Point Counter Point, Page 47

  ‘Elinor!’ he called, thinking that she must be upstairs. ‘Elinor!’

  There was still no answer. Or was she playing a joke? Would she suddenly pounce out at him from behind one of the screens. He smiled to himself at the thought and was advancing to explore the silent room, when his eye was caught by the papers pinned so conspicuously to a panel of the screen on the right. He approached and had just begun to read, ‘The accompanying telegram will explain…’ when a sound behind him made him turn his head. A man was standing within four feet of him, his hands raised; the club which they grasped had already begun to swing sideways and forward from over the right shoulder. Everard threw up his arm, too late. The blow caught him on the left temple. It was as though a light had suddenly been turned out. He was not even conscious of falling.

  Mrs. Quarles kissed her son. ‘Dear Phil,’ she said. ‘It’s good of you to have come so quickly.’

  ‘You’re not looking very well, mother.’

  ‘A little tired, that’s all. And worried,’ she added after a moment’s pause and with a sigh.

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘About your father. He’s not well,’ she went on, speaking slowly and as if with reluctance. ‘He wanted very specially to see you. That was why I wired.’

  ‘He isn’t dangerously ill?’

  ‘Not physically,’ Mrs. Quarles replied. ‘But his nerves…. It’s a kind of breakdown. He’s very excited. Very unstable.’

  ‘But what’s the cause?’

  Mrs. Quarles was silent. And when at last she spoke it was with an obvious effort, as though each word had to force its way past some inward barrier. Her sensitive face was fixed and strained. ‘Something has happened to upset him,’ she said. ‘He’s had a great shock.’ And slowly, word by word, the story came out.

  Bent forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, Philip listened. After a first glance at his mother’s face, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. He felt that to look at her, to meet her eyes would be the infliction of an unnecessary embarrassment. Speaking was already a pain to her and a humiliation; let her at least speak unseen, as though there were nobody there to witness her distress. His averted eyes left her a kind of spiritual privacy. Word after word, in a colourless soft voice, Mrs. Quarles talked on. Incident succeeded sordid incident. When she began to tell the story of Gladys’s visit of two days before, Philip could not bear to listen any longer. It was too humiliating for her; he could not permit her to go on.

  ‘Yes, yes, I can imagine,’ he said, interrupting her. And jumping up, he limped with quick nervous steps to the window.’don’t go on.’ He stood there for a minute, looking out at the lawn and the thick yew-tree walls and the harvest-coloured hills beyond, on the further side of the valley. The scene was almost exasperatingly placid. Philip turned, limped back across the room and standing for a moment behind his mother’s chair laid a hand on her shoulder; then walked away again.

  ‘Don’t think about it any more,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever has to be done.’ He looked forward with an enormous distaste to loud and undignified scenes, to disputes and vulgar hagglings. ‘Perhaps I’d better go and see father,’ he suggested.

  Mrs. Quarles nodded. ‘He was very anxious to see you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t quite know. But he’s been insisting.’

  ‘Does he talk about…well, this business?’

  ‘No. Never mentions it. I have the impression that he forgets about it deliberately.’

  ‘Then I’d better not speak about it.’

  ‘Not unless he begins,’ Mrs. Quarles advised. ‘Mostly he talks about himself. About the past, about his health—pessimistically. You must try to cheer him.’ Philip nodded. ‘And humour him,’ his mother went on;’don’t contradict. He easily flares up. It isn’t good for him to get excited.’

  Philip listened. As though he were a dangerous animal, he was thinking; or a naughty child. The misery of it, the anxiety, the humiliation for his mother!

  ‘And don’t stay too long,’ she added.

