Point Counter Point, Page 44

  CHAPTER XXX

  Rachel Quarles had no sympathy with those sentiA mental philanthropists who blur the distinction between right and wrong, between wrong-doers and the righteous. Criminals, in her eyes, and not the society in which they lived, were responsible for their crimes. Sinners committed their own sins; their environment did not do it for them. There were excuses, of course, palliations, extenuating circumstances. But good was always good, bad remained bad. There were circumstances in which the choice of good was very difficult; but it was always the individual who made the choice and who, having made, must answer for it. Mrs. Quarles, in a word, was a Christian and not a humanitarian. As a Christian she thought that Marjorie had done wrong to leave her husband—even such a husband as Carling—for another man. She disapproved the act, but did not presume to judge the person, the more so since, in spite of what she had done, Marjorie’s heart and head were still, from Mrs. Quarles’s Christian point of view, ‘in the right place.’ Rachel found it easier to like a person who had acted wrongly, while continuing to think rightly, than one who, like her daughter-in-law, Elinor, thought wrongly, while acting, so far as she knew, in a manner entirely blameless. There were circumstances, too, in which wrong action seemed to her almost less reprehensible than wrong thought. It was not that she had any sympathy for hypocrisy. The person who thought and spoke well while consistently and consciously acting ill was detestable to her. Such people, however, are rare. Most of those who do wrong, in spite of their sound beliefs, do so in a moment of weakness and afterwards regret their wrongdoing. But the person who thinks wrongly does not admit the wrongness of bad actions. He sees no reason why he should not commit them or why, having committed them, he should repent and mend his ways. And even if he in fact behaves virtuously, he may be the means, by his wrong thinking, of leading others into wrong action.

  ‘An admirable woman,’ had been John Bidlake’s verdict; ‘but rather too fond of fig-leaves—especially over the mouth.’

  Herself, Rachel Quarles was only conscious of being a Christian. She could never imagine how people contrived to live without being Christians. But a great many, she sadly had to admit, did so contrive. Almost all the young people of her acquaintance. ‘It’s as though one’s children talked a different languages’ she had once complained to an old friend.

  In Marjorie Carling she discovered someone who spoke and understood her own spiritual idiom.

  ‘You’ll find her, I’m afraid, a bit of a bore,’ Philip had warned her, when he announced his intention of lending his little house at Chamford to Walter and Marjorie. ‘But be nice to her, all the same. She deserves it, poor woman. She’s had a very thin time of it.’ And he detailed a story that made his mother sigh to listen to.

  ‘I shouldn’t have expected Walter Bidlake to be like that,’ she said.

  ‘But in these matters one doesn’t expect anything of anybody. Things happen to them, that’s all. They don’t do them.’

  Mrs. Quarles did not answer. She was thinking of the time when she had first discovered one of Sidney’s infidelities. The astonishment, the pain, the humiliation…. ‘But still,’ she said aloud, ‘one wouldn’t have thought he’d knowingly have made somebody unhappy.’

  ‘Still less that he’d knowingly have made himself unhappy. And yet I think he’s really made himself quite as wretched as Marjorie. Perhaps that’s his chief justification.’

  His mother sighed. ‘It all seems so extraordinarily unnecessary.’

  Mrs. Quarles called on Marjorie almost as soon as she had settled in.

  ‘Come and see me often,’ she said, as she took her leave. ‘Because I like you,’ she added, with a sudden smile, for which poor Marjorie was quite pathetically grateful. It wasn’t often that people liked her. That she had fallen so deeply in love with Walter was due, above everything, to his having been one of the few people who had ever shown any interest in her. ‘And I hope you like me,’ Mrs. Quarles added.

  Marjorie could only blush and stammer. But she already adored.

  Rachel Quarles had spoken in all sincerity. She did like Marjorie—liked her, even, for the very defects which made other people find her such a bore; for her stupidity—it was so good and well-meaning; for her lack of humour—it was the mark of such earnestness. Even those intellectual pretensions, those deep or informative remarks dropped portentously out of a meditative silence, did not displease her. Mrs. Quarles recognized in them the rather absurd symptoms of a genuine love of the good, the true and the beautiful, of a genuine desire for self-improvement.

