Point Counter Point, Page 43

  Absurd and childish, she now assured herself. But there, the absurd and childish thing had happened; there was no undoing it.

  From Philip Quarles’s Notebook

  In the Sunday Pictorial, a snapshot of Everard Webley with his mouth open—a black hole in the middle of a straining face—bawling. ‘Mr. E. W., the founder and chief of the B. B. F., addressed a battalion of British Freemen in Hyde Park on Saturday.’ And that was all that remained of the event, that gargoylish symbol of demagogy. A mouth opened to bray. What a horror!

  And yet the event was genuinely impressive. And E.’s bawling sounded quite nobly, at the time. And he looked monumental on his white horse. Selecting a separate instant out of what had been a continuity, the camera turned him into a cautionary scarecrow. Unfair? Or was the camera’s vision the true one and mine the false? For after all, the impressive continuity must have been made up of such appalling instants as the camera recorded. Can the whole be something quite different from its parts? In the physical world, yes. Taken as a whole a body and brain are radically different from their component electrons. But what about the moral world? Can a collection of low values make up a single high value? Everard’s photo poses a genuine problem. Millions of monstrous instants making up a splendid half-hour.

  Not that I was without my doubts of the splendidness at the time. E. talked a lot about Thermopylae and the Spartans. But my resistance was even more heroic. Leonidas had three hundred companions. I defended my spiritual Thermopylae single-handed against E. and his Freemen. They impressed me; but I resisted. The drill, to begin with, was superb. I watched, enchanted. As usual. How does one explain the fascination of the military spectacle? Explain it away, by preference. I wondered all the time I was watching.

  A squad is merely ten men and emotionally neutral. The heart only begins to beat at the sight of a company. The evolutions of a battalion are intoxicating. And a brigade is already an army with banners—which is the equivalent, as we know from the Song of Songs, of being in love. The thrill is proportional to the numbers. Given the fact that one is only two yards high, two feet wide and solitary, a cathedral is necessarily more impressive than a cottage and a mile of marching men is grander than a dozen loafers at a street corner. But that’s not all. A regiment’s more impressive than a crowd. The army with banners is equivalent to love only when it’s perfectly drilled. Stones in the form of a building are finer than stones in a heap. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army’s beautiful. But that’s not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master. So I thought, as I admired the evolutions of Everard’s Freemen. And by taking the admiration to bits, I preserved myself from being overwhelmed by it. Divide and rule. I did the same with the music and afterwards with Everard’s speech.

  What a great stage manager was lost in Everard! Nothing could have been more impressive than (breaking the studiously prolonged silence) that fanfare of trumpets and then, solemnly, the massive harmonies of a thousand voices singing ‘The Song of the Freemen.’ The trumpets were prodigious—like the overture to the Last Judgment. (Why should upper partials be so soul-shaking?) And when the trumpet overture was done, the thousand voices burst out with that almost supernatural sound which choral singing always has. Enormous, like the voice of Jehovah. Reinhardt himself couldn’t have done the trick more effectually. IV felt as though there were a hole where my diaphragm should be; a kind of anxious tingling ran over my skin, the tears were very nearly at the surface of my eyes. I did the Leonidas turn again and reflected how bad the music was, what ridiculous rant the words.