  Philip left her. The fool, he said to himself as he crossed the hall, the damned fool! The sudden anger and contempt with which he thought of his father were tempered by no previous affection. Neither, for that matter, were they exacerbated by any previous hatred. Up to this time Philip had neither loved nor disliked his father. Unreflectingly tolerant or, at the worst, with a touch of amused resignation, he had just accepted his existence. There was nothing in his memories of childhood to justify more positive emotions. As a father, Mr. Quarles had shown himself no less erratic and no less ineffectual than as a politician or as a man of business. Brief periods of enthusiastic interest in his children had alternated with long periods, during which he almost ignored their existence. Philip and his brother had preferred him during the seasons of neglect; for he had ignored them benevolently. They liked him less when he was interested in their wellbeing. For the interest was generally not so much in the children as in a theory of education or hygiene. After meeting an eminent doctor, after reading the latest book on pedagogical methods, Mr. Quarles would wake up to the discovery that, unless something were drastically done, his sons were likely to grow up into idiots and cripples, weak-minded and with bodies poisoned by the wrong food and distorted by improper exercise. And then, for a few weeks, the two boys would be stuffed with raw carrots or overdone beef (it depended on the doctor Mr. Quarles happened to have met); would be drilled, or taught folk-dancing and eurhythmics; would be made to learn poetry by rote (if it happened to be the memory that was important at the moment) or else (if it happened to be the ratiocinative faculties) would be turned out into the garden, told to plant sticks in the lawn and, by measuring the shadow at different hours of the day, discover for themselves the principles of trigonometry. While the fit lasted, life for the two boys was almost intolerable. And if Mrs. Quarles protested, Sidney flew into a rage and told her that she was a selfishly doting mother, to whom the true welfare of her children meant nothing. Mrs. Quarles did not insist too strongly; for she knew that, thwarted, Sidney would probably become more obstinate; humoured, he would forget his enthusiasm. And in fact, after a few weeks, Sidney would duly tire of labours which produced no quick and obvious results. His hygiene had not made the boys perceptibly larger or stronger; they had not grown appreciably more intelligent for his pedagogy. All that they quite indubitably were was a daily and hourly bore. ‘Affairs of greater moment’ would occupy more and more of his attention, until gradually, like the Cheshire cat, he had faded altogether out of the world of the schoolroom and the nursery into higher and more comfortable spheres. The boys settled down again to happiness.

  Arrested at the door of his father’s room by the sounds from within, Philip listened. His face took on an expression of anxiety, even of alarm. That voice? And his father, he had been told, was alone. Talking to himself? Was he as bad as all that? Bracing himself, Philip opened the door and was immediately reassured to find that what he had taken for insanity was only dictation to the dictaphone. Propped up on pillows, Mr. Quarles was half-sitting, half-lying in his bed. His face, his very scalp were flushed and shining, and his pink silk pyjamas were like an intensified continuation of the same fever. The dictaphone stood on the table by his bed; Mr. Quarles was talking into the mouthpiece of its flexible speaking-tube. ‘True greatness,’ he was saying sonorously, ‘is inversely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you are! he cried, looking round as the door opened. He stopped the clockwork of the machine, hung up the speaking-tube and stretched out a welcoming hand. Simple gestures. But there was something, it seemed to Philip, extravagant about all his movements. It was as though he were on the stage. The eyes which he turned on Philip were unnaturally bright. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. So glad, dyah boy.’ He patted Philip’s hand; the loud voice suddenly trembled.

  Unused to such demonstrations, Philip was embarrassed. ‘Well, how are you feeling?’ he asked with an assumption of ch
eeriness.

  Mr. Quarles shook his head and pressed his son’s hand without speaking. Philip was more than ever embarrassed at seeing that the tears had come into his eyes. How could one go on hating and being angry?

  ‘But you’ll be all right,’ he said, trying to be reassuring. ‘It’s just a question of resting for a bit.’ Mr. Quarles tightened the clasp of his hand. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said. ‘But I feel that the end’s nyah.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense, father. You mustn’t talk like that.’

  ‘Nyah,’ Mr. Quarles repeated, obstinately nodding, ‘very nyah. That’s why I’m so glad you’re hyah. I should have been unhappah to die when you were at the other end of the wahld. But with you hyah, I feel I can go’—his voice trembled again—’quite contentedlah.’ Once more he squeezed Philip’s hand. He was convinced that he had always been a devoted father, living for nothing but his children. And so he had been, every now and then. ‘Yes, quite contentedlah.’ He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and while he was doing so surreptitiously wiped his eyes.

  ‘But you’re not going to die.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mr. Quarles insisted. ‘I can feel it.’ He genuinely did feel it; he believed he was going to die, because there was at least a part of his mind that desired to die. These complications of the last weeks had been too much for him; and the future promised to be worse, if that were possible. To fade out, painlessly—that would be the best solution of all his problems. He wished, he believed; and, believing in his approaching death, he pitied himself as a victim and at the same time admired himself for the resigned nobility with which he supported his fate.

  ‘But you’re not going to die,’ Philip dully insisted, not knowing what consolation, beyond mere denial, to offer. He had no gift for dealing extempore with the emotional situations of practical life. ‘There’s nothing…’ He was going to say, ‘There’s nothing the matter with you’; but checked himself, reflecting, before it was too late, that his father might be offended.

  ‘Let’s say no more about it.’ Mr. Quarles spoke tartly; there was a look of annoyance in his eye. Philip remembered what his mother had said about humouring him. He kept silence. ‘One can’t quarrel with Destinah,’ Mr. Quarles went on in another tone. ‘Destinah,’ he repeated with a sigh. ‘You’ve been fortunate, dyah boy; you discovered your vocation from the farst. Fate has treated you well.’

  Philip nodded. He had often thought so himself, with a certain apprehension even. He had an obscure belief in nemesis.

