Point Counter Point, Page 51

  The irrelevant loudness of his laugh made Rampion glance questioningly at him. What was up? He couldn’t be bothered to discover.

  ‘It’s all a damned lie,’ he went on, ‘and an idiotic lie at that—all this pretending to be more than human. Idiotic because it never comes off. You try to be more than human, but you only succeed in making yourself less than human. Always…’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Philip. ‘“We walk on earth and have no need of wings.”’ And suddenly he heard his father’s loud voice saying, ‘I had wings. I had wings’; he saw his flushed face and feverishly pink pyjamas. Ludicrous and deplorable. ‘Do you know who that’s by?’ he went on. ‘That’s the last line of the poem I wrote for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, when I was twenty-one. The subject was “King Arthur,” if I remember rightly. Needless to say I didn’t get the prize. But it’s a good line.’

  ‘A pity you didn’t live up to it,’ said Rampion, ‘instead of whoring after abstractions. But of course, there’s nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions. He knows by experience how lifedestroying they are. The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride. He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he’s got feet. It’s when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They’re ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other.’

  ‘But all this,’ said Spandrell, breaking a long silence, ‘is just the gospel of animalism. You’re just advising us to behave like beasts.’

  ‘I’m advising you to behave like human beings,’ said Rampion. ‘Which is slightly different. And anyhow,’ he added, ‘it’s a damned sight better to behave like a beast—a real genuine undomesticated animal, I mean—than to invent a devil and then behave like one’s invention.’

  There was a brief silence.’suppose I were to tell them,’ Spandrell was thinking,’suppose I were to tell them that I’d just jumped out on a man from behind a screen and hit him on the side of the head with an Indian club.’ He took another sip of brandy. ‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m not so sure of what you say. Behaving like an animal is behaving like a creature that’s below good and evil. You must know what good is before you can start behaving like the devil.’ And yet it had all been just stupid and sordid and disgusting. Yes, and profoundly silly, an enormous stupidity. At the core of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he had found, not fire and poison, but only a brown disgusting putrefaction and a few small maggots. ‘Things exist only in terms of their opposites,’ he went on, frowning at his own thoughts. ‘The devil implies God.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘A devil of absolute evil implies a God of absolute good. Well, what of it? What’s that got to do with you or me?’

  ‘A good deal, I should have thought.’

  ‘It’s got about as much to do with us as the fact of this table being made of electrons, or an infinite series of waves undulating in an unknown medium, or a large number of point-events in a four-dimensional continuum, or whatever else Philip’s scientific friends assure us it is made of. As much as that. That is to say, practically nothing. Your absolute God and absolute devil belong to the class of irrelevant nonhuman facts. The only things that concern us are the little relative gods and devils of history and geography, the little relative goods and evils of individual casuistry. Everything else is nonhuman and beside the point; and if you allow yourself to be influenced by nonhuman, absolute considerations, then you inevitably make either a fool of yourself, or a villain, or perhaps both.’

  ‘But that’s better than making an animal of oneself,’ insisted Spandrell. ‘I’d rather be a fool or a villain than a bull or a dog.’

  ‘But nobody’s asking you to be a bull or a dog,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘Nobody’s asking you to be anything but a man. A man, mind you. Not an angel or a devil. A man’s a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that’s unconscious and earthy and mysterious at the other. Balanced. Which is damnably difficult. And the only absolute he can ever really know is the absolute of perfect balance. The absoluteness of perfect relativity. Which is a paradox and nonsense intellectually. But so is all real, genuine, living truth—just nonsense according to logic. And logic is just nonsense in the light of living truth. You can choose which you like, logic or life. It’s a matter of taste. Some people prefer being dead.’

  ‘Prefer being dead.’ The words went echoing through Spandrell’s mind. Everard Webley lying on the floor, trussed up like a chicken. Did he prefer being dead? ‘All the same,’ he said slowly,’some things must always remain absolutely and radically wrong. Killing, for example.’ He wanted to believe that it was more than merely low and sordid and disgusting. He wanted to believe that it was also terrible and tragic. ‘That’s an absolute wrong.’

  ‘But why more absolute than anything else?’ said Rampion. ‘There are circumstances when killing’s obviously necessary and right and commendable. The only absolutely evil act, so far as I can see, that a man can perform, is an act against life, against his own integrity. He does wrong if he perverts himself, if he falsifies his instincts.’