  The Last Trump, the voice of God—and then it was Everard’s turn to speak. And one wasn’t let down. How well he did it! His voice took you in the solar plexus, like those upper partials on the trumpets. Moving and convincing, even though you knew that what he said was vague and more or less meaningless. I analysed the tricks. They were the usual ones. The most effective was the employment of inspiring words with two or more meanings. ‘Liberty,’ for example. The liberty in the title and programme of the British Freemen is the liberty to buy and sell and own property with a minimum of government interference. (A pretty large minimum, parenthetically; but let that pass.) Everard bawls out the word in his solar-plexus-punching voice: ‘we are fighting for liberty; we are going to free the country,’ etcetera. The hearer immediately visualizes himself sitting in shirt-sleeves with a bottle and a complaisant wench and no laws, no code of good manners, no wife, no policeman, no parson to forbid. Liberty! Naturally it arouses his enthusiasm. It’s only when the British Freemen come to power that he’ll realize that the word was really used in an entirely different sense. Divide and conquer. I conquered. P. S.—Or rather one part of me conquered. I’ve got into the habit of associating myself with that part and applauding when it triumphs. But, after all, is it the best part? In these particular circumstances, perhaps yes. It’s probably better to be dispassionately analytical than to be overwhelmed by Everard’s stage-managing and eloquence into becoming a British Freeman. But in other circumstances? Rampion’s probably right. But having made a habit of dividing and conquering in the name of the intellect, it’s hard to stop. And perhaps it isn’t entirely a matter of second nature; perhaps first nature comes in too. It’s easy to believe one ought to change one’s mode of living. The difficulty is to act on the belief. This settlement in the country, for example; this being rustic and paternal and a good neighbour; this living vegetably and intuitively—is it really going to be possible? I imagine it; but in fact, in fact…? Meanwhile, it might be rather interesting to concoct a character on these lines. A man who has always taken pains to encourage his own intellectualist tendencies at the expense of all the others. He avoids personal relationships as much as he can, he observes without participating, doesn’t like to give himself away, is always a spectator rather than an actor. Again, he has always been careful not to distinguish one day, one place from another; not to review the past and anticipate the future at the New Year, not to celebrate Christmas or birthdays, not to revisit the scenes of his childhood, not to make pilgrimages to the birthplaces of great men, battlefields, ruins and the like. By this suppression of emotional relationships and natural piety he seems to himself to be achieving freedom—freedom from sentimentality, from the irrational, from passion, from impulse and emotionalism. But in reality, as he gradually discovers, he has only narrowed and desiccated his life; and what’s more, has cramped his intellect by the very process he thought would emancipate it. His reason’s free, but only to deal with a small fraction of experience. He realizes his psychological defects, and desires, in theory, to change. But it’s difficult to break lifelong habits; and perhaps the habits are only the expression of an inborn indifference and coldness, which it might be almost impossible to overcome. And for him at any rate, the merely intellectual life is easier; it’s the line of least resistance, because it’s the line that avoids other human beings. Among them his wife. For he’d have a wife and there would be the elements of drama in the relations between the woman, living mainly with her emotions and intuitions, and the man whose existence is mainly on the abstracted intellectual plane. He loves her in his way and she loves him in hers. Which means that he’s contented and she’s dissatisfied; for love in his way entails the minimum of those warm, confiding human relationships which constitute the essence of love in her way. She complains; he would like to give more, but finds it hard to change himself. She even threatens to leave him for a more human lover; but she is too much in love with him to put the threat into effect.

  That Sunday afternoon Elinor and Everard Webley drove down into the country.

  ‘Forty-three miles in an hour and seven minutes,’ said Everard looking at his watch as he stepped out of the car. ‘Not bad considering that includes getting out of London and being held up by that filthy charabanc in Guildford. Not at
all bad.’

  ‘And what’s more,’ said Elinor, ‘we’re still alive. If you knew the number of times I just shut my eyes and only expected to open them again on the Day of Judgment….’

  He laughed, rather glad that she should have been so frightened by the furiousness of his driving. Her terrors gave him a pleasing sense of power and superiority. He took her arm protectively and they walked away down the green path into the wood. Everard drew a deep breath.

  ‘This is better than making political speeches,’ he said, pressing her arm.

  ‘Still,’ said Elinor, ‘it must be rather wonderful to sit on a horse and make a thousand people do whatever you want.’

  Everard laughed. ‘Unfortunately there’s a bit more in politics than that.’ He glanced at her. ‘You enjoyed the meeting?’

  ‘I was thrilled.’ She saw him again on his white horse, heard his strong vibrating voice, remembered her exultation and those sudden tears. Magnificent, she said to herself, magnificent! But there was no recapturing the exultation. His hand was on her arm, his huge presence loomed almost threateningly over her. ‘Is he going to kiss me?’ she nervously wondered. She tried to drive out the questioning dread and fill its place with yesterday’s exultation. Magnificent! But the dread would not be exorcised. ‘I thought your speech was splendid,’ she said aloud and wondered parenthetically as she spoke what it had been about She remembered the sound and timbre of the words, but not their significance. Hopeless! ‘Oh, what lovely honeysuckle!’

  Everard reached up, enormous, and picked a couple of blossoms. ‘Such beauty, such loveliness!’ He quoted Keats, fumbled in his memory for a line in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. He wondered lyrically why one lived in towns, why one wasted one’s time in the pursuit of money and power, when there was all this beauty waiting to be known and loved.

  Elinor listened rather uncomfortably. He seemed to turn it on, this love of beauty, like an electric light—turn out the love of power, turn out efficiency and political preoccupations and turn on the love of beauty. But why shouldn’t he, after all? There was nothing wrong in liking beautiful things. Nothing, except that in some obscure indescribable way Everard’s love of beauty wasn’t quite right. Too deliberate was it? Too occasional? Too much for holidays only? Too conventional, too heavy, too humourlessly reverent? She preferred him as a lover of power. As a power-lover he was somehow of better quality than as a beauty-lover. A poor beauty-lover, perhaps, because he was such a good power-lover. By compensation. Everything has to be paid for.

  They walked on. In an open glade between the trees the foxgloves were coming into flower.

  ‘Like torches burning upwards from the bottom,’ said Everard poetically.

  Elinor halted in front of one tall plant whose first flower-bells were on a level with her eyes. The red flesh of the petals was cool and resilient between her fingers. She peeped into the open bell-mouth.

  ‘Think of the discomfort of having freckles in one’s throat,’ she said. ‘Not to mention little beetles.’

  They moved away in silence through the trees. It was Everard who first spoke.