  ‘Whereas in my case…’ Mr. Quarles did not finish the sentence, but raised his hand and let it fall again, hopelessly, on to the coverlet. ‘I wasted yahs of my life on false scents. Yahs and yahs before I discovered my ryahl bent. A philosopher’s wasted on practical affairs. He’s even absard. Like what’s-his-name’s albatross. You know.’

  Philip was puzzled. ‘Do you mean the one in The Ancient Mariner?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mr. Quarles impatiently. ‘That Frenchman.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ Philip had caught the reference. ‘Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees. Baudelaire, you mean.’

  ‘Baudelaire, of course.’

  ‘Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees,

  Ses ailes de geant l’empechent de marcher,’

  Philip quoted, glad to be able to divert the conversation if only for a moment from personalities to literature.

  His father was delighted. ‘Exactlah!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s the same with philosophers. Their wings prevent them from walking. For tharty yahs I tried to be a walker—in politics, in business. I didn’t ryahlize that my place was in the air, not on the ground. In the air!’ he repeated, raising his arm. ‘I had wings.’ He agitated his hand in a rapid tremolo. ‘Wings, and didn’t know it.’ His voice had grown louder, his eyes brighter, his face pinker and more shiny. His whole person expressed such an excitement, such restlessness and exaltation, that Philip was seriously disquieted.

  ‘Hadn’t you better rest a little?’ he anxiously suggested.

  Mr. Quarles disregarded the interruption. ‘Wings, wings,’ he cried. ‘I had wings and if I’d ryahlized it as a young man, what heights I might have flown to! But I tried to walk. In the mud. For tharty yahs. Only after tharty yahs did I discover that I was meant to be flying. And now I must give up almost before I’ve begun.’ He sighed and, leaning back against his pillows, he shot the words almost perpendicularly up into the air. ‘My work unfinished. My dreams unryahlized. Fate’s been hard.’

  ‘But you’ll have all the time you need to finish your work.’

  ‘No, no,’ Mr. Quarles insisted, shaking his head. He wanted to be one of fate’s martyrs, to be able to point to himself and say: There, but for the malignity of providence, goes Aristotle. Destiny’s unkindness justified everything—his failure in sugar, in politics, in farming, the coldness with which his first book had been received, the indefinite delay in the appearance of the second; it even justified in some not easily explicable fashion his having put Gladys in a family way. To be a seducer of servants, secretaries, peasant girls was part of his unhappy destiny. And now that, to crown the edifice of his misfortune, he was about to die (prematurely but stoically, like the noblest Roman of them all), how trivial, how wretchedly insignificant was this matter of lost virginities and impending babies! And how unseemly, at the philosophic death-bed, was all the outcry! But he could only ignore it on condition that this was. genuinely his death-bed and that destiny was universally admitted to have been cruel. A martyred philosopher on the point of death was justified in refusing to be bothered with Gladys and her baby. That was why (though the reason was felt and not formulated) Mr. Quarles repudiated, so vigorously and even with annoyance, his son’s consoling assurances of long life; that was why he arraigned malignant providence and magnified with even more than his ordinary self-complaisance the talents which providence had prevented him from using.

  ‘No, no, dyah boy,’ he repeated. ‘I shall never finish. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to have a talk with you.’

  Philip looked at him with a certain apprehension. What was coming next? he wondered. There was a little silence.

  ‘One doesn’t want to shuffle off entirely unrecorded,’ said Mr. Quarles in a voice made husky by a recrudescence of self-pity

  ‘Shyahr extinction—it’s difficult to face.’ Before his mind’s eye the void expanded, lampless and abysmal. Death. It might be the end of his troubles; but it was none the less appalling. ‘You understand the feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Philip, ‘perfectly. But in your case, father…’ Mr. Quarles who had been blowing his nose again raised a protesting hand. ‘No, no.’ He had made up his mind that he was going to die; it was useless for anyone to attempt to dissuade him. ‘But if you understand my feeling, that’s all that matters. I can depart in peace with the knowledge that you won’t allow all memory of me to disappyah completely. Dyah boy, you shall be my literary executor. There are some fragments of my writing….’

  ‘The book on democracy?’ asked Philip, who saw himself being called upon to complete the largest work on the subject yet projected. His father’s answer took a load off his mind.

  ‘No, not that,’ Mr. Quarles hastily replied. ‘Only the bare matyahrials of that book exist. And to a great extent not on paper. Only in my mind. In fact,’ he went on, ‘I was just going to tell you that I wanted all my notes for the big book destroyed. Without being looked at. They’re myah jottings. Meaningless except to me.’ Mr. Quarles was not anxious that the emptiness of his files and the prevailing blankness of the cards in his cardindex should be posthumously discovered and commented on. ‘They must all be destroyed, do you understand?’