  Spandrell was sarcastic. ‘We’re getting back to the’ beasts again,’ he said. ‘Go ravening round fulfilling all your appetites as you feel them. Is that the last word in human wisdom?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t really so stupid as you try to make out,’ said Rampion. ‘If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human beings behave to-day. It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that make men so beastly—no, “beastly” is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals—so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then. It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, its principles, its tradition and education. Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession—why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation. It’s not instinct that makes Casanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence. If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs. They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous. And it’s the same with the other instincts. It’s not the possessive instinct that’s made modem civilization insane about money. The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles. The money-grubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian Service. Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime. It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect. And then, think of civilized war. It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness. Men have to be compelled by law and then tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight. You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.’

  ‘You’d do still more,’ said Burlap, ‘by telling them to obey Jesus.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. Telling them to obey Jesus is telling them to be more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more than human always means succeeding in being less than human. Telling men to
obey Jesus literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like idiots and finally like devils. Just consider the examples. Old Tolstoy—a great man who deliberately turned himself into an idiot by trying to be more than a great man. Your horrid little St. Francis.’ He turned to Burlap.

  ‘Another idiot. But already on the verge of diabolism. With the monks of Thebaid you see the process carried a step further. They went over the verge. They got to the stage of being devils. Self-torture, destruction of everything decent and beautiful and living. That was their programme. They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness. They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts. But no, they wanted to be more than human. So they just became devils. Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils. Ugh! ‘ Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust. ‘And to think,’ he went on indignantly, ‘that the world’s full of these creatures! Not quite so far gone as St. Anthony and his demons or St. Francis and his halfwits. But of the same kind. Different only in degree. And all perverted in the same wayby trying to be nonhuman. Nonhumanly religious, nonhumanly moral, nonhumanly intellectual and scientific, nonhumanly specialized and efficient, nonhumanly the business man, nonhumanly avaricious and property-loving, nonhumanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts. There are four of them at this table now.’ He looked round with a grin. ‘A pure little Jesus pervert.’ Burlap forgivingly smiled. ‘An intellectual-aesthetic pervert.’ ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Philip.

  ‘A morality-philosophy pervert.’ He turned to Spandrell. ‘Quite the little Stavrogin. Pardon my saying so, Spandrell; but you really are the most colossal fool.’ He looked intently into his face.

  ‘Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one! But it won’t do. It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.’ Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew… But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?

  ‘Laugh away, old Dostoievsky! But let ife tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin. He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.’

  ‘And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?’ asked Philip.

  ‘What indeed!’ Rampion shook his head. His fine hair floated up silkily. He smiled. ‘A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah pervert. A worry-about-the-bloodyold-world pervert. Above all a gibber pervert.’ He got up. ‘That’s why I’m going home,’ he said. ‘The way I’ve been talking—it’s really nonhuman. Really scandalous. I’m ashamed. But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against nonhuman things and people, you inevitably become nonhuman yourself. It’s all your fault.’ He gave a final grin, waved goodnight and was gone.

  Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him. Sitting—for such was the engagingly childlike habit he had formed during the last few weeks—on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion. An extraordinary man, a great man, even. Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly. She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself. Hardly great, she insisted jealously. Well, perhaps not quite. But very nearly. If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot. The attitude was comprehensible. Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other. His incapacity to understand St. Francis, for example. The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint. That was extraordinary and deplorable.

  ‘What does he say?’ asked Beatrice severely. Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St. Francis under her protection.

  Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said. Beatrice was indignant. How could he say such things? How did he dare? It was an outrage. Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real defect. But so few people, he added in charitable palliation, were born with a real feeling for spiritual beauty. Rampion was an extraordinary man in many ways, but it was as though he lacked that extra sense-organ which enables men like St. Francis to see the beauty that is beyond earthly beauty. In a rudimentary form he himself, he thought, had the power. How rarely he met anyone who seemed to be like him! Almost everybody was in this respect a stranger. It was like seeing normally in a country where most people were colour blind. Didn’t Beatrice feel that too? For of course she was one of the rare clear-seeing ones. He had felt it at once, the first time he met her. Beatrice nodded gravely. Yes, she too felt like that. Burlap smiled up at her; he knew it. She felt proud and important. Rampion’s idea of love, for example; Burlap shook his head. So extraordinarily gross and animal and corporeal.

