen more letters, the answers to a correspondence which he had allowed to accumulate for several days before coming to London, so that the total might seem more important and also that he might get his full money’s worth out of Gladys’s secretaryship

  ‘Thank goodness,’ he said, when the last of the letters was answered. ‘You’ve no idyah,’ he went on (and the great thinker had come to reinforce the landed gentleman), ‘you’ve no idyah how exasperating these trivial little things can be, when you’ve got something more syahrious and important to think about.’

  ‘I suppose they must be,’ said Gladys, thinking how funny he was.

  ‘Take down,’ commanded Mr. Quarles, to whom a pensee had suddenly occurred. He leaned back in his chair and, closing his eyes, pursued the elusive phrase.

  Gladys waited, her fingers poised above the keyboard. She looked at the watch on her wrist. Ten past twelve. It would be lunch-time soon. A new watch—that would be the first thing she’d make him give her. The one she had was such a cheap, nasty-looking watch; and it kept such bad time.

  ‘Note for the volume of Reflections,’ said Mr. Quarles, without opening his eyes. The keys briefly rattled. ‘The ivory pinnacles of thought’—he repeated the words inwardly. They made a satisfying reverberation along the corridors of his mind. The phrase was caught. He sat up briskly and opened his eyes—to become aware that the lisle-thread top of one of Gladys’s sunburnt stockings was visible, from where he was sitting, to a considerable distance above the knee.

  ‘All my life,’ he dictated, his eyes fixed on the lisle thread, ‘I have suffered from the irrelevant—no, say “importunate”—interruptions of the wahld’s trivialitah, full stop. Some thinkers comma I know comma are able to ignore these interruptions comma to give them a fleeting but sufficient attention and return with a serene mind to higher things full stop.’

  There was silence. Above the lisle thread, Mr. Quarles was thinking, was the skin,—soft, curving tightly over the firm curved flesh. To caress and, caressing, to feel the finger-tips silkily caressed; to squeeze a handful of elastic flesh. Even to bite. Like a round goblet, like a heap of wheat.

  Suddenly conscious of the direction of his glances, Gladys pulled down her skirt.

  ‘Where was I?’ asked Mr. Quarles.

  ‘Higher things with a serene mind,’ Gladys g answered, reading from the page in front of her.

  ‘H’m.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘For me comma alas comma this serenitah has always been impossible semi-colon; my nahvous sensibilitah is too great full stop. Dragged down from the ivorah pinnacles of thought’ (he rolled out the phrase with relish) ‘into the common dust comma, I am exasperated comma, I lose my peace of mind and am unable to climb again into my tower.’

  He rose and began to walk restlessly about the room.

  ‘That’s always been my trouble,’ he said. ‘Too much sensibilitah. A syahrious thinker ought to have no temperament, no nerves. He has no business to be passionate.’

  The skin, he was thinking, the firm elastic flesh. He halted behind her chair. The little triangle of cropped hair pointed down along her spine. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent over her.

  Gladys looked up, smiling impertinently, with triumph. ‘Well?’ she asked.

  Mr. Quarles bent lower and kissed her neck. She giggled.

  ‘How you tickle!’

  His hands explored her, sliding along her arms, pressing her body—the body of the species, of the entire sex. The individual Gladys continued to giggle.

  ‘Naughty!’ she said, and made a pretence of pushing his hands away. ‘Naughty!’

  CHAPTER XXI

  ‘A month ago,’ said Elinor, as their taxi drove out of Liverpool Street Station, ‘we were in Udaipur.’

  ‘It certainly seems improbable,’ said Philip, agreeing with the implications of her remark.

  ‘These ten months of travel have been like an hour in a cinema. There’s the Bank. I begin to doubt whether I’ve ever been away.’ She sighed. ‘It’s rather a dreadful feeling.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Philip. ‘I suppose I’m used to it. I never do feel that anything has really happened before this morning.’ He craned his neck out of the window. ‘Why people should bother about the Taj Mahal when there’s St. Paul’s to look at, I can’t imagine. What a marvel!’

  ‘That wonderful black and white of the stone.’

