Point Counter Point, Page 39

  Realizing her power, Gladys began to withhold what he desired. Perhaps he could be blackmailed into the generosity which it was not in his nature to display spontaneously. Returning from a very inexpensive evening at Lyons’ and the pictures, she pushed him angrily away when, in the taxi, he attempted the usual endearments.

  ‘Can’t you leave me in peace?’ she snapped. And a moment later, ‘Tell the driver to go to my place first and drop me.’

  ‘But, my dyah child! Mr. Quarles protested. Hadn’t she promised to come back with him?

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. Tell the driver.’

  The thought that, after three days of fervid anticipation, he would have to pass the evening in solitude was agonizing. ‘But, Gladys, my darling…’

  ‘Tell the driver.’

  ‘But it’s ryahly too cruel; you’re too unkind.’

  ‘Better write to the Times about it,’ was all her answer. ‘I’ll tell the driver myself.’

  After a night of insomnia and suffering Mr. Quarles went out as soon as the shops were open and bought a fourteen-guinea wrist watch.

  The advertisement was for a dentifrice. But as the picture represented two fox-trotting young people showing their teeth at one another in an amorous and pearly smile and as the word began with a D, little Phil unhesitatingly read ‘dancing.’

  His father laughed. ‘You old humbug!’ he said. ‘I thought you said you could read.’

  ‘But they are dancing,’ the child protested.

  ‘Yes, but that isn’t what the word says. Try again.’ He pointed.

  Little Phil glanced again at the impossible word and took a long look at the picture. But the fox-trotting couple gave him no help. ‘Dynamo,’ he said at last in desperation. It was the only other word beginning with a D that he could think of at the moment.

  ‘Or why not dinosaurus, while you’re about it?’ mocked his father. ‘Or dolicocephalous? Or dicotyledon?’ Little Phil was deeply offended; he could not bear to be laughed at. ‘Try again. Try to read it this time. Don’t guess.’

  Little Phil turned his head away. ‘It bores me,’ he said. His vanity made him reluctant to attempt what he could not achieve successfully. Miss Fulkes, who believed in teaching by rational persuasion and with the reasoned consent of the taught (she was still very young), had lectured him on his own psychology, in the hope that, once he had realized his defects, he would mend them. ‘You’ve got the wrong sort of pride,’ she had told him. ‘You’re not ashamed of being a dunce and not knowing things. But you are ashamed of making mistakes. You’d rather not do a thing at all than do it badly. That’s quite wrong.’ Little Phil would nod his head and say ‘Yes, Miss Fulkes’ in the most rational and understanding way imaginable. But he continued to prefer doing things not at all to doing them with difficulty and badly. ‘It bores me,’ he repeated. ‘But would you like me to make you a drawing?’ he suggested, turning back to his father with a captivating smile. He was always ready to draw; he drew well.

  ‘No thanks. I’d like you to read,’ said Philip.

  ‘But it bores me.’

  ‘Never mind. You must try.’

  ‘But I don’t want to try.’

  ‘But I want you to. Try.’

  Little Phil burst into tears. Tears, he knew, were an irresistible weapon. And, sure enough, they proved their value yet once more.

  Elinor looked up from where she was sitting, dissociated, book in hand, at the other end of the room. ‘Don’t make him cry,’ she called. ‘It’s so bad for him.’

  Philip shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you imagine that’s the way to educate a child…’ he said with a bitterness that the occasion did not justify, a bitterness gradually accumulated during the past weeks of silence and distant hostility, of self-questioning and ineffective self-reproach, and finding now an almost irrelevant expression.

  ‘I don’t imagine anything,’ said Elinor in a cold hard voice. ‘I only know that I don’t want him to cry.’ Little Phil redoubled his noise. She called him to her and took him on to her knee.

  ‘But seeing that he has the misfortune to be an only child, one really ought to make the effort not to spoil him.’

  Elinor pressed her cheek against the boy’s hair.’seeing that he is an only child,’ she said, ‘ I don’t see why he shouldn’t be treated as one.’

  ‘You’re hopeless,’ said Philip. ‘It’s high time we settled down, so that the boy can have a chance of being brought up rationally.’

  ‘And who’s going to do the rational upbringing?’ asked Elinor. ‘You?’ She laughed sarcastically. ‘At the end of a week you’d be so bored that you’d either commit suicide or take the first aeroplane to Paris and not come back for six months.’