  ‘Dreadful,’ said Beatrice feelingly. Denis, she was thinking, was so different. Tenderly she looked down at the head that reposed, so trustingly, against her knee. She adored the way his hair curled, and his very small, beautiful ears, and even the pink bare spot on the top of his crown. That little pink tonsure was somehow rather engagingly pathetic. There was a long silence.

  Burlap at last profoundly sighed. ‘How tired I am!’ he said.

  ‘You ought to go to bed.’

  ‘Too tired even to move.’ He pressed his cheek more heavily against her knee and shut his eyes.

  Beatrice raised her hand, hesitated a moment, dropped it again, then raised it once more and began to run her fingers soothingly through his dark curls. There was another long silence.

  ‘Ah, don’t stop,’ he said, when at last she withdrew her hand. ‘It’s so comforting. Such a virtue seems to go out from you. You’d almost cured my headache.’

  ‘You’ve got a headache?’ asked Beatrice, her solicitude running as usual to a kind of anger. ‘Then you simply must go to bed,’ she commanded.

  ‘But I’m so happy here.’

  ‘No, I insist.’ Her protective motherliness was thoroughly aroused. It was a bullying tenderness.

  ‘How cruel you are!’ Burlap complained, rising reluctantly to his feet. Beatrice was touched with compunction. ‘I’ll stroke your head when you’re in bed,’ she promised. She too now regretted that soft warm silence, that speechless intimacy, which her outburst of domineering solicitude had too abruptly shattered. She justified herself by an explanation. The headache would return if he didn’t go to sleep the moment it was cured. And so on.

  Burlap had been in bed nearly ten minutes when she came to keep her promise. She was dressed in a green dressing-gown and her yellow hair was plaited into a long thick pigtail that swung heavily as she moved, like the heavy plaited tail of a cart-horse at a show.

  ‘You look about twelve with that pigtail hanging down your back,’ said Burlap, enchanted.

  Beatrice laughed, rather nervously, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He raised his hand and took hold of the thick plait. ‘Too charming,’ he said. ‘It simply invites pulling.’ He gave a little tug at it, playfully.

  ‘Look out,’ she warned. ‘I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.’ She took hold of one of his dark curls.

  ‘Pax, pax!’ he begged, reverting to the vocabulary of the preparatory school. ‘I’ll let go. The real reason,’ he added, ‘why little boys don’t like fighting with little girls is simply that little girls are so much more ruthless and ferocious.’

  Beatrice laughed again. There was a silence. She felt a little breathless and fluttering, as one feels when one is anxiously expecting something to happen. ‘Head bad?’

  she asked

/>   ‘Rather bad.’ She stretched out a hand and touched his forehead.

  ‘Your hand’s magical,’ he said. With a quick unexpected movement he wriggled round sideways under the sheets and laid his head on her lap. ‘There,’ he whispered and, with a sigh of contentment, closed his eyes.

  For a moment Beatrice was taken aback, almost frightened. That dark head lying hard and heavy on her thighs—it seemed strange, terrifying. She had to suppress a little shudder before she could feel glad at the confiding childishness of his movement. She began stroking his forehead, stroking his scalp through the thick dark curls. Time passed. The soft warm silence enveloped them once more, the dumb intimacy of contact was reestablished. She was no longer domineering in her protective solicitude, only tender. The armour of her hardness was as though melted away from her, melted away in this warm intimacy along with the terrors which made it necessary.

  Burlap sighed again. He was in a kind of blissful doze of sensual passivity.

  ‘Better?’ she asked in a soft whisper.

  ‘Still rather bad on the side,’ he whispered back. ‘Just over the ear.’ And he rolled his head over so that she could more easily reach the painful spot, rolled it over so that his face was pressed against her belly, her soft belly that stirred so livingly with her breathing, that was so warm and yielding against his face.

  At the touch of his face against her body Beatrice felt a sudden renewal of those spasmodic creepings of apprehension. Her flesh was terrified by the nearness of that physical intimacy. But as Burlap did not stir, as he made no dangerous gesture, no movement towards a closer contact, the terrors died gradually down and their flutterings served only to enhance and intensify that wonderful warm emotion of tenderness which succeeded them. She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again. The warmth of his breathing was against her belly. She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with apprehensions and anticipations. Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through its terrors, timidly desired.