  At their third meeting Marjorie confided all her story. Mrs. Quarles’s comments were sensible and Christian. ‘There’s no miraculous cure for these things,’ she said; ‘no patent medicine for unhappiness. Only the old dull virtues, patience, resignation and the rest; and the old consolation, the old source of strength—old, but not dull. There’s nothing less dull than God. But most young people won’t believe me when I tell them so, even though they’re bored to death with jazz bands and dancing.’

  Marjorie’s first adoration was confirmed and increased—increased so much, indeed, that Mrs. Quarles felt quite ashamed, as though she had extorted something on false pretences, as though she had fraudulently acted a part.

  ‘You’re such a wonderful help and comfort,’ Marjorie declared.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she answered almost angrily. ‘The truth is that you were lonely and unhappy and I was conveniently there at the right moment.’

  Marjorie protested; but the older woman would not permit herself to be praised or thanked.

  They talked a good deal about religion. Carling had given Marjorie a horror for all that was picturesque or formal in Christianity. Piran of Peranzabuloe, vestments, ceremonials—everything remotely connected with a saint, a rite, a tradition was hateful to her. But she preserved a vague inchoate faith in what she regarded as the essentials; she had retained from girlhood a certain habit of Christian feeling and thought. Under the influence of Rachel Quarles the faith became more definite, the habitual emotions were reinforced.

  ‘I feel so enormously much happier since I’ve been here, with you,’ she announced hardly more than a week after her arrival.

  ‘It’s because you’re not trying to be happy or wondering why you should have been made unhappy, because you’ve stopped thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That’s the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,’ Mrs. Quarles went on; ‘they never think of life except in terms of happiness. How shall I have a good time? That’s the question they ask. Or they complain. Why am I not having a better time? But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it’s inevitably a disappointment—for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it’s been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody’s happy. It’s because they’re on the wrong road. The question they ought to be asking themselves isn’t: Why aren’t we happy, and how shall we have a good time? It’s: How can we please God, and why aren’t we better? If people asked themselves those questions and answered them to the best of their ability in practice, they’d achieve happiness without ever thinking about it. For it’s not by pursuing happiness that you find it; it’s by pursuing salvation. And when people were wise, instead of merely clever, they thought of life in terms of salvation and damnation, not of good times and bad times. If you’re feeling happy now, Marjorie, that’s because you’ve stopped wishing you were happy and started trying to be better. Happiness is like coke—something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.’

  At Gattenden, meanwhile, the days passed gloomily.

  ‘Why don’t you do a little painting?’ Mrs. Bidlake suggested to her husband on the morning that followed his arrival.

  Old John shook his head.

  ‘You’d enjoy it so much once you star
ted,’ coaxed Elinor.

  But her father would not allow himself to be persuaded. He didn’twant to paint, precisely because painting would have been so enjoyable. His very dread of pain, sickness and death made him perversely refuse to let his mind be distracted from their abhorred contemplation. It was as though some part of him obscurely desired to accept defeat and misery, were anxious to make abjection yet more abject. His courage, his Gargantuan power, his careless high spirits had been the fruits of a deliberate and lifelong ignorance. But now that to ignore was no longer possible, now that the enemy was installed in his very vitals, the virtue had gone out of him. He was afraid and could not conceal his terrors. He no longer even desired to conceal them. He somehow wanted to be abject. And abject he was. Mrs. Bidlake and Elinor did their best to rouse him from the apathetic misery in which he spent the greater part of his days at Gattenden. But he would not be roused except to complain and occasionally fly into a querulous rage.

  ‘Deplorable,’ wrote Philip in his notebook, ‘to see an Olympian reduced by a little tumour in his stomach to a state of subhumanness. But perhaps,’ he added a few days later as an afterthought, ‘he was always subhuman, even when he seemed most Olympian; perhaps being Olympian was just a symptom of subhumanity.’

  It was only with little Phil that John Bidlake would occasionally rouse himself from his abjection. Playing with the child, he would sometimes forget for a little to be wretched.

  ‘Draw something for me,’ he would say.