  ‘Naughty father!’ put in the child.

  Philip was offended, the more so as he was secretly aware that what she said was true. The ideal of a rustic domesticity, filled with small duties and casual human contacts, was one that, for him, precariously verged on absurdity. And though the idea of supervising little Phil’s upbringing was interesting, he knew that the practice would be intolerably tedious. He remembered his own father’s spasmodic essays at education. He’d be just the same. Which was precisely why Elinor had no business to say so.

  ‘I’m not quite so childishly frivolous as you seem to imagine,’ he said with dignity and bottled anger.

  ‘On the contrary,’ she answered, ‘you’re too adultly serious. You couldn’t manage a child because you’re not enough of a child yourself. You’re like one of those dreadfully grown-up creatures in Shaw’s Methuselah.’

  ‘Naughty father!’ repeated little Phil exasperatingly, like a parrot with only one phrase.

  Philip’s first impulse was to seize the child out of his mother’s arms, smack him for his impertinence, drive him from the room and then turn on Elinor and violently ‘have things out’ with her. But a habit of gentlemanly self-control and a dread of scenes made him keep his temper. Instead of healthily breaking out he made an effort of will and more than ever tightly shut himself in. Preserving his dignity and his unexpressed grievance, he got up and walked through the French window into the garden. Elinor watched his departure. Her impulse was to run after him, take him by the hand and make peace. But she too checked herself. Philip limped away out of sight. The child continued to whimper. Elinor gave him a little shake.

  ‘Stop, Phil,’ she said almost angrily. ‘That’s enough now. Stop at once.’

  The two doctors were examining what to an untrained eye might have seemed the photograph of a typhoon in the Gulf of Siam, of an explosion of black smoke in the midst of clouds, or merely of an ink stain.

  ‘Particularly clear,’ said the young radiographer. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the smoke cloud. ‘There’s a most obvious new growth there, at the pylorus.’ He glanced with a certain enquiring deference at his distinguished colleague.

  Sir Herbert nodded. ‘Obvious,’ he repeated. He had an oracular manner; what he said, you felt, was always and necessarily true.

  ‘It couldn’t very well be large. Not with the symptoms so far recorded. There’s been no vomiting yet.’

  ‘No vomiting?’ exclaimed the radiographer with an almost excessive display of interest and astonishment. ‘That would explain the smallness.’

  ‘The obstruction’s only slight.’

  ‘It would certainly be worth opening up the abdomen for exploration purposes.’

  Sir Herbert made a little pouting grimace and dubiously shook his head. ‘One has to think of the patient’s age.’

  ‘Quite,’ the radiographer made haste to agree.

  ‘He’s older than he seems.’

  ‘Yes, yes. He certainly doesn’t look his age.’

  ‘Well, I must be going,’ said Sir Herbert.

  The young radiographer darted to the door, handed him his hat and gloves, personally escorted him to the attendant Daimler. Returning to his desk he glanced again at the black-blotched, grey-cloudy photograph.

  �
�A really remarkably successful exposure,’ he said to himself with satisfaction and, turning the picture over, he wrote a few words in pencil on the back.

  ‘J. Bidlake, Esq. Stomach after barium meal. New growth at pylorus, small but v. clear. Photographed….’ He looked up at his calendar for the date, recorded it and put the photograph away in his file for future reference.

  The old manservant announced the visitor and retired, closing the door of the studio behind him.

  ‘Well, John,’ said Lady Edward, advancing across the room. ‘How are you? I heard you’d been seedy. Nothing serious, I hope.’

  John Bidlake did not even get up to receive her. From the depth of the armchair in which he had spent the day meditating in terror the themes of disease and death, he held out a hand.

  ‘But, my poor John!’ exclaimed Lady Edward sitting down beside him. ‘You look very low and wretched. What is it?’

  John Bidlake shook his head. ‘God knows,’ he said. He had guessed, of course, from Sir Herbert’s vaguely professional words about ‘slight obstructions in the neighbourhood of the pylorus,’ he knew what was the matter. Hadn’t his son Maurice died of the same thing five years ago, in California? He knew; but he would not speak his knowledge. Uttered, the worst was more frightful, more irrevocable. Besides, one should never formulate one’s knowledge of coming evil; for then fate would have, so to speak, a model on which to shape events. There was always a kind of impossible chance that, if one didn’t put one’s foreboding of evil into words, the evil wouldn’t happen. The mysteries of John Bidlake’s personal religion were quite as obscure and paradoxical as any of those in the ‘theolatrous’ orthodoxies which he liked to deride.