  ‘As though it were an engraving. Doubly a work of art. Not merely architecture, but an etching of architecture.’ He leaned back. ‘I often doubt whether I ever had a childhood,’ he went on, returning to the previous conversation.

  ‘That’s because you never think of it. Lots of my childhood is more real to me than Ludgate Hill here. But then I constantly think of it.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Philip. ‘I don’t often try to remember. Hardly ever, in fact. I always seem to have too much to do and think about.’

  ‘You have no natural piety,’ said Elinor. ‘I wish you had.’

  They drove along the Strand. The two little churches protested against Australia House, in vain. In the courtyard of King’s College a group of young men and women sat in the sun waiting for the Professor of Pastoral Theology. At the pit door of the Gaiety there was already a queue; the placa
rds advertised the four hundredth performance of’ The Girl from Biarritz.’ Next door to the Savoy, Philip noticed, you could still buy a pair of boots for twelve-and-six. In Trafalgar Square the fountains were playing, Sir Edwin Landseer’s lions mildly glared, the lover of Lady Hamilton stood perched among the clouds, like St. Simeon the Stylite. And behind the grim colonnade of the National Gallery Uccello’s horsemen timelessly fought and Rubens raped his Sabines, Venus looked into her mirror and in the midst of Piero’s choiring angels Jesus was born into a magically lovely world.

  The cab turned down Whitehall.

  ‘I like to think of all the bureaucrats.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Elinor.

  ‘Scribbling away,’ he went on,’scribbling from morning till night in order that we may live in freedom and comfort. Scribble, scribble—the result is the British Empire. What a comfort,’ he added, ‘to live in a world where one can delegate everything tiresome, from governing to making sausages, to somebody else.’

  At the Gate of the Horse Guards the mounted sentries looked as though they were stuffed. Near the Cenotaph a middleaged lady was standing with raised eyes, murmuring a prayer over the Kodak with which she proposed to take a snapshot of the souls of the nine hundred thousand dead. A Sikh with a black beard and a pale mauve turban emerged from Grindley’s as they passed. The time, according to Big Ben, was twenty-seven minutes past eleven. In the library of the House of Lords was there a dozing marquess? A charabanc disgorged Americans at the door of Westminster Abbey. Looking back through the little porthole in the hood they were able to see that the hospital was still urgently in need of funds.

  John Bidlake’s house was in Grosvenor Road, overlooking the river.

  ‘Pimlico,’ said Philip meditatively, as they approached the house. He laughed. ‘Do you remember that absurd song your father used always to quote?’

  ‘“To Pimlico Then let us go,”’ Elinor chanted.

  ‘“One verse omitted here.” You mustn’t forget that.’ They both laughed, remembering John Bidlake’s comments.

  ‘“One verse omitted here.” It’s omitted in all the anthologies. I’ve never been able to discover what happened when they’d got to Pimlico. It’s kept me wondering for years, feverishly. Nothing like Bowdlerism for heating the imagination.’

  ‘Pimlico,’ Philip repeated. Old Bidlake, he was thinking, had made of Pimlico a sort of Rabelaisian Olympus. He liked the phrase. But ‘Gargantuan’ would be better for public use than ‘Rabelaisian.’ For those who had never read him, Rabelais connoted nothing but smut. Gargantuan Olympus, then. They had at least heard rumours that Gargantua was large.

  But the John Bidlake they found sitting by the stove in his studio was not at all Olympian, seemed less instead of more than life size. He suffered himself to be kissed by his daughter, limply shook hands with Philip.

  ‘Good to see you again,’ he said. But there was no resonance in his voice; the undertone ofjovial thunders and jovial laughters was absent. He spoke without gusto. His eyes were without lustre, and bloodshot. He looked thin and grey.

  ‘How are you, father?’ Elinor was surprised and distressed. She had never seen her father like this before.

  ‘Not well,’ he answered, shaking his head, ‘not well. Something wrong with my insides.’ The old lion suddenly and recognizably roared. ‘Making us go through life with a barrow-full of tripes! I’ve always resented God’s practical jokes.’ The roar became plaintive. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to mine now. Something very unpleasant.’ It degenerated almost into a whine. ‘I feel wretched.’ Lengthily, the old man described his symptoms.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ Elinor asked, when he had finished.