  And with his tongue between his teeth little Phil would draw a train, or a ship, or the stags in Gattenden Park fighting, or the old marquess in his donkey-drawn chair.

  ‘Now you draw me something, grandfather,’ he would say, when he was tired.

  And the old man would take the pencil and make half a dozen marvellous little sketches of T’ang, the Pekingese dog, or Tompy, the kitchen cat. Or sometimes, in a fit of naughtiness, he would scribble a caricature of poor Miss Fulkes writhing. And sometimes, forgetting all about the child, he would draw for his own amusement—a group of bathers, two men wrestling, a dancer.

  ‘But why have they got no clothes on?’ the child would ask.

  ‘Because they’re nicer without.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ And losing interest in drawings that had so little in the way of a story to tell him, he would ask for the pencil back again.

  But it was not always that John Bidlake responded so happily to his grandson. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly wretched, he felt the child’s mere presence as an outrage, a kind of taunting. He would fly into a rage, would shout at the boy for making a noise and disturbing him.

  ‘Can’t I ever be left in peace?’ he would shout, and then would go on to complain with curses of the general inefficiency of everybody. The house was full of women, all supposed to be looking after that damned brat. But there he always was, rampaging round, kicking up hell’s own din, getting in the way. It was intolerable. Particularly when one wasn’t well. Absolutely intolerable. People were without any consideration. Flushed and writhing, poor Miss Fulkes would lead her howling charge back to the nursery.

  The most trying scenes were at meal-times. For it was at meals (now reduced, so far as he was concerned, to broth and milk and Benger’s food) that John Bidlake was most disagreeably reminded of the state of his health. ‘Disgusting slops!’ he grumbled. But if he ate anything solid, the results were deplorable. Meal-times were the stormiest and most savage moments of John Bidlake’s day. He vented his anger on the child. Always a reluctant eater, little Phil was peculiarly difficult about his food all that spring and early summer. There were tears at almost every meal.

  ‘It’s because he isn’t really very well,’ Miss Fulkes explained apologetically. And it was true. The boy looked sallow and peaked, slept uneasily, was nervous and quickly tired, suffered from headaches, had ceased to put on weight. Dr. Crowther had ordered malt and codliver oil and a tonic. ‘Not well,’ insisted Miss Fulkes.

  But John Bidlake would not hear of it. ‘He’s simply naughty, that’s all. He just won’t eat.’ And turning to the boy, ‘Swallow, child, swallow!’ he shouted. ‘Have you forgotten how to swallow?’ The spectacle of little Phil chewing and chewing interminably on a mouthful of something he did not like exasperated him. ‘Swallow, boy! Don’t go on ruminating like that. You’re not a cow. Swallow!’ And, very red in the face, with tears welling up into his eyes, little Phil would make a terrible effort to swallow the abhorred cud of five minutes’ queasy mastication. The muscles of his throat would heave and ripple, an expression of invincible disgust would distort his small face, there would be an ominous sound of retching. ‘But it’s simply revolting!’ stormed the old man. ‘Swallow!’ His shouting was an almost infallible recipe for making the child sick.

  Burdens fell, darkness gave place to light, Marjorie apocalyptically understood all the symbols of religious literature. For she herself had struggled in the Slough of Despond and had emerged; she too had climbed laboriously and without hope and had suddenly been consoled by a sight of the promised land.

  ‘All these phrases used to sound so conventional and meaninglessly pious,’ she said to Mrs. Quarles. ‘But now I see they’re just descriptions of facts.’

  Mrs. Quarles nodded. ‘Bad descriptions, because the facts are indescribable. But if you’ve had personal experience of them, you can see what the symbols are driving at.’

  ‘Do you know the Black Country?’ said Marjorie. ‘I feel as though I’d come out of one of those mining towns on to the moors. Out into the great open spaces,’ she added in her earnest, rather drawlingly childish voice. (The voice, Mrs. Quarles couldn’t help thinking, and repented immediately of the thought—for after all the poor girl couldn’t help her voice—made the great open spaces seem curiously stuffy.) ‘And when I look back, the black town seems so small and insignificant compared with the space and the enormous sky. As though one were looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of field-glasses.’

