Point Counter Point, Page 6

  Illidge wished that the hit had been scored by someone else. The dirty ruffian! He himself was a communist. Webley left them. Lady Edward watched him ploughing his way through the crowd. ‘Like a steam engine, she said. ‘What energy! But so touchy. These politicians—worse than actresses. Such vanity! And dear Webley hasn’t got much sense of humour. He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation.’ (The r’s roared like lions.) ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean. As a great historical character. I can never remember, when I see him, that he’s really Alexander the Great. I always make the mistake of thinking it’s just Webley.’

  Illidge laughed. He found himself positively liking Lady Edward. She had the right feelings about things. She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.

  ‘Not but what his Freemen aren’t a very good thing,’ Lady Edward went on. Illidge’s sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up.’don’t you think so, Mr. Babbage?’

  He made a little grimace. ‘Well…’ he began.

  ‘By the way,’ said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment of Webley’s Freemen, ‘you must really be careful coming down those stairs. They’re terribly slippery.’

  Illidge blushed. ‘Not at all,’ he muttered and blushed still more deeply—a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair—as he realized the imbecility of what he had said. His sympathy declined still further.

  ‘Well, rather slippery all the same,’ Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat. ‘What were you working at with Edward this evening? ‘ she went on. ‘It always interests me so much.’

  Illidge smiled. ‘Well, if you really want to know,’ he said, ‘we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.’ Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.

  ‘Newts? Those things that swim?’ Illidge nodded. ‘But how do they lose their parts? ‘

  ‘Well, in the laboratory,’ he explained, ‘they lose them because we cut them off.’

  ‘And they grow again?’

  ‘They grow again.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Lady Edward. ‘I never knew that. How fascinating these things are. Do tell me some more.’

  She wasn’t so bad after all. He began to explain. Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward. He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings—the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg—when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said, ‘and I’ll introduce you to General Knoyle. Such an amusing old man—if only unintentionally sometimes.’

  Illidge’s exposition froze suddenly in his throat. He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention. Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.

  General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman. His voice was martial and asthmatic. ‘“My dear fellow,” I said to him’ (they heard him as they approached), ‘“my dear fellow, don’t enter the horse now. It would be a crime,” I said. “It would be sheer madness. Scratch him,” I said, “scratch him.” And he scratched him.’

  Lady Edward made her presence known. The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.

  ‘I chose the Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,’ said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.

  ‘Well—er—really, that was very kind of you.’ General Knoyle’s confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.

  ‘I hesitated,’ Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, ‘between Handel’s Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni. Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.’ Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General’s ruddy face.

  ‘That was very kind of you,’ he protested. ‘Not that I can pretend to understand much about music. But I know what I like, I know what I like.’ The phrase seemed to give him confidence. He cleared his throat and started again. ‘What I always say is…’

  ‘And now,’ Lady Edward concluded triumphantly, ‘I want to introduce Mr. Babbage, who helps Edward with his work and who is a real expert on newts. Mr. Babbage, this is General Knoyle and this is Colonel Pilchard.’ She gave a last smile and was gone.

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ exclaimed the General, and the Colonel said she was a holy terror.

  ‘One of the holiest,’ Illidge feelingly agreed.

  The two military gentlemen looked at him for a moment and decided that from one so obviously beyond the pale the comment was an impertinence. Good Catholics may have their little jokes about the saints and the habits of the clergy; but they are outraged by the same little jokes on the lips of infidels. The General made no verbal comment and the Colonel contented himself with looking his disapproval. But the way in which they turned to one another and continued their interrupted discussion of race-horses, as though they were alone, was so intentionally offensive, that Illidge wanted to kick them.

  ‘Lucy, my child!’

  ‘Uncle John!’ Lucy Tantamount turned round and smiled at her adopted uncle. She was of middle height and slim, like her mother, with short dark hair, oiled to complete blackness and brushed back from her forehead. Naturally pale, she wore no rouge. Only her thin lips were painted and there was a little blue round the eyes. A black dress emphasized the whiteness of her arms and shoulders. It was more than two years now since Henry Tantamount had died—for Lucy had married her second cousin. But she still mourned in her dress, at any rate by artificial light. Black suited her so well. ‘How are you?’ she added, thinking as she spoke the words that he was beginning to look very old.

  ‘Perishing,’ said John Bidlake. He took her arm familiarly, grasping it just above the elbow with a big, blue-veined hand. ‘Give me an excuse for going to have supper. I’m ravenously hungry.’