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t believe in them. They never do one any good.’ The truth was that he had a superstitious terror of doctors. Birds of evil omen—he hated to see them in the house.

  ‘But you really ought.’ She tried to persuade him.

  ‘All right,’ he at last consented grumblingly.

  ‘Let the quacks come.’ But secretly he was rather relieved. He had been wanting to see the doctor for some time now; but his superstition had been stronger hitherto than his desire. The ill-omened medicine man was now to come, but not on his invitation; on Elinor’s. The responsibility was not his; not on him, therefore, would fall the bad luck. Old Bidlake’s private religion was obscurely complicated.

  They began to talk of other things. Now that he knew he could consult a doctor in safety, John Bidlake felt better and more cheerful.

  I’m worried about him,’ said Elinor, as they drove away.

  Philip nodded. ‘Being seventy-three’s no joke. He’s begun to look his age.’

  What a head! he was thinking. He wished he could paint. Literature couldn’t render it. One could describe it, of course, down to the last wrinkle. But where would one be then? Nowhere. Descriptions are slow. A face is instantaneously perceived. A word, a single phrase —that was what one needed. ‘The glory that was Greece, grown old.’ That, for example, would give you something of the man. Only of course it wouldn’t do. Quotations have something facetiously pedantic about them. ‘A statue in parchment’ would be better. ‘The parchment statue of what had once been Achilles was sitting, crumpled, near the stove.’ That was getting nearer the mark. No longwinded description. But for anyone who had ever seen a cast of the Discobolos, handled a vellum-bound book, heard of Achilles, John Bidlake was in that sentence visible. And for those who had never seen a Greek statue or read about Achilles in a book with a crinkly sheep-skin cover? Well, presumably they could go to the devil.

  ‘All the same,’ he thought, ‘it’s too literary. Too much culture.’

  Elinor broke the silence. ‘I wonder how I shall find Everard, now that he’s become such a great man.’ With her mind’s eye she saw the keen face, the huge but agile body. Swiftness and violence. And he was in love with her. Did she like the man? Or did she detest him?

  ‘I wonder if he’s started pinching people’s ears, like Napoleon?’ Philip laughed. ‘Anyhow, it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Elinor, ‘I like him.’ Philip’s mockery had answered her question for her.

  ‘So do I. But mayn’t I laugh at what I like?’

  ‘You certainly laugh at me. Is that because you like me?’

  He took her hand and kissed it. ‘I adore you, and I never laugh at you. I take you perfectly seriously.’

  Elinor looked at him, unsmiling. ‘You make me desperate sometimes. What would you do, if I went off with another man? Would you care two pins?’

  ‘I should be perfectly wretched.’

  ‘Would you?’ She looked at him. Philip was smiling; he was a thousand miles away. ‘I’ve a good mind to make the experiment,’ she added, frowning. ‘But would you be wretched? I’d like to be certain before I began.’

  ‘And who’d be your fellow experimenter?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the trouble. Most other men are so impossible.’

  ‘What a compliment!’

  ‘But you’re impossible too, Phil. The most impossible of them all, really. And the worst of it is I love you, in spite of it. And you know it. Yes, and exploit it too.’ The cab drew up at the curb. She reached for her umbrella. ‘But you be careful,’ she went on, as she rose to her feet. ‘I’m not indefinitely exploitable. I won’t go on giving something for nothing for ever. One of these days I shall start looking for somebody else.’ She stepped out on to the pavement.

  ‘Why not try Everard,’ he chaffed, looking out at her through the window of the cab.

  ‘Perhaps I shall,’ she answered. ‘I know Everard would ask nothing better.’

  Philip laughed and blew her a kiss. ‘Tell the man to drive to the Club,’ he said.