  Mrs. Quarles frowned slightly. ‘Not so insignificant as all that,’ she said. ‘For after all, there are people living in the town, however black it may be. And the wrong end of the field-glasses is the wrong end. One isn’t meant to look at things so that they appear small and insignificant. That’s one of the dangers of getting out under the sky; one’s too apt to think of the towns and the people in them as small and remote and unimportant. But they aren’t, Marjorie. And it’s the business of the lucky ones who have got out into the open to help the others to come too.’ She frowned again, at herself this time; she hated anything like preaching. But Marjorie mustn’t imagine herself superior, promoted out of the world. ‘How’s Walter?’ she asked with an irrelevance that was no irrelevance. ‘How are you getting on together now?’

  ‘The same as ever,’ said Marjorie. The admission, a few weeks ago, would have made her utterly wretched. But now even Walter had begun to seem small and rather remote. She loved him still, of course; but somehow through the wrong end of the field-glasses. Through the right end she saw only God and Jesus; they loomed overwhelmingly large.

  Mrs. Quarles looked at her, and an expression of sadness passed quickly over her sensitive face. ‘Poor Walter!’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry for him too,’ said Marjorie. There was silence.

  Old Dr. Fisher had told her to come and report progress every few weeks, and Marjorie took advantage of that Wednesday’s cheap excursion tickets to run up to town, do some necessary shopping and tell the doctor how well she felt.

  ‘You look it too,’ said Dr. Fisher, peering at her first through his spectacles, then over the top of them. ‘Extraordinarily much better than when you were here last. It often happens in the fourth month,’ he went on to explain. Dr. Fisher liked to make his patients take an intelligent interest in their own physiology. ‘Health improves. So do spirits. It’s the body settling down to the new state of affairs. The changes in the circulation no doubt have something to do with it. The foetal
heart begins to beat about this time. I’ve known cases of neurasthenic women who wanted to have one baby after another, as quick as ever it could be managed. Pregnancy was the only thing that could cure them of their melancholy and obsessions. How little as yet we understand about the relations between body and mind!’

  Marjorie smiled and said nothing. Dr. Fisher was an angel, one of the best and kindest men in the whole world. But there were things he understood even less of than the relations between body and mind. What did he understand about God, for example? What did he understand about the soul and its mystical communion with spiritual powers? Poor Dr. Fisher! All that he could talk about was the fourth month of pregnancy and the foetal heart. She smiled inwardly, feeling a kind of pity for the old man.

  Burlap that morning was affectionate. ‘Old man,’ he said, laying a hand on Walter’s shoulder,’shouldn’t we go out and eat a chop together somewhere?’ He gave Walter’s shoulder a little squeeze and smiled down at him with the wistful enigmatic tenderness of one of Sodoma’s saints.

  ‘Alas,’ said Walter, trying to simulate an answering affection,’ I’m lunching with a man at the other end of London.’ It was a lie; but he couldn’t face the prospect of an hour with Burlap in a Fleet Street chophouse. Besides, he wanted to see if there was a letter from Lucy waiting for him at the club. He looked at his watch. ‘Lord!’ he added, not wishing to prolong the conversation with Burlap, ‘I must be off.’

  Outside it was raining. The umbrellas were like black mushrooms that had suddenly sprouted from the mud. Gloomy, gloomy. In Madrid the sunshine would be ferocious. ‘But I love the heat,’ she had said. ‘I blossom in ovens.’ He had imagined Spanish nights, dark and hot, and her body pale in the starlight, a ghost, but tangible and warm; and love as patient and relentless as hatred, and possessions like slow murder. His imaginations had justified every conceivable lie and outrage. It mattered not what might be done or left undone, provided the imaginations were realized. He had prepared the ground, he had invented a series of elaborate lies, one set for Burlap, another for Marjorie; he had made enquiries about the price of tickets, he had arranged for an overdraft at the bank. And then came Lucy’s letter with the news that she had changed her mind. She was going to stay in Paris. Why? There was only one possible reason. His jealousy, his disappointment; his humiliation had overflowed into six pages of reproach and fury.