Point Counter Point (3 page)

‘You’re too good to be an amateur upholsterer,’ he had flattered her out of the depths of a then genuine belief in her intellectual capacities.

She should help him in some unspecified way with his literary work, she should write herself. Under his influence she had taken to writing essays and short stories. But they were obviously no good. From having been encouraging, he became reticent; he said no more about her efforts. In a little while Marjorie abandoned the unnatural and futile occupation. She had nothing after that but Walter. He became the reason of her existence, the foundation on which her whole life was established. The foundation was moving away from under her.

‘If only,’ thought Walter, ‘she’d leave me in peace!’

He turned into the Underground station. At the entrance a man was selling the evening papers. SOCIALIST ROBBERY SCHEME. FIRST READING. The words glared out from the placard. Glad of an excuse to distract his mind Walter bought a paper. The LiberalLabour Government’s Bill for the nationalization of the mines had passed its first reading by the usual majority. Walter read the news with pleasure. His political opinions were advanced. Not so the opinions of the proprietor of the evening paper. The language of the leading article was savagely violent.

‘The ruffians,’ thought Walter as he read it. The article evoked in him a stimulating enthusiasm for all that it assailed, a delightful hatred for Capitalists and Reactionaries. The barriers of his individuality were momentarily thrown down, the personal complexities were abolished. Possessed by the joy of political battle, he overflowed his boundaries, he became, so to speak, larger than himself-larger and simpler.

‘The ruffians,’ he repeated, thinking of the oppressors, the monopolizers.

At Camden Town station a wizened little man with a red handkerchief round his neck took the seat next to his. The stink of the old man’s pipe was so suffocating, that Walter looked up the car to see if there were not another vacant seat. There was, as it happened; but on second thoughts, he decided not to move. To retire from the stink would seem too offensively pointed, might occasion comment from the stinker. The acrid smoke rasped his throat; he coughed.

‘One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts,’ Philip Quarles used to say. ‘What’s the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn’t the rationalization of your feelings? If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.’

A whiff of stale sweat came up with the nicotine fumes to Walter’s nostrils. ‘The Socialists call it Nationalization,’ he read in his paper; ‘but the rest of us have a shorter and homelier name for what they propose to do. That name is Theft.’ But at least it was theft from thieves and for the benefit of their victims. The little old man leaned forward and spat, cautiously and perpendicularly, between his feet. With the heel of his boot he spread the gob over the floor. Walter looked away; he wished that he could personally like the oppressed and personally hate the rich oppressors. One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts. But one’s tastes and instincts were accidents. There were eternal principles. But if the axiomatic principles didn’t happen to be your personal major premiss…?

And suddenly he was nine years old and walking with his mother in the fields near Gattenden. Each of them carried a bunch of cowslips. They must have been up to Batt’s Corner; it was the only place where cowslips grew in the neighbourhood.

‘We’ll stop for a minute and see poor Wetherington,’ his mother said. ‘He’s very ill.’ She knocked at a cottage door.

Wetherington had been the under-gardener at the Hall; but for the past month he had not been working. Walter remembered him as a pale, thin man with a cough, not at all communicative. He was not much interested in Wetherington. A woman opened the door. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Wetherington.’ They were shown in.

Wetherington was lying in bed propped up with pillows. His face was terrible. A pair of enormous, large-pupilled eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. Stretched over the starting bones, the skin was white and clammy with sweat. But almost more appalling even than the face was the neck, the unbelievably thin neck. And from the sleeves of his nightshirt projected two knobbed sticks, his arms, with a pair of immense skeleton hands fastened to the end of them, like rakes at the end of their slender hafts. And then the smell in that sickroom! The windows were tightly shut, a fire burned in the little grate. The air was hot and heavy with a horrible odour of stale sick breath and the exhalations of a sick body—an old inveterate smell that seemed to have grown sickeningly sweetish with long ripening in the pent-up heat. A new, fresh smell, however pungently disgusting, would have been less horrible. It was the inveterateness, the sweet decaying over-ripeness of this sickroom smell that made it so peculiarly unbearable. Walter shuddered even now to think of it. He lit a cigarette to disinfect his memory. He had been brought up on baths and open windows. The first time that, as a child, he was taken to church, the stuffiness, the odour of humanity made him sick; he had to be hurried out. His mother did not take him to church again. Perhaps we’re brought up too wholesomely and aseptically, he thought. An education -that results in one’s feeling sick in the company of one’s fellow-men, one’s brothers-can it be good? He would have liked to love them. But love does not flourish in an atmosphere that nauseates the lover with an uncontrollable disgust.

