Point Counter Point (4 page)

‘What a pantomime! ‘ said old John Bidlake to his hostess. ‘My dear Hilda, you really must look.’

‘Sh-sh!’ Lady Edward protested behind her feather fan. ‘You mustn’t interrupt the music. Besides I am looking.’

Her whisper was colonial and the r’s of ‘interrupt’ were rolled far back in the throat; for Lady Edward came from Montreal and her mother had been a Frenchwoman. In I897 the British Association met in Canada. Lord Edward Tantamount read a much-admired paper to the Biological Section. ‘One of the coming men,’ the professors had called him., But for those who weren’t professors, a Tantamount and a millionaire might be regarded as already having arrived. Hilda Sutton was most decidedly of that opinion. Lord Edward was the guest, during his stay in Montreal, of Hilda’s father. She took her opportunity. The British Association went home; but Lord Edward remained in Canada.

‘Believe me,’ Hilda had once confided to a friend, ‘ I never took so much interest in osmosis before or since.’

The interest in osmosis roused Lord Edward’s attention. He became aware of a fact which he had not previously noticed; that Hilda was exceedingly pretty. Hilda also knew her woman’s business. Her task was not difficult. At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed. He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living. Hilda helped him over his paralysing twelve-year-old shynesses, and whenever terror prevented him from making the necessary advances, came half or even all the way to meet him. His ardours were boyish-at once violent and timid, desperate and dumb. Hilda talked for two and was discreetly bold. Discreetly-for Lord Edward’s notions of how young girls should behave were mainly derived from the Pickwick Papers. Boldness undisguised would have alarmed him, would have driven him away. Hilda kept up all the appearance of Dickensian younggirlishness, but contrived at the same time to make all the advances, create all the opportunities and lead the conversation into all the properly amorous channels. She had her reward. In the spring of i898 she was Lady Edward Tantamount.

‘But I assure you,’ she had once said to John Bidlake, quite angrily-for he had been making fun of poor Edward, ‘I’m genuinely fond of him, genuinely.’

‘In your own way, no doubt,’ mocked Bidlake. ‘In your own way. But you must admit it’s a good thing it isn’t everybody’s way. Just look at yourself in that mirror.’

She looked and saw the reflection of her naked body lying, half sunk in deep cushions, on a divan.

‘Beast!’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference to my being fond of him.’

‘Oh, not to your particular way of being fond, I’m sure.’ He laughed. ‘But I repeat that it’s perhaps a good thing that—’

She put her hand over his mouth. That was a quarter of a century ago. Hilda had been married five years and was thirty. Lucy was a child of four. John Bidlake was forty-seven, at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter; handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker and taker of virginities.

‘Painting’s a branch of sensuality,’ he’ retorted to those who reproved him for his way of life. ‘Nobody can paint a nude who hasn’t learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body. I take my art seriously. I’m unremitting in my preliminary studies.’ And the skin would tighten in laughing wrinkles round his monocle, his eyes would twinkle like a genial satyr’s.

To Hilda, John Bidlake brought the revelation of her own body, her physical potentialities. Lord Edward was only a kind of child, a fossil boy preserved in the frame of a very large middleaged man. Intellectually, in the laboratory, he understood the phenomena of sex But in practice and emotionally he was a child, a fossil mid-Victorian child, preserved intact, with all the natural childish timidities and all the taboos acquired from the two beloved and very virtuous maiden aunts, who had taken the place of his dead mother, all the amazing principles and prejudices sucked in with the humours of Mr. Pickwick and Micawber He loved his young wife, but loved her as a fossil child of the’sixties might love-timidly and very apologetically; apologizing for his ardours, apologizing for his body, apologizing for hers. Not in so many words, of course; for the fossil child was dumb with shyness; but by a silent ignoring, a silent pretending that the bodies weren’t really involved in the ardours, which anyhow didn’t really exist. His love was one long tacit apology for itself; and being nothing more than an apology was therefore quite inexcusable. Love must justify itself by its results in intimacy of mind and body, in warmth, in tender contact, in pleasure. If it has to be justified from outside, it is thereby proved a thing without justification. John Bidlake made no apologies for the kind of love he had to offer. So far as it went, it entirely justified itself. A healthy sensualist, he made his love straightforwardly, naturally, with the good animal gusto of a child of nature.

