Point Counter Point (16 page)

‘Who the devil is that?’ he asked.

The others looked round in the direction he was pointing. A stranger was walking up the hill towards them.

‘No idea,’ said Mary, looking at him.

The stranger approached. He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind—for he wore no hat. He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey flannel trousers. His tie was red; he walked without a stick.

‘Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,’ said George.

And indeed, the young man was coming straight towards them. He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important business.

‘What an extraordinary face!’ thought Mary, as he approached. ‘But how ill he looks! So thin, so pale.’ But his eyes forbade her to feel pity. They were bright with power.

He came to a halt in front of them drawing up his thin body very rigidly, as though he were on parade. There was defiance in the attitude, an earnest defiance in the expression of his face. He looked at them fixedly with his bright eyes, turning from one to the other.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. It was costing him an enormous effort to speak. But speak he must, just because of that insolent unawareness in their blank rich faces.

Mary answered for the others. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘I’m trespassing here,’ said the stranger. ‘Do you mind?’ The seriousness of his defiance deepened. He looked at them sombrely. The young men were examining him from the other side of the bars, from a long way off, from the vantage ground of another class. They had noticed his clothes. There was hostility and contempt in their eyes. There was also a kind of fear. ‘I’m a trespasser,’ he repeated. His voice was rather shrill, but musical. His accent was of the country.

‘One of the local cads,’ George had been thinking.

‘A trespasser.’ It would have been much easier, much pleasanter to sneak out unobserved. That was why he had to affront them.

There was a silence. The military man turned away. He dissociated himself from the whole unpleasant business. It had nothing to do with him, after all. The park belonged to Mary’s father. He was only a guest. ‘I’ve gotta motta: Always merry and bright,’ he hummed to himself, as he looked out over the black town in the valley.

It was George who broke the silence.’Do we mind?’ he said, repeating the stranger’s words. His face had gone very red.

‘How absurd he looks!’ thought Mary, as she glanced at him. ‘Like a bull calf. A blushing bull calf.’

‘Do we mind?’ Damned insolent little bounder! George was working up a righteous indignation. ‘I should just think we do mind. And I’ll trouble you to…’

Mary broke out into laughter. ‘We don’t mind at all,’ she said. ‘Not in the least.’

Her brother’s face became even redder. ‘What do you mean, Mary?’ he asked furiously. (‘Always merry and bright,’ hummed the military man, more starrily detached than ever.) ‘The place is private.’

‘But we don’t mind a bit,’ she said, not looking at her brother, but at the stranger. ‘Not a bit, when people come and are frank about it, like you.’ She smiled at him; but the young man’s face remained as proudly serious as ever. Looking into those serious bright eyes, she too suddenly became serious. It was no joke, she saw all at once, no joke. Grave issues were involved, important issues. But why grave and in what way important she did not know. She was only obscurely and profoundly aware that it was no joke. ‘Goodbye,’ she said in an altered voice, and held out her hand.

The stranger hesitated for a second, then took it. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out of the park as quick as I can.’ And turning round, he walked rapidly away.

‘What the devil!’ George began, turning angrily on his sister.

‘Oh, hold your tongue!’ she answered impatiently.

‘Shaking hands with the fellow,’ he went on protesting.

‘A bit of a pleb, wasn’t he?’ put in the military friend.

She looked from one to the other without speaking and walked away. What louts they were! The two young men followed.

‘I wish to God Mary would learn how to behave herself properly,’ said George, still fuming.

The military young man made deprecating noises. He was in love with her; but he had to admit that she
was
rather embarrassingly unconventional sometimes. It was her only defect.

‘Shaking that bounder’s hand!’ George went on grumbling.

That was their first meeting. Mary then was twenty-two and Mark Rampion a year younger. He had finished his second year at Sheffield University and was back at Stanton for the summer vacation. His mother lived in one of a row of cottages near the station. She had a little pension—her husband had been a postman—and made a few extra shillings by sewing. Mark was a scholarship boy. His younger and less talented brothers were already at work.

‘A very remarkable young man,’ the Rector insisted more than once in the course of his sketch of Mark Rampion’s career, some few days later.