In Wetherington’s sickroom even pity found it hard to flourish. He sat there, while his mother talked to the dying man and his wife, gazing, reluctant but compelled by the fascination of horror, at the ghastly skeleton in the bed and breathing through his bunch of cowslips the warm and sickening air. Even through the fresh delicious scent of the cowslips he could smell the inveterate odours of the sickroom. He felt almost no pity, only horror, fear and disgust. And even when Mrs. Wetherington began to cry, turning her face away so that the sick man should not see her tears, he felt not pitiful so much as uncomfortable, embarrassed. The spectacle of her grief only made him more urgently long to escape, to get out of that horrible room into the pure enormous air and the sunshine.

He felt ashamed of these emotions as he remembered them. But that was how he had felt, how he still felt. ‘One should be loyal to one’s instincts.’ No, not to all, not to the bad ones; one should resist these. But they were not so easily overcome. The old man in the next seat relit his pipe. He remembered that he had held every breath for as long as he possibly could, so as not to have to draw in and smell the tainted air too often. A deep breath through the cowslips; then he counted forty before he let it out again and inhaled another. The old man once more leaned forward and spat. ‘The idea that nationalization will increase the prosperity of the workers is entirely fallacious. During the past years the tax-payer has learned to his cost the meaning of bureaucratic control. If the workers imagine…’ He shut his eyes and saw the sickroom. When the time came to say goodbye, he had shaken the skeleton hand. It lay there, unmoving, on the bedclothes; he slipped his fingers underneath those dead and bony ones, lifted the hand a moment and let it fall again.

It was cold and wettish to the touch. Turning away, he surreptitiously wiped his palm on his coat. He let out his long-contained breath with an explosive sigh and inhaled another lungfull of the sickening air. It was the last he had to take; his mother was already moving towards the door. Her little Pekingese frisked round her, barking.

‘Be quiet, T’ang!’ she said in her clear, beautiful voice. She was perhaps the only person in England, he now reflected, who regularly pronounced the apostrophe in T’ang.

They walked home by the footpath across the fields. Fantastic and improbable as a little Chinese dragon, T’ang ran on ahead of them bounding lightly over what were to him enormous obstacles. His feathery tail fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, when the grass was very long he sat up on his little flat rump as though he were begging for sugar, and looked out with his round bulgy eyes over the tussocks, taking his bearings.

Under the bright dappled sky Walter had felt like a reprieved prisoner. He ran, he shouted. His mother walked slowly, without speaking. Every now and then she halted for a moment and shut her eyes. It was a habit she had, when she felt pensive or perplexed. She was often perplexed, Walter reflected, smiling tenderly to himself. Poor Wetherington must have perplexed her a great deal. He remembered how often she had halted on their way home.

‘Do hurry up, mother,’ he had shouted impatiently. ‘We shall be late for tea.’

Cook had baked scones for tea and there was yesterday’s plum cake and a newly opened pot of Tiptree’s cherry jam.

‘One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts.’ But an accident of birth had determined them for him. Justice was eternal; charity and brotherly love were beautiful in spite of the old man’s pipe and Wetherington’s sickroom. Beautiful precisely because of such things. The train slowed down. Leicester Square. He stepped out on to the platform and made his way towards the lifts. But the personal major premiss, he was thinking, is hard to deny; and the major premiss that isn’t personal is hard, however excellent, to believe in. Honour, fidelity-these were good things. But the personal major premiss of his present philosophy was that Lucy Tantamount was the most beautiful, the most desirable…

‘All tickets, please!’

