Point Counter Point (35 page)

‘But if you’re bored by it, if you hate it,’ Philip Quarles had interrogated, focussing on Spandrell his bright intelligent curiosity, ‘why the devil do you go on with the life?’ It was nearly a year since the question had been asked; the paralysis had not then crept so deep into Spandrell’s soul. But even in those days Philip had found his case very puzzling. And since the man was prepared to talk about himself without demanding any personalities in return, since he didn’t seem to mind being an object of scientific curiosity and was boastful rather than reticent about his weaknesses, Philip had taken the opportunity of cross-examining him. ‘I can’t see why,’ he insisted.

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because I’m committed to it. Because in some way it’s my destiny. Because that’s what life finally is—hateful and boring; that’s what human beings are, when they’re left to themselves—hateful and boring again. Because, once one’s damned, one ought to damn oneself doubly. Because…yes, because I really like hating and being bored.’

He liked it. The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone. The concert season was in full swing, there was opera at Covent Garden, all the theatres were open; but Spandrell only read the advertisements—the
Eroica
at the Queen’s Hall, Schnabel playing Op. 106 at the Wigmore,
Don Giovanni
at Covent Garden, Little Tich at the Alhambra,
Othello
at the Old Vic, Charlie Chaplin at Marble Arch—read them very carefully and stayed at home. There was a pile of music on the piano, his shelves were full of books, all the London Library was at his disposal; Spandrell read nothing but magazines and the illustrated weeklies and the morning and evening papers. The rain went sliding incessantly down the dirty glass of the windows; Spandrell turned the enormous crackling pages of the
Times
. ‘The Duke of York,’ he read, having eaten his way, like a dung beetle’s maggot in its native element, through Births, Deaths and the Agony Column, through Servants and Real Estate, through Legal Reports, through Imperial and Foreign News, through Parliament, through the morning’s history, through the five leading articles, through Letters to the Editor, as far as Court and Personal and the little clerical essay on
The Bible in Bad Weather
,’ the Duke of York will be presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers Company on Monday next. His Royal Highness will take luncheon with the Master and Wardens of the Company after the presentation.’ Pascal and Blake were within reach, on the bookshelf. But ‘Lady Augusta Crippen has left England on the
Berengaria
. She will travel across America to visit her brother-in-law and sister, the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Spandrell laughed, and the laughter was a liberation, was a source of energy. He got up; he put on his mackintosh and went out. ‘The Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Still smiling, he turned into the public-house round the comer. It was early; there was only one other drinker in the bar.

‘But why should two people stay together and be unhappy?’ the barmaid was saying. ‘Why? When they can get a divorce and be happy?’

‘Because marriage is a sacrament,’ replied the stranger.

‘Sacrament yourself!’ the barmaid retorted contemptuously. Catching sight of Spandrell, she nodded and smiled. He was a regular customer.

‘Double brandy,’ he ordered, and leaning against the bar examined the stranger. He had a face like a choirboy’s—but a choirboy suddenly overwhelmed by middle age; chubby, prettily doll-like, but withered. The mouth was horribly small, a little slit in a rosebud. The cherub’s cheeks had begun to sag and were grey, like the chin, with a day’s beard.

‘Because,’ the stranger went on—and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of selfconsciousness, ‘because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. One flesh,’ he repeated and accompanied the wdrds by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter. He caught Spandrell’s eye, blushed, and to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.

‘What do
you
think, Mr. Spandrell?’ asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.

‘Of what? Of being one flesh?’ The barmaid nodded. ‘H’m. As a matter of fact, I was just envying the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter for being so unequivocally two fleshes. If you were called the Governor-General of South Melanesia,’ he went on, addressing himself to the withered choirboy,’ and your wife was Lady Ethelberta Todhunter, do you imagine you’d be one flesh? ‘ The stranger wriggled like a worm on a hook. ‘Obviously not. It would be shocking if you were.’

The stranger ordered another whiskey. ‘But joking apart,’ he said, ‘the sacrament of marriage…’

‘But why should two people be unhappy? ‘ persisted the barmaid. ‘When it isn’t necessary?’