‘Don’t expect me to talk about the stars and madonna lilies and the cosmos,’ he said. ‘They’re not my line. I don’t believe in them. I believe in—’ And his language became what a mysterious convention has decreed to be unprintable.

It was a love without pretensions, but warm, natural, and, being natural, good so far as it went—a decent, good-humoured, happy sensuality. To Hilda, who had never known anything but a fossil child’s reticent apology for love, it was a revelation. Things which had been dead in her came alive. She discovered herself, rapturously. But not too rapturously. She never lost her head. If she had lost her head, she might have lost Tantamount House and the Tantamount millions and the Tantamount title as well. She had no intention of losing these things. So she kept her head, coolly and deliberately; kept it high and secure above the tumultuous raptures, like a rock above the waves. She enjoyed herself, but never to the detriment of her social position. She could look on at her own enjoyment; her cool head, her will to retain her social position remained apart from and above the turmoil. John Bidlake approved the way she made the best of both worlds.

‘Thank God, Hilda,’ he had often said, ‘you’re a sensible woman.’

Women who believed the world well lost for love were apt to be a terrible nuisance, as he knew only too well by personal experience. He liked women; love was an indispensable enjoyment. But nobody was worth involving oneself in tiresome complications for, nothing was worth messing up one’s life for. With the women who hadn’t been sensible and had taken love too seriously, John Bidlake had been ruthlessly cruel. It was the battle of ‘all for love’ against ‘anything for a quiet life.’ John Bidlake always won. Fighting for his quiet life, he drew the line at no sort of frightfulness.

Hilda Tantamount was as much attached to the quiet life as John himself. Their affair had lasted, pleasantly enough, for a space of years and slowly faded out of existence. They had been good lovers, they remained good friends—conspirators, even, people called them, mischievous conspirators leagued together to amuse themselves at the world’s expense. They were laughing now. Or rather old John, who hated music, was laughing alone. Lady Edward was trying to preserve the decorums.

‘You simply must be quiet,’ she whispered

‘But you’re not realizing how incredibly comic it is,’ Bidlake insisted.

‘Sh-sh.’

‘But I’m whispering.’ This continual shushing annoyed him. ‘Like a lion.’

‘I can’t help that,’ he answered crossly. When he took the trouble to whisper, he assumed that his voice was inaudible to all but the person to whom his remarks were addressed. He did not like to be told that what he chose to assume as true was not true.

‘Lion, indeed!’ he muttered indignantly. But his face suddenly brightened again. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Here’s another late arrival. What’s the betting she’ll do the same as all the others?’

‘Sh-sh,’ Lady Edward repeated.

But John Bidlake paid no attention to her. He was looking in the direction of the door, where the latest of the late-comers was still standing, torn between the desire to disappear unobtrusively into the silent crowd and the social duty of making her arrival known to her hostess. She looked about her in embarrassment. Lady Edward hailed her over the heads of the intervening crowd with a wave of her long feather and a smile. The late arrival smiled back, blew a kiss, laid a finger to her lips, pointed to an empty chair at the other side of the room, threw out both hands in a little gesture that was meant to express apologies for being late and despairing regret at being unable in the circumstances to come and speak to Lady Edward, then shrugging up her shoulders and shrinking into herself so as to occupy the smallest possible amount of space, tiptoed with extraordinary precautions down the gangway towards the vacant seat.

Bidlake was in ecstasies of merriment. He had echoed the poor lady’s every gesture as she made it. Her blown kiss he had returned with extravagant interest, and when she laid a finger to her lips, he had covered his mouth with a whole hand. He had repeated her gesture of regret, grotesquely magnifying it until it expressed a ludicrous despair. And when she tiptoed away, he began to count on his fingers, to make the gestures that, in Naples, avert the evil eye, and to tap his forehead. He turned to Lady Edward in triumph.

‘I told you so,’ he whispered, and his whole face was wrinkled with suppressed laughter. ‘It’s like being in a deaf and dumb asylum. Or talking to pygmies in Central Africa.’ He opened his mouth and pointed into it with a stretched forefinger; he went through the motions of drinking from a glass. ‘Me hungly,’ he said, ‘me velly velly thirsty.’