  ‘But I’m not.’

  ‘No matter,’ said old Bidlake. ‘My need is greater than thine, as Sir Philip Sidney so justly remarked.’

  ‘But I don’t want to eat.’ She objected to being domineered, to following instead of leading. But Uncle John was too much for her.

  ‘I’ll do all the eating,’ he declared. ‘Enough for two.’ And jovially laughing, he continued to lead her along towards the dining-room.

  Lucy abandoned the struggle. They edged their way through the crowd. Greenish-yellow and freckled, the orchid in John Bidlake’s button-hole resembled the face of a yawning serpent. His monocle glittered in his eye.

  ‘Who’s that old man with Lucy?’ Polly Logan enquired as they passed.

  ‘That’s old Bidlake.’

  ‘Bidlake? The man who…who painted the pictures?’ Polly spoke hesitatingly, in the tone of one who is conscious of a hole in her education and is afraid of making a ridiculous mistake.’do you mean that Bidlake?’ Her companion nodded. She felt enormously relieved. ‘Well I never,’ she went on, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes very wide. ‘I always thought he was an Old Master. But he must be about a hundred by this time, isn’t he?’

  ‘I should think he must be.’ Norah was also under twenty.

  ‘I must say,’ Polly handsomely admitted, ‘he doesn’t look it. He’s still quite a beau, or a buck, or a Champagne Charlie, or whatever people were in his young days.’

  ‘He’s had about fifteen wives,’ said Norah.

  It was at this moment that Hugo Brockle found the courage to present himself. ‘You don’t remember me. We were introduced in our perambulators.’ How idiotic it sounded! He felt himself blushing all over.

  The third and finest ofJohn Bidlake’s ‘Bathers’ hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room of Tantamount House. It was a gay and joyous picture, very light in
tone, the colouring very pure and brilliant. Eight plump and pearly bathers grouped themselves in the water and on the banks of a stream so as to form with their moving bodies and limbs a kind of garland (completed above by the foliage of a tree) round the central point of the canvas. Through this wreath of nacreous flesh (and even their faces were just smiling flesh, not a trace of spirit to distract you from the contemplation of the lovely forms and their relations) the eye travelled on towards a pale bright landscape of softly swelling downland and clouds.

  Plate in hand and munching caviar sandwiches, old Bidlake stood with his companion, contemplating his own work. An emotion of mingled elation and sadness possessed him.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘it’s enormously good. Look at the way it’s composed. Perfect balance, and yet there’s no suggestion of repetition or artificial arrangement.’ The other thoughts and feelings which the picture had evoked in his mind he left unexpressed. They were too many and too confused to be easily put into words. Too melancholy above all; he did not care to dwell on them. He stretched out a finger and touched the sideboard; it was mahogany, genuine wood. ‘Look at the figure on the right with the arms up.’ He went on with his technical exposition in order that he might keep down, might drive away the uninvited thoughts.’see how it compensates for the big stooping one there on the left. Like a long lever lifting a heavy weight.’ But the figure with the arms up was Jenny Smith, the loveliest model he had ever had. Incarnation of beauty, incarnation of stupidity and vulgarity. A goddess as long as she was naked, kept her mouth shut, or had it kept shut for her with kisses; but oh, when she opened it, when she put on her clothes, her frightful hats! He remembered the time he had taken her to Paris with him. He had to send her back after a week. ‘You ought to be muzzled, Jenny,’ he told her, and Jenny cried. ‘It was a mistake going to Paris,’ he went on. ‘Too much sun in Paris, too many artificial lights. Next time, we’ll go to Spitzbergen. In winter. The nights are six months long up there.’ That had made her cry still more loudly. The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty. Afterwards she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity. And finally what was left of her died. But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts. What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too. Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost. Soon even he would have disappeared. And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny? Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers. And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said again, when he had finished his exposition, and his tons was mournful; his face as he looked at his picture was sad. ‘But after all,’ he added, after a little pause and with a sudden explosion of voluntary laughter,’ after all, everything I do is good; damn good even.’ It was a bidding of defiance to the stupid critics who had seen a falling off in his later paintings; it was a challenge to his own past, to time and old age, to the real John Bidlake who had painted real Jenny and kissed her into silence.

  ‘Of course it’s good,’ said Lucy, and wondered why the old man’s painting had fallen off so much of late. This last exhibition—it was deplorable. He himself, after all, had remained so young, comparatively speaking. Though of course, she reflected, as she looked at him, he had certainly aged a good deal during the last few months.

