Point Counter Point (30 page)

Phil snatched the paper from her. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said angrily. His pride was hurt, he hated criticism, refused ever to be in the wrong.

‘Perhaps it isn’t really,’ Miss Fulkes made haste to be soothing. ‘Perhaps I made a mistake.’ Phil smiled again. ‘Though why a child,’ Miss Fulkes was thinking,’shouldn’t be told when he’s drawn a leg that’s impossibly long and thin and waggly, I really don’t understand.’ Still, old Mr. Bidlake ought to know. A man in his position, with his reputation, a great painter—she had often heard him called a great painter, read it in newspaper articles, even in books. Miss Fulkes had a profound respect for the Great. Shakespeare, Milton, Michelangelo…Yes, Mr. Bidlake, the Great John Bidlake, ought to know best. She had been wrong in mentioning that left leg.

‘It’s after halfpast twelve,’ she went on in a brisk efficient voice. ‘Time for you to lie down.’ Little Phil always lay down for half an hour before lunch.

‘No!’ Phil tossed his head, scowled ferociously and made a furious gesture with his clenched fists.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Fulkes calmly. ‘And don’t make those silly faces.’ She knew, by experience, that the child was not really angry; he was just making a demonstration, in order to assert himself and in the vague hope, perhaps, that he might frighten his adversary into yielding—as Chinese soldiers are said to put on devils’ masks and to utter fearful yells when they approach the enemy, in the hope of inspiring terror.

‘Why should I?’ Phil’s tone was already much calmer.

‘Because you must.’

The child got up obediently. When the mask and the yelling fail to take effect, the Chinese soldier, being a man of sense and not at all anxious to get hurt, surrenders.

‘I’ll come and draw the curtains for you,’ said Miss Fulkes.

Together, they walked down the passage to Phil’s bedroom. The child took off his shoes and lay down. Miss Fulkes drew the folds of orange cretonne across the windows.

‘Not too dark,’ said Phil, watching her movements through the richly coloured twilight.

‘You rest better when it’s dark.’

‘But I’m frightened,’ protested Phil.

‘You’re not frightened in the least. Besides, it isn’t really dark at all.’ Miss Fulkes moved towards the door.

‘Miss Fulkes!’ She paid no attention. ‘Miss Fulkes!’

On the threshold Miss Fulkes turned round. ‘If you go on shouting,’ she said severely, ‘I shall be very angry. Do you understand?’ She turned and went out, shutting the door behind her.

‘Miss Fulkes!’ he continued to call, but in a whisper, under his breath. ‘Miss Fulkes! Miss Fulkes!’ She mustn’t hear him, of course; for then she would really be cross. At the same time he wasn’t going to obey tamely and without a protest. Whispering her name he rebelled, he asserted his personality, but in complete safety.

Sitting in her own room, Miss Fulkes was reading—to improve her mind. The book was
The Wealth of Nations
. Adam Smith, she knew, was Great. His book was one of those that one ought to have read. The best that has been thought or said. Her family was poor, but cultured. We needs must love the highest when we see it. But when the highest takes the form of a chapter beginning, ‘As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or in other words, by the extent of the market,’ then, really, it is difficult to love it as ardently as one ought to do. ‘When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for.’

Miss Fulkes read the sentence through; but before she had come to the end of it, she had forgotten what the beginning was about. She began again;…’for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus…(I could take the sleeves out of my brown dress, she was thinking; because it’s only under the arms that it’s begun to go, and wear it for the skirt only with a jumper over it)…over and above his own consumption for such parts…(an orange jumper perhaps).’ She tried a third time, reading the words out aloud. ‘When the market is very small…’ A vision of the cattle market at Oxford floated before her inward eye; it was quite a large market. ‘No person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself…’ What was it all about? Miss Fulkes suddenly rebelled against her own conscientiousness. She hated the highest when she saw it. Getting up, she put
The Wealth of Nations
back on the shelf. It was a row of very high books—’my treasures,’ she called them. Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson bound in squashy leather and looking, with their rounded corners and Gothic titles, like so many Bibles.
Sartor Resartus
, also Emerson’s
Essays
. Marcus Aurelius in one of those limp leathery artistic little editions that one gives, at Christmas, and in sheer despair, to those to whom one can think of nothing more suitable to give. Macaulay’s
History
. Thomas a Kempis, Mrs. Browning. Miss Fulkes did not select any of them. She put her hand behind the best that has beenr thought or said and withdrew from its secret place a copy of
The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds
. A ribbon marked her place. She opened and began to read. ‘Lady Kitty turned on the lights and walked in. A cry of horror broke from her lips, a sudden faintness almost overcame her. In the middle of the room lay the body of a man in faultless evening dress. The face was almost unrecognizably mangled; there was a red gash in the white shirt front. The rich Turkey carpet was darkly soaked with blood…’ Miss Fulkes read on, avidly. The thunder of the gong brought her back with a start from the world of emeralds and murder. She sprang up. ‘I ought to have kept an eye on the time,’ she thought, feeling guilty. ‘We shall be late.’ Pushing
The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds
back into its place behind the best that has been thought or said, she hurried along to the night nursery. Little Phil had to be washed and brushed.