  Everard kept her waiting nearly ten minutes. When she had finished re-powdering her face, Elinor wandered inquisitively about the room. The flowers were abominably arranged. And that cabinet full of old swords and daggers an
d inlaid pistols was hideous, like a thing in a museum; a monstrosity, but at the same time rather touchingly absurd. Everard had such a schoolboyish ambition to ride about on a horse and chop people’s heads off; the cabinet gave him away. So did that glass-topped table with the tray-full of coins and medals under the crystal lid. How proudly he had shown her his treasures! There was the Macedonian tetradrachm, with the head of Alexander the Great in the guise of Hercules; the sestertius of 44 B.C. with the formidable profile of Caesar, and next to it Edward iI.’s rose noble stamped with the ship that symbolized the beginning of England’s power at sea. And there, on Pisanello’s medal, was Sigismondo Malatesta, most beautiful of ruffians; and there was Queen Elizabeth in her ruff and Napoleon with laurels in his hair, and the Duke of Wellington. She smiled at them affectionately; they were old friends. The satisfactory thing about Everard, she reflected, was that you always knew where you were with him. He was always so definitely himself; he lived up to character. She opened the piano and played a couple of chords; out of tune, as usual. On the little table near the fireplace was a volume of Everard’s latest Speeches and Addresses. She picked it up, she turned over the pages. ‘The policy of the British Freemen,’ she read, ‘may be summarized as Socialism without Political Democracy, combined with Nationalism without insularity.’ That sounded excellent. But if he had written ‘ political democracy without socialism combined with insularity without nationalism’she would probably have admired just as sincerely. These abstractions! she shook her head and sighed. ‘I must be a fool,’ she thought. But really they meant nothing to her. They were quite empty. Words, nothing more. She turned a page. ‘The party system works well enough in cases where the parties are merely two groups of rival oligarchs, belonging to the same class and having fundamentally the same interests and ideals, competing with one another for power. But when parties become identified with classes and develop strict party principles, the system becomes an insanity. Because I sit on one side of the house and you sit on the other, I am compelled to believe in individualism to the exclusion of all state interference, you are compelled to believe in state interference to the exclusion of all individualism; I am compelled to believe in nationalism, even in economic nationalism (which is an imbecility), and you are compelled to believe in internationalism, even political internationalism (which is no less of an imbecility); I am compelled to believe in the dictatorship of the rich (to the exclusion of the intelligent), you are compelled to believe in the dictatorship of the poor (also to the exclusion of the intelligent). All this for the simple and politically irrelevant reason that I am on the Right and you are on the Left. In our parliaments the claims of topography are stronger than those of sense. Such are the blessings of the modern party system. It is the aim of the British Freemen to abolish that system, along with the corrupt and inefficient parliamentarism which is its corollary.’ That sounded all right, she thought; but she wondered, nevertheless, why people should bother about this sort of thing. Instead of just living. But apparently, if one were a man, one found just living dull. She reopened the book in the middle. ‘Every English liberty has been paid for by a new slavery. The destruction of feudalism strengthened the Crown. At the Reformation, we disposed of Papal infallibility, but we saddled ourselves with the divine right of kings. Cromwell smashed the divine right of kings, but imposed the tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes. The tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes is rapidly being destroyed, in order that we may have the dictatorship of the proletariat. A new infallibility, not of the Pope, but of the majority, has been propounded—an infallibility which we are compelled by law to believe in. The British Freemen are pledged to a new reformation and a new political revolution. We shall dispose of the dictatorship of the proletariat as our fathers disposed of the divine right of kings. We shall deny majority infallibility as they denied papal infallibility. The British Freemen stand for…’ Elinor had some difficulty in turning the page. Stand for what? she wondered. For the dictatorship of Everard and the infallibility of Webley? She blew at the recalcitrant pages; they fluttered apart. ‘…for justice and liberty. Their policy is that the best men shall rule, whatever their origin. Careers, in a word, must be fully open to talents. That is justice. They demand that every problem shall be dealt with on its own merits, intelligently, without reference to traditional party prejudices or the worthless opinion of stupid majorities. That is liberty. Those who imagine that liberty is synonymous with universal suffrage…’ A door banged; a loud voice resounded in the hall. There was a rush of feet on the stairs; the house shook. The door of the drawing-room burst open, as though a bomb had exploded on the outside. Everard Webley came in on a burst of loud apology and welcome.