  ‘But haven’t you seen a doctor?’ Lady Edward’s tone was accusatory; she knew her friend’s strange prejudice against doctors.

  ‘Of course I have,’ he answered irritably, knowing that she knew. ‘Do you take me for a fool? But they’re all charlatans. I went to one with a knighthood. But do you suppose he knew anything more than the others? He just told me in quack jargon what I’d told him in plain words; that I’d got something wrong with my innards. Stupid rogue!’ His hatred of Sir Herbert and all doctors had momentarily revived him.

  ‘But he must have told you something,’ Lady Edward insisted.

  The words brought him back to the thought of that’slight obstruction in the neighbourhood of the pylorus,’ of disease and pain and the creeping approach of death. He relapsed into his old misery and terror. ‘Nothing of significance,’ he muttered, averting his face.

  ‘Then perhaps it’s nothing really serious,’ Lady Edward comfortingly suggested.

  ‘No, no!’ To the old man her lighthearted hopefulness seemed an outrage. He would not put himself into the power of fate by formulating the horrible truth. But at the same time he wanted to be treated as though the truth had been formulated. Treated with a grave commiseration. ‘It’s bad. It’s very bad,’ he insisted.

  He was thinking of death; death in the form of a new life growing and growing in his belly, like an embryo in a womb. The one thing fresh and active in his old body, the one thing exuberantly and increasingly alive was death.

  All round, on the walls of the studio, hung fragmentary records of John Bidlake’s life. Two little landscapes painted in the Pincian Gardens in the days when Rome had only just ceased to be the Pope’s—a view of belfries and cupolas seen through a gap in the ilex trees, a pair of statues silhouetted against the sky. Next to them a satyr’s face, snubby and bearded—the portrait of Verlaine. A London street scene, full of hansoms and top hats and lifted skirts. Three sketches of the plump, bright-coloured Mary Betterton of thirty years ago. And Jenny, loveliest of models, lying naked on a long chair, with a window behind her, white clouds beyond, a bowl of roses on the window-sill and a great blue Persian cat stretched like a couchant lion, on Jenny’s white belly, dozing, its paws between her round and shallow breasts.

  Lady Edward brightly changed the subject. ‘Lucy’s just flown off to Paris again,’ she began.

  CHAPTER XXV

  QUAI VOLTAIRE.

  The air was rough, I forgot the Quies for my ears and was in a Hell of Noise for 2 1/2 hours. Feeling very tired and consequently, sweet Walter, rather sentimental and sola sola. Why aren’t you here to console me for the unbearable sadness of this lovely evening outside my window? The Louvre, the river, the green glass sky, the sunlight and those velvet shadows—they make me feel like bursting into tears. And not the scenery only. My arms in the sleeves of my dressing-gown, my hand writing, even my bare toes, now that I’ve dropped my slippers—terible, terrible. And as for my face in the glass, and my shoulders, and the orange roses and the Chinese goldfish to match, and the Dufy curtains and all the rest—yes, all, because everything’s equally beautiful and extraordinary, even the things that are dull and ugly—they’re too much to be borne. Too much. I can’t stand it and what’s more, I won’t. Interval of 5 minutes. That’s why I’ve telephoned to Rene Tallemant to come and have a cocktail and take me out somewhere amusing, malgre my headache. I simply won’t let myself be bullied by the universe. Do you know Rene? Rather a divine little man. But I wish it were you, all the same. Must go and put on a few clothes. A toi. LUCY.

  QUAI VOLTAIRE.