The occasion was a church bazaar and charitable garden party at the Rectory. Some of the Sunday School children had acted a little play in the open air The dramatist was Mark Rampion.

‘Quite unassisted,’ the Rector assured the assembled gentry.’ And what’s more, the lad can draw. They’re a little eccentric perhaps, his pictures, a little…ah..’ he hesitated.

‘Weird,’ suggested his daughter, with an upper middle-class smile, proud of her incomprehension.

‘But full of talent,’ the Rector continued. ‘The boy’s a real cygnet of Tees,’ he added with a selfconscious, almost guilty laugh. He had a weakness for literary allusions. The gentry smiled perfunctorily.

The prodigy was introduced. Mary recognized the trespasser.

‘I’ve met you before,’ she said.

‘Poaching your view.’

‘You’re welcome to it.’ The words made him smile, a little ironically it seemed to her. She blushed, fearful lest she had said something that might have sounded rather patronizing. ‘But I suppose you’d go on poaching whether you were welcome or not,’ she added with a nervous little laugh.

He said nothing, but nodded, still smiling.

Mary’s father stepped in with congratulations. His praises went trampling over the delicate little play like a herd of elephants. Mary writhed. It was all wrong, hopelessly wrong. She could feel that. But the trouble, as she realized, was that she couldn’t have said anything better herself. The ironic smile still lingered about his lips. ‘What fools he must think us all!’ she said to herself.

And now it was her mother’s turn. ‘Jolly good’ was replaced by ‘too charming.’ Which was just as bad, just as hopelessly beside the point.

When Mrs. Felpham asked him to tea, Rampion wanted to refuse the invitation—but to refuse it without being boorish or offensive. After all, she meant well enough, poor woman. She was only rather ludicrous. The village Maecenas, in petticoats, patronizing art to the extent of two cups of tea and a slice of plum cake. The role was a comic one. While he was hesitating, Mary joined in the invitation.

‘Do come,’ she insisted. And her eyes, her smile expressed a kind of rueful amusement and an apology. She saw the absurdity of the situation. ‘But I can’t do anything about it,’ she seemed to say. ‘Nothing at all. Except apologize.’

‘I should like to come very much,’ he said, turning back to Mrs. Felpham.

The appointed day came. His tie as red as ever, Rampion presented himself. The men were out fishing; he was received by Mary and her mother. Mrs. Felpham tried to rise to the occasion. The village Shakespeare, it was obvious, must be interested in the drama.

‘Don’t you love Barrie’s plays?’ she asked. ‘I’m so fond of them.’ She talked on; Rampion made no comment. It was only later, when Mrs. Felpham had given him up as a bad job and had commissioned Mary to show him round the garden, that he opened his lips.

‘I’m afraid your mother thought me very rude,’ he said, as they walked along the smooth flagged paths between the roses

‘Of course not,’ Mary protested with an excessive heartiness.

Rampion laughed. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But of course she did. Because I
was
rude. I was rude in order that I shouldn’t be ruder. Better say nothing than say what I thought about Barrie.’

‘Don’t you like his plays?’

‘Do I like them? I?’ He stopped and looked at her. The blood rushed up into her cheeks; what had she said? ‘You can ask that here.’ He waved his hand at the flowers, the little pool with the fountain, the high terrace, with the stonecrops and the aubretias growing from between the stones, the grey, severe Georgian house beyond. ‘But come down with me into Stanton and ask me there. We’re sitting on the hard reality down there, not with an air cushion between us and the facts. You must have an assured five pounds a week at least, before you can begin to enjoy Barrie. If you’re sitting on the bare facts, he’s an insult.’

There was a silence. They walked up and down among the roses—those roses which Mary was feeling that she ought to disclaim, to apologize for. But a disclaimer, an apology would be an offence. A big retriever puppy came frisking clumsily along the path towards them. She called its name; the beast stood up on its hind legs and pawed at her.

‘I think I like animals better than people,’ she said, as she protected herself from its ponderous playfulness.

‘Well, at least they’re genuine, they don’t live on air cushions like the sort of people you have to do with,’ said Rampion, bringing out the obscure relevance of her remark to what had been said before. Mary was amazed and delighted by the way he understood.