The debate threatened to start again. Deliberately he stifled it, the liftman slammed the gates. The lift ascended. In the street he hailed a taxi.

‘Tantamount House, Pall Mall.’

Three Italian ghosts unobtrusively haunt the eastern end of Pall Mall. The wealth of newly industrialized England and the enthusiasm, the architectural genius, of Charles Barry called them up out of the past and their native sunshine. Under the encrusting grime of the Reform Club the eye of faith recognizes something agreeably reminiscent of the Farnese Palace. A few yards further down the street, Sir Charles’s recollections of the house that Raphael designed for the Pandolfini loom up through the filmy London air-the Travellers’ Club. And between them, austerely classical, grim like a prison and black with soot, rises a smaller (but still enormous) version of the Cancelleria. It is Tantamount House.

Barry designed it in I839. A hundred workmen laboured for a year or two. And the third marquess paid the bills. They were heavy; but the suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield had begun to spread over the land which his ancestors had stolen from the monasteries three hundred years before. ‘The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has from the sacred writings and the ancient traditions of the Fathers, taught that there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar’ Rich men with uneasy consciences had left their land to the monks that their souls might be helped through Purgatory by a perpetual performance of the acceptable sacrifice of the altar. But Henry vyi. had lusted after a young woman and desired a son; and because Pope Clement vu. was in the power of Henry’s first wife’s daughter’s cousin, he would not grant him a divorce. The monasteries were in consequence suppressed. An army of beggars, of paupers, of the infirm died miserably of hunger. But the Tantamounts acquired some scores of square miles of ploughland, forest and pasture. A few years later, under Edward VI., they stole the property of two disestablished grammar schools; children remained uneducated that the Tantamounts might be rich. They farmed their land scientifically with a view to the highest profit. Their contemporaries regarded them as ‘ men that live as though there were no God at all, men that would have all in their own hands, men that would leave nothing to others, men that be never satisfied.’ From the pulpit of St. Paul’s, Lever accused them of having ‘ offended God, and brought a common wealth into a common ruin.’ The Tantamounts were unperturbed. The land was theirs, the money came in regularly.

The corn was sown, grew and was harvested, again and again. The beasts were born, fattened and went to the slaughter. The ploughmen, the shepherds, the cow-herds laboured from before dawn till sunset, year after year, until they died. Their children took their places. Tantamount succeeded Tantamount. Elizabeth made them barons; they became viscounts under Charles n., earls under William and Mary, marquesses under George n. They married heiress after heiressten square miles of Nottinghamshire, fifty thousand pounds, two streets in Bloomsbury, half a brewery, a bank, a plantation and six hundred slaves in Jamaica. Meanwhile, obscure men were devising machines which made things more rapidly than they could be made by hand. Villages were transformed into towns, towns into great cities. On what had been the Tantamounts’ pasture and ploughland, houses and factories were built. Under the grass of their meadows half-naked men hewed at the black and shining coal face. The laden trucks were hauled by little boys and women. From Peru the droppings of ten thousand generations of sea-gulls were brought in ships to enrich their fields. The corn grew thicker; the new mouths were fed. And year by year the Tantamounts grew richer and richer and the souls of the Black Prince’s pious contemporaries continued, no doubt, to writhe, unaided as they were by any acceptable sacrifice of the altar, in the unquenchable fires of Purgatory. The money that might, if suitably applied, have shortened their term among the flames served, among other things, to call into existence a model of the Papal Chancellery in Pall Mall.

The interior of Tantamount House is as nobly Roman as its facade. Round a central quadrangle run two tiers of open arcades with an attic, lit by small square windows, above. But instead of being left open to the sky, the quadrangle is covered by a glass roof, which converts it into an immense hall rising the whole height of the building. With its arcades and gallery it makes a very noble room-but too large, too public, too much like a swimming bath or a roller-skating rink to be much lived in. To-night, however, it was justifying its existence. Lady Edward Tantamount was giving one of her musical parties. The floor was crowded with seated guests and in the hollow architectural space above them the music intricately pulsed.