  ‘Will you ever love me?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘You know how fond I am of you, Everard.’ Her heart sank; the moment had come, he would want to kiss her. But he made no gesture, only laughed, rather mournfully.

  ‘Very fond of me,’ he repeated. ‘Ah, if only you could be a little less reasonable, a little more insane If only you knew what loving was!’

  ‘Isn’t it a good thing somebody should be sane? ‘ said Elinor. ‘Sane beforehand, I mean. For everybody can be sane afterwards. Much too sane, when the fit’s over and the lovers begin to wonder whether, after all, the world was well lost. Think, Everard, think first. Do you want to lose the world?’

  ‘I shouldn’t lose it,’ Everard answered, and his voice had that strange thrilling vibration which she seemed to hear, not with her ears, but with her body, in the very midriff. ‘They couldn’t take it away from me. Times have changed since Parnell’s day. Besides I’m not Parnell. Let them try to take it away!’ He laughed. ‘Love and the world—I’m going to have both, Elinor. Both.’ He smiled down at her, the power-lover triumphant.

  ‘You’re asking too much,’ she answered laughing, ‘you’re greedy.’ The exultation tingled again through her, was like the breath-taking warmth of hot wine.

  He bent down and kissed her. Elinor did not shrink.

  Another car had pulled up at the roadside, another couple strolled along the green path into the wood. Through the glaring pink and white of her cosmetics the woman’s face was old; the weary flesh had sagged out of its once charming shape.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely!’ she kept exclaiming as she walked along, carrying her heavy body rather unsteadily on very high-heeled shoes over the uneven ground. ‘Isn’t it lovely!’

  Spandrell—for it was he—did not answer.

  ‘Pick me some of that honeysuckle there!’ she begged.

  He pulled down a flowered spray with the crook of his stick. Through the reek of chemical perfumery and not very clean underlinen the scent of the flowers came cool and delicious to his nostrils.

  ‘Don’t they smell simply divine!’ she exclaimed, rapturously sniffing. ‘Too divine!’

  The corners of Spandrell’s mouth twitched into a smile. It amused him to hear the cast-off locutions of duchesses in the mouth of this ageing prostitute. He looked at her. Poor Connie! She was a skeleton at the feast—more gruesomely deathly for being covered with so much loose and sagging flesh. Really gruesome. There was no other word. Here, in the sun, she was like a piece of stage scenery seen by daylight and from close at hand. That was why he had gone to the expense of hiring the Daimler and taking her out—just because the poor superannuated punk was so gruesome. He nodded. ‘Quite nice,’ he said. ‘But I prefer your scent.’

  They walked on. A little uncertain already of the distinction between a second and a minor third, a cuckoo was calling. In the slanting corridors of sunlight tunnelled through the green and purple of the forest shadows the little flies jerkily danced and zigzagged. There was no wind, the leaves hung down heavy with greenness. The trees were as though gorged with sap and sunshine.

  ‘Lovely, lovely,’ was Connie’s refrain. The place, the day reminded her, she said, of her childhood in the country. She sighed.

  ‘And you wish you’d been a good girl,’ said Spandrell sarcastically. ‘“The roses round the door make me love mother more.” I know, I know.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What I hate about trees in the summer,’ he went on, ‘is their beastly fat complacency. Bulging—that’s what they are; like bloated great profiteers. Bulging with insolence, passive insolence.’

  ‘Oh, the foxgloves!’ cried Connie, who hadn’t even been listening. She ran towards them, grotesquely unsteady on her high heels. Spandrell followed her.

  ‘Pleasingly phallic,’ he said, fingering one of the spikes of unopened buds. And he went on to develop the conceit, profusely.

  ‘Oh, be quiet, be quiet,’ cried Connie. ‘How can you say such things?’ She was outraged, wounded. ‘How can you—here?’

  ‘In God’s country,’ he mocked. ‘How can I?’ And raising his stick he suddenly began to lay about him right and left, slash, slash, breaking one of the tall proud plants at every stroke. The ground was strewn with murdered flowers.

  ‘Stop, stop!’ She caught at his arm. Silently laughing, Spandrell wrenched himself away from her and went on beating down the plants. ‘Stop! Please! Oh, don’t, don’t.’ She made another dash at him. Still laughing, still laying about him with his stick, Spandrell dodged away from her.

  ‘Down with them,’ he shouted, ‘down with them.’ Flower after flower fell under his strokes. ‘There!’ he said at last, breathless with laughter and running and slashing. ‘There!’ Connie was in tears.

  ‘How could you?’ she said ‘How could you do it?’

  He laughed again, silently, throwing back his head. ‘Serve them rig
ht,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m going to sit still and let myself be insulted? The insolence of the brutes! Ah, there’s another!’ He stepped across the glade to where one last tall foxglove stood as though hiding among the hazel saplings. One stroke was enough. The broken plant fell almost noiselessly.

  ‘Damn their insolence! It serves them right. Let’s come back to the car.’