  Your letter was tiresome. Such yammering. And it isn’t flattering to be called a poison in the blood. It’s the equivalent of being called a stomach-ache. If you can’t write more sensibly, don’t write at all. Quant a moi, je m’amuse. Pas follement. But sufficiently, sufficiently. Theatres; mostly bad; but I like them; I’m still childish enough to feel involved in the imbecile plots. And buying clothes; such ravishments! I simply adored myself in Lanvin’s looking-glasses. Looking at pictures, on the other hand, is an overrated sport. Not dancing, though. There’d be some point, if life were always like dancing with a professional. But it ain’t. And if it were, I dare say one would long to walk. In the evenings a little pub-crawling in Mont Parnasse through hordes of Americans, Poles, Esthonians, Rumanians, Finns, Letts, Lapps, Wends, etcetera, and all of them (God help us!) artists. Shall we found a league for the suppression of art? Paris makes me long to. Also I wish one met a few more heterosexuals for a change. I don’t really like ni les tapettes ni les gousses. And since Proust and Gide made them fashionable one sees nothing else in this tiresome town. All my English respectability breaks out! Yours, L.

  QUAI VOLTAIRE.

  This time your letter was much better. (My only poem, and an accident at that. Rather good, all the same.) If only everybody would realize that being miserable or jolly about love is chiefly a matter of fashion. Being poetically miserable is an old fashion, and besides, the rhymes don’t justify it in English. Cuoredolore-amore; you can’t escape it in Italian. Nor in German; herz must feel schmerz and liebe is inevitably full of triebe. But in English, no. There’s no pain connected with English loves; only gloves and turtle doves. And the only things that, by the laws of poetry, can go straight to Englishmen’s hearts are tarts and amorous arts. And I assure you, a man’s much better occupied when he’s thinking about those subjects than when he’s telling himself how wretched he is, how jealous, how cruelly wronged and all the nonsensical rest of it. I wish that idiot Rene would understand this. But unfortunately cceur rhymes with douleur, and he’s French. He’s becoming almost as much of a bore as you were, my poor Walter. But I hope you’re now a reformed character. I like you. L.

  QUAI VOLTAIRE.

  Suffering from a cold and intense boredom, only momentarily relieved by your letter. Paris is really terribly dreary. I have a good mind to fly away somewhere else, only I don’t know where. Eileen came to see me to-day. She wants to leave Tim, because he will insist on her lying naked in bed while he sets fire to newspapers over her and lets the hot ashes fall on her body. Poor Tim! It seems unkind to deprive him of his simple pleasures. But Eileen’s so nervous of being grilled. She was furious with me for laughing and not being more sympathetic. I took it all as a joke. Wh
ich it is. A very mild one, however. For really, like the Queen, we are not amused. How I hate you for not being here to entertain me! One can forgive anything except absence. Unpardonably absent Walter, goodbye. I have an envie for you to-night, for your hands and your mouth. And you? Do you remember? L.

  QUAI VOLTARAIRE.

  So Philip Quarles is going to settle in the country and be a mixture of Mrs. Gaskell and Knud Hamsun. Well, well…. But it’s good that somebody should have illusions. At any rate he can’t be more bored in his village than I am here. What straits one’s reduced to! Last night I went with Tim and Eileen, who seems to be reconciled to the firework displays, to one of those places where you pay a hundred francs for the privilege of looking on at orgies (in masks—the one amusing feature) and if you want to, participating in them. Dim religious lights, little cubicles, divans, a great deal of what the French call amour promiscuously going on. Odd and grotesque, but terribly dreary and all so very medical. A sort of cross between very stupid clowns and an operating theatre. Tim and Eileen wanted me to stay. I told them I’d rather pay-a visit to the Morgue, and left them there. I hope they amused themselves. But what a bore, what a hopeless unmitigated bore! I always thought Heliogabalus was such a very sophisticated young person. But now I’ve seen what amused him, I realize that he must have had a mind like a baby’s, really infantile. I have the misfortune to be rather grown up about some things. I’ve a notion of going to Madrid next week. It’ll be terrifically hot, of course. gut I love the heat. I blossom in ovens. (Rather a significant intimation of my particular immortality, perhaps?) Why don’t you come with me? Seriously, I mean. You could surely get away. Murder Burlap and come and be a tripper a la Maurice Barre’s. Du sang, de la volupte et de la mort. I feel rather bloodthirsty at the moment. Spain would suit me. Meanwhile, I’ll make enquiries about the bull-fighting season. The ring makes you sick; even my bloodthirstiness won’t run to disembowelled cab-horses. But the spectators are marvellous. Twenty thousand simultaneous sadistic frissons. Really remarkable. You simply must come. my sweet Walter. Say yes. I insist. LUCY.