‘Why
shouldn’t
they be unhappy?’ Spandrell enquired. ‘Perhaps it’s what they’re here for. How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?’

A positivist, the barmaid laughed. ‘What rot!’

‘But the Anglicans don’t regard it as a sacrament,’ Spandrell continued.

The choirboy writhed indignantly. ‘Do you take me for an Anglican?’

The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation. Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously. In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalents of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy, of poetry and a week-end with Cleopatra, of big-game hunting and music. The choirboy ordered another drink.

‘What an age we live in!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Barbarous. Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.’

‘Not to mention hygienic truths,’ said Spandrell. ‘These damp clothes! And not a window.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.

The choirboy shuddered and held up his hands. ‘But what a handkerchief!’ he exclaimed, ‘what a horror!’

Spandrell held it out for inspection. ‘It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,’ he said. It was a silk bandana, red with bold patterns in black and pink. ‘Extremely expensive, I may add.’

‘But the colour, my dear sir. The colour!’

‘I like it.’

‘But not at this. season of the year. Not between Easter and Whitsun. Impossible! The liturgical colour is white.’ He pulled out his own handkerchief. It was snowy. ‘And my socks.’ He lifted a foot.

‘I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.’

‘White, white,’ said the choirboy. ‘It’s prescribed. Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white. Not to mention the fact that to-day’s the feast of St. Natalia the Virgin. And white’s the colour for all virgins who aren’t also martyrs.’

‘I should have thought they were all martyrs,’ said Spandrell. ‘That is, if they’ve been virgins long enough.’

The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. Outside was loneliness and the damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact. The choirboy began to talk of little St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin-miners. He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.

‘Another wet Derby,’ prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company and with fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls. The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever,—a steam of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening. Into Spandrell’s face the withered choirboy breathed alcohol and poetry.

‘To and fro, to and fro,

Piran of Perranzabuloe,’

he intoned. Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacing. He had lost his selfconsciousness. The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep. A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.

‘Walked weightless,’

he continued,

‘Walked weightless on the heaving seas

Among the Cassiterides.’

‘That was Piran’s chief miracle,’ he explained; ‘walking from Land’s End to the Scilly Islands.’

‘Pretty nearly the world’s record, I should think,’ said Spandrell.

The other shook his head. ‘There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales. But I can’t remember his name. Miss!’ he called. ‘Here! Another whiskey, please.’

‘I must say,’ said Spandrell, ‘you seem to make the best of both worlds. Six whiskeys…

‘Only five,’ the choirboy protested. ‘This is only the fifth.’

‘Five whiskeys, then, and the liturgical colours. Not to mention St. Piran of Perranzabuloe. Do you really believe in that walk to the Scillies?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And here’s for young Sacramento,’ said the barmaid, pushing his glass across the counter.

The choirboy shook his head as he paid. ‘Blasphemies all round,’ he said. ‘Every word another wound in the Sacred Heart.’ He drank. ‘Another bleeding, agonizing wound.’

‘What fun you have with your Sacred Heart!’

‘Fun?’ said the choirboy indignantly.

‘Staggering from the bar to the altar rails. And from the confessional to the bawdy house. It’s the ideal life. Never a dull moment. I envy you.’

‘Mock on, mock on!’ He spoke like a dying martyr. ‘And if you knew what a tragedy my life has been, you wouldn’t say you envied me.’

The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. God-thirsty from the spiritual deserts of the workshop and the office, men came, as to a temple. Bottled and barrelled by Clyde and Liffey, by Thames, Douro and Trent, the mysterious divinity revealed itself to them.

For the Brahmins who pressed and drank the soma, its name was Indra; for the hemp-eating yogis, Siva. The gods of Mexico inhabited the peyotl. The Persian Sufis discovered Allah in the wine of Shiraz, the shamans of the Samoyedes ate toadstools and were filled with the spirit of Num.

‘Another whiskey, Miss,’ said the choirboy, and turning back to Spandrell almost wept over his misfortunes. He had loved, he had married—sacramentally; he insisted on that. He had been happy. They had both been happy.