There was no breeze except the wind of the ship’s own speed; and that was like a blast from the engine-room. Stretched in their chairs Philip and Elinor watched the gradual diminution against the sty of a jagged island of bare red rock. From the deck above came the sound of people playing shuffle-board. Walking on principle or for an appetite their fellow passengers passed and re-passed with the predictable regularity of comets.

‘The way people take exercise,’ said Elinor in a tone positively of resentment; it made her hot to look at them. ‘Even in the Red Sea.’

‘It explains the British Empire,’ he said.

There was a silence. Burnt brown, burnt scarlet, the young men on leave passed laughing, four to a girl. Sun-dried and curry-pickled veterans of the East strolled by with acrimonious words; about the Reforms and the cost of Indian living, upon their lips. Two female missionaries padded past in a rarely broken silence. The French globe-trotters reacted to the oppressively imperial atmosphere by talking very loud. The Indian students slapped one another on the back like stage subalterns in the days of ‘Charley’s Aunt’; and the slang they talked would have seemed old-fashioned in a preparatory school.

Time flowed. The island vanished; the air was if possible hotter.

‘I’m worried about Walter,’ said Elinor, who had been ruminating the contents of that last batch of letters she had received just before leaving Bombay.

‘He’s a fool,’ Philip answered. ‘After committing one stupidity with that Carling female, he ought to have had the sense not to start again with Lucy.’

‘Of course he ought,’ said Elinor irritably. ‘But the point is that he hasn’t had the sense. It’s a question of thinking of a remedy.’

‘Well, it’s no good thinking about it five thousand miles away.’

‘I’m afraid he may suddenly rush off and leave poor Marorie in the lurch. With a baby on the way, too. She’s a dreary woman. But he mustn’t be allowed to treat her like that.’

‘No,’ Philip agreed. There was a pause. The sparse procession of exercise lovers marched past. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he went on reflectively, ‘that it would make an excellent subject.’

‘What?’

‘This business of Walter’s.’

‘You don’t propose to exploit poor Walter as copy?’ Elinor was indignant. ‘No really, I won’t have it. Botanizing on his grave—or at any rate his heart.’

‘But of course not!’ Philip protested.

‘_Mais je vous assure_,’ one of the Frenchwomen was shouting so loud that he had to abandon the attempt to continue, ‘
aux Galeries Lafayette les camisoles en flanelle pour enfant ne coutent que
…’

‘_Camisoles enflanelle_,’ repeated Philip. ‘Phew!’

‘But seriously, Phil…’

‘But, my dear, I never intended to use more than the situation. The young man who tries to make his life rhyme with his idealizing books and imagines he’s having a great spiritual love, only to discover that he’s got hold of a bore whom he really doesn’t like at all.’

‘Poor Marjorie! But why can’t she keep her face better powdered? And those artistic beads and earrings she always wears…’

‘And who then goes down like a ninepin,’ Philip continued, ‘at the mere sight of a Siren. It’s the situation that appealed to me. Not the individuals. After all, there are plenty of other nice young men besides Walter. And Marjorie isn’t the only bore. Nor Lucy the only man-eater.’

‘Well, if it’s only the situation,’ Elinor grudgingly allowed.

‘And besides,’ he went on, ‘it isn’t written and probably never will be. So there’s nothing to get upset about, I assure you.’

‘All right. I won’t say anything more till I see the book.’

There was another pause.

‘.. such a wonderful time at Gulmerg last summer,’ the young lady was saying to her four attentive cavaliers. ‘There was golf, and dancing every evening, and…’

‘And in any case,’ Philip began again in a meditative tone, ‘ the situation would only be a kind of…’

‘_Mais je lui ai dit, les hommes sont comme ca. Une jeune fille bien elevee doit…’

‘…a kind of excuse,’ bawled Philip. ‘It’s like trying to talk in the parrot-house at the Zoo,’ he added with parenthetic irritation. ‘A kind of excuse, as I was saying, for a new way of looking at things that I want to experiment with.’

‘I wish you’d begin by looking at me in a new way,’ said Elinor with a little laugh. ‘A more human way.’

‘But seriously, Elinor…’

‘Seriously,’ she mocked. ‘Being human isn’t serious. Only being clever.’

‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘if you don’t want to listen, I’ll shut up.’

‘No, no, Phil. Please.’ She laid her hand on his. ‘Please.’

‘I don’t want to bore you.’ He was huffy and dignified.

‘I’m sorry, Phil. But you do look so comic when you’re more in sorrow than in anger. Do you remember those camels at Bikaner—what an extraordinarily superior expression? But do go on!’

‘This year,’ one female missionary was saying to the other, as they passed by, ‘ the Bishop of Kuala Lumpur ordained six Chinese deacons and two Malays. And the Bishop of British North Borneo…’ The quiet voices faded into inaudibility.

Philip forgot his dignity and burst out laughing. ‘Perhaps he ordained some Orang-utans.’

‘But do you remember the wife of the Bishop of Thursday Island?’ asked Elinor. ‘The woman we met on that awful Australian ship with the cockroaches.’

‘The one who would eat pickles at breakfast?’

‘Pickled onions at that,’ she qualified with a shudder. ‘But what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these
camisoles en flanelle
and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘ thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes,
homme moyen sensuel
eyes…’

‘Loving eyes too.’

He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result…’ he hesitated.

‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked.

‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’

‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’

‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’

‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’