  ‘Of course,’ he repeated. ‘That’s the right spirit.’

  ‘Though I must confess,’ Lucy added, to change the subject, ‘I always find your bathers rather an insult.’

  ‘An insult?’

  ‘Speaking as a woman, I mean. Do you really find us so profoundly silly as you paint us?’

  ‘Yes, do you?’ another voice enquired. ‘Do you really?’ It was an intense, emphatic voice, and the words came out in gushes, explosively, as though they were being forced through a narrow aperture under emotional pressure.

  Lucy and John Bidlake turned and saw Mrs. Betterton, massive in dove grey, with arms, old Bidlake reflected, like thighs, and hair that was, in relation to the fleshy cheeks and chins, ridiculously short, curly and auburn. Her nose, which had tilted up so charmingly in the days when he had ridden the black horse and she the bay, was now preposterous, an absurd irrelevance in the middleaged face. Real Bidlake had ridden with her, just before he had painted these bathers. She had talked about art with a naive, schoolgirlish earnestness which he had found laughable and charming. He had cured her, he remembered, of a passion for Burne-Jones, but never, alas, of her prejudice in favour of virtue. It was with all the old earnestness and a certain significant sentimentality as of one who remembers old times and would like to exchange reminiscences as well as general ideas, that she now addressed him. Bidlake had to pretend that he was pleased to see her after all these years. It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her; he could not remember having spoken to her more than three or four times in all the quarter of a century which had turned Mary Betterton into a memento mori.

  ‘Dear Mrs. Betterton!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is delightful.’ But he disguised his repugnance very badly. And when she addressed him by his Christian name— ‘Now, John,’ she said, ‘you must give us an answer to our question,’ and she laid her hand on Lucy’s arm, so as to associate her in the demand—old Bidlake was positively indignant. Familiarity from a memento mori—it was intolerable. He’d give her a lesson. The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous. Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul. Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure. Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables. True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing. Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive. It was the same with women. He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality. It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts. He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane. When one is in high spirits, memento mori’s cease to remind.

  ‘John, you’re incorrigible,’ said Mrs. Betterton, indulgently. She turned to Lucy, smiling. ‘But he doesn’t mean a word he says.’

  ‘I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,’ objected Lucy. ‘I’ve noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.’

  Old Bidlake laughed.

  ‘Because they’re the ones who know women most intimately.’

  ‘Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.’

  ‘But I assure you,’ Mrs. Betterton insisted, ‘he doesn’t mean it. I knew him before you were born, my dear.’

  The gaiety went out of John Bidlake’s face. The memento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton’s flabby mask.

  ‘Perhaps he was different then,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose. We’re dangerous company, Uncle John. You ought to be careful.’

  She had started one of Mrs. Betterton’s favourite hares. That lady dashed off in serious pursuit. ‘It’s the upbringing,’ she explained. ‘Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays. No wonder they’re cynical.’ She proceeded eloquently. Children were given too much, too early. They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle. ‘I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen’ she declared, with pride.

&nb
sp; ‘My poor dear lady!’

  ‘I began going when I was six,’ said Lucy.

  ‘And dances,’ Mrs. Betterton continued. ‘The hunt ball—what an excitement! Because it only happened once a year.’ She quoted Shakespeare.

  ‘Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,

  Since seldom coming, in the long year set,

  Like stones of worth they thinly placed….

  ‘They’re a row of pearls nowadays.’

  ‘And false ones at that,’ said Lucy.

  Mrs. Betterton was triumphant. ‘False ones-you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t “blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure” by daily wear. Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age. A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.’

  ‘And what’s your remedy? ‘ enquired John Bidlake. ‘If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,’ he added ironically.

  ‘Naughty!’ cried Mrs. Betterton with an appalling playfulness. Then, becoming serious, ‘The remedy,’ she went on, ‘is fewer diversions.’

  ‘But I don’t want them fewer,’ objected John Bidlake. ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘they must be strongerprogressively.’

  ‘Progressively?’ Mrs. Betterton repeated. ‘But where would that sort of progress end?’

  ‘In bull fighting?’ suggested John Bidlake. ‘Or gladiatorial shows? Or public executions, perhaps? Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade? Where?’

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?’

  Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.

  ‘I think it’s detestable,’ Polly was saying—and her face was flushed with anger, ‘to make war on the poor.’

  ‘But the Freemen don’t make war on the poor.’

  ‘They do.’