Spandrell raised his eyebrows.’did she like the smell of whiskey?’

The other shook his head sadly. ‘I had my faults,’ he admitted. ‘I was weak. This accursed drink! Accursed!’ And in a sudden enthusiasm for temperance he poured his whiskey on the floor. ‘There!’ he said triumphantly.

‘Very noble!’ said Spandrell. He beckoned to the barmaid

‘Another whiskey for this gentleman.’

The choirboy protested, but without much warmth. He sighed. ‘It was always my besetting sin,’ he said. ‘But I was always sorry afterwards. Genuinely repentant.’

‘I’m sure you were. Never a dull moment.’

‘If she’d stood by me, I might have cured myself.’

‘A pure woman’s help, what?’ said Spandrell.

‘Exactly,’ the other nodded. ‘That’s exactly it. But she left me. Ran off. Or rather, not ran. She was lured. She wouldn’t have done it on her own. It was that horrible little snake in the grass. That little…’ He ran through the sergeant-major’s brief vocabulary. ‘I’d wring his neck if he were here,’ the choirboy went on. The Lord of Battles had been in his fifth whiskey. ‘Dirty little swine!’ He banged the counter. ‘You know the man who painted those pictures in the Tate; Bidlake? Well, it was that chap’s son. Walter Bidlake.’

Spandrell raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. The choirboy talked on.

At Sbisa’s, Walter was dining with Lucy Tantamount.

‘Why don’t you come to Paris too? ‘ Lucy was saying.

Walter shook his head. ‘I’ve got to work.’

‘I find it’s really impossible to stay in one place more than a couple of months at a time. One gets so stale and wilted, so unutterably bored. The moment I step into the aeroplane at Croydon I feel as though I had been born again—like the Salvation Army.’

‘And how long does the new life last?’

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘As long as the old one. But fortunately there’s an almost unlimited supply of aeroplanes. I’m all for Progress.’

The swing-doors of the temple of the unknown god closed behind them. Spandrell and his companion stepped out into the cold and rainy darkness.

‘Oof!’ said the choirboy, shivering, and turned up the collar of his raincoat. ‘It’s like jumping into a swimming-bath.’

‘It’s like reading Haeckel after Fenelon. You Christians live in such a jolly little public-house of a universe.’

They walked a few yards down the street.

‘Look here,’ said Spandrell,’do you think you can get home on foot? Because you don’t look as though you could.’

Leaning against a lamp-post the choirboy shook his head.

‘We’ll wait for a cab.’

They waited. The rain fell. Spandrell looked at the other man with a cold distaste. The creature had amused him, while they had been in the pub, had served as a distraction. Now, suddenly, he was merely repulsive.

‘Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?’ he asked. ‘They’ll make you drink burning whiskey there. A perpetual Christmas pudding in your belly. If you could see yourself! The revolting spectacle…’

The choirboy’s sixth whiskey had been full of contrition. ‘I know, I know,’ he groaned. ‘I’m disgusting. I’m contemptible. But if you knew how I’d struggled and striven and…’

‘There’s a cab.’ Spandrell gave a shout.

‘How I’d prayed,’ the choirboy continued.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens. I’ve wrestled…’

The cab drew up in front of them. Spandrell opened the door.

‘Get in, you sot,’ he said, and gave the other a push. ‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens,’ he said to the driver. The choirboy, meanwhile, had crawled into his seat. Spandrell followed. ‘Disgusting slug!’

‘Go on, go on. I deserve it. You have every right to despise me.’

‘I know,’ said Spandrell. ‘But if you think I’m going to do you the pleasure of telling you so any more, you’re much mistaken.’ He leaned back in his corner and shut his eyes. All his appalling weariness and disgust had suddenly returned. ‘God,’ he said to himself. ‘God, God, God.’ And like a grotesque derisive echo of his thoughts, the choirboy prayed aloud. ‘God have mercy upon me,’ the maudlin voice repeated. Spandrell burst out laughing.