‘I’d like to know more of your sort of people,’ she said; ‘genuine people, people without air cushions.’

‘Well, don’t imagine I’m going to do the Cook’s guide for you,’ he answered ironically. ‘We’re not a Zoo, you know; we’re not natives in quaint costume, or anything of that sort. If you want to go slumming, apply to the Rector.’

She flushed very red. ‘You know I wasn’t meaning that,’ she protested.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. ‘When one’s rich, it’s difficult not to mean that. A person like you simply can’t imagine what it is not to be rich. Like a fish. How can a fish imagine what life out of the water is like?’

‘But can’t one discover, if one tries?’

‘There’s a great gulf,’ he answered.

‘It can be crossed.’

‘Yes, I suppose it can be crossed.’ But his tone was dubious.

They walked and talked among the roses for a few minutes longer; then Rampion looked at his watch and said he must be going.

‘But you’ll come again?’

‘Would there be much point in my coming again?’ he asked. ‘It’s rather like interplanetary visiting, isn’t it?

‘I hadn’t felt it like that,’ she answered, and added, after a little pause, ‘I suppose you find us all very stupid, don’t you?’ She looked at him. He had raised his eyebrows, he was about to protest. She wouldn’t allow him to be merely polite. ‘Because, you know, we
are
stupid. Terribly stupid.’ She laughed, rather ruefully. With people of her own kind stupidity was rather a virtue than a defect. To be too intelligent was to risk not being a gentleman. Intelligence wasn’t altogether safe. Rampion had made her wonder whether there weren’t better things than gentlemanly safety. In his presence she didn’t feel at all proud of being stupid.

Rampion smiled at her. He liked her frankness. There was something genuine about her. She hadn’t been spoilt—not yet, at any rate.

‘I believe you’re an
agent provocateur
,’ he bantered, ‘trying to tempt me to say rude and subversive things about my betters. But as a matter of fact, my opinions aren’t a bit rude. You people aren’t stupider than anyone else. Not naturally stupider. You’re victims of your way of living. It’s put a shell round you and blinkers over your eyes. By nature a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird. But you must admit that its way of living doesn’t exactly encourage intelligence.’

They met again several times in the course of that summer. Most often they walked together over the moors. ‘Like a force of nature,’ he thought as he watched her with bent head tunnelling her way through the damp wind. A great physical force. Such energy, such strength and health—it was magnificent. Rampion himself had been a delicate child, constantly ailing. He admired the physical qualities he did not himself possess. Mary was a sort of berserker Diana of the moors. He told her, as much one day. She liked the compliment.

‘_Wass fur ein Atavismus_! That was what my old German governess always used to say about me. She was right, I think. I
am
a bit of an Atavismus.’

Rampion laughed. ‘It sounds ridiculous in German. But it isn’t at all absurd in itself. An atavismus—that’s what we all ought to be. Atavismuses with all modern conveniences. Intelligent primitives. Big game with a soul.’

It was a wet cold summer. On the morning of the day fixed for their next meeting, Mary received a letter from him. ‘Dear Miss Felpham,’ she read, and this first sight of his handwriting gave her a strange pleasure. ‘I’ve idiotically gone and caught a chill. Will you be more forgiving than I am—for I can’t tell you how inexpressibly disgusted and angry I am with myself—and excuse me for putting you off till to-day week?’

He looked pale and thin, when she next saw him, and was still troubled by a cough. When she enquired about his health, he cut her short almost with anger. ‘I’m quite all right,’ he said sharply, and changed the subject.

‘I’ve been re-reading Blake,’ he said. And he began to speak about the
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
.

‘Blake was civilized,’ he insisted, ‘_civilized_. Civilization is harmony and completeness. Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body—Blake managed to include and harmonize everything. Barbarism is being lopsided. You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body. A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality. Christianity made us barbarians of the soul, and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect. Blake was the last civilized man.’

He spoke of the Greeks and those naked sunburnt Etruscans in the sepulchral wall paintings. ‘You’ve seen the originals?’ he said. ‘My word, I envy you.’