Lady Edward flapped her ostrich at him.

Meanwhile the music played on—Bach’s Suite in B minor, for flute and strings. Young Tolley conducted with his usual inimitable grace, bending in swan-like undulations from the loins, and tracing luscious arabesques on the air with his waving arms, as though he were dancing to the music. A dozen anonymous fiddlers and ‘cellists scraped at his bidding. And the great Pongileoni glueily kissed his flute. He blew across the mouth hole and a cylindrical air column vibrated; Bach’s meditations filled the Roman quadrangle. In the opening largo John Sebastian had, with the help of Pongileoni’s snout and the air column, made a statement: There are grand things in the world, noble things; there are men born kingly; there are real conquerors, intrinsic lords of the earth. But of an earth that is, oh! complex and multitudinous, he had gone on to reflect in the fugal allegro. You seem to have found the truth; clear, definite, unmistakable, it is announced by the violins; you have it, you triumphantly hold it. But it slips out of your grasp to present itself in a new aspect among the ‘cellos and yet again in terms of Pongileoni’s vibrating air column. The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment to create a seemingly final and perfected harmony, only to break apart again. Each is always alone and separate and individual. ‘I am I,’ asserts the violin; ‘the world revolves round me.’ ‘Round me,’ calls the ‘cello. ‘Round me,’ the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.

In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts. The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist. It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything. Here, for example, is one particular part; and John Sebastian puts the case. The Rondeau begins, exquisitely and simply melodious, almost a folk-song. It is a young girl singing to herself of love, in solitude, tenderly mournful. A young girl singing among the hills, with the clouds drifting overhead. But solitary as one of the floating clouds, a poet had been listening to her song. The thoughts that it provoked in him are the Sarabande that follows the Rondeau. His is a slow and lovely meditation on the beauty (in spite of squalor and stupidity), the profound goodness (in spite of all the evil), the oneness (in spite of such bewildering diversity) of the world. It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to time suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced. A girl singing to herself under the clouds suffices to create the certitude. Even a fine morning is enough. Is it illusion or the revelation of profoundest truth? Who knows? Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers drew their rosined horse-hair across the stretched intestines of lambs; through the long Sarabande the poet slowly meditated his lovely and consoling certitude.

‘This music is beginning to get rather tedious,’ John Bidlake whispered to his hostess. ‘Is it going to last much longer?’

Old Bidlake had no taste or talent for music, and he had the frankness to say so. He could afford to be frank. When one can paint as well as John Bidlake, why should one pretend to like music, when in fact one doesn’t? He looked over the seated audience and smiled.

‘They look as though they were in church,’ he said.

Lady Edward raised her fan protestingly.

‘Who’s that little woman in black,’ he went on, ‘rolling her eyes and swaying her body like St. Teresa in an ecstasy? ‘

‘Fanny Logan,’ Lady Edward whispered back. ‘But do keep quiet.’

‘People talk of the tribute vice pays to virtue,’ John Bidlake went on, incorrigibly. ‘But everything’s permitted nowadays-there’s no more need of moral hypocrisy. There’s only intellectual hypocrisy now. The tribute philistinism pays to art, what? Just look at them all paying it-in pious grimaces and religious silence!’

‘You can be thankful they payyou in guineas,’ said Lady Edward. ‘And now I absolutely insist that you should hold your tongue.’

Bidlake made a gesture of mock terror and put his hand over his mouth. Tolley voluptuously waved his arms; Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers scraped. And Bach, the poet, meditated of truth and beauty.

Fanny Logan felt the tears coming into her eyes. She was easily moved, especially by music; and when she felt an emotion, she did not try to repress it, but abandoned herself whole-heartedly to it. How beautiful this music was, how sad, and yet how comforting! She felt it within her, as a current of exquisite feeling, running smoothly but irresistibly through all the labyrinthine intricacies of her being. Even her body shook and swayed in time with the pulse and undulation of the melody. She thought of her husband; the memory of him came to her on the current of the music, of darling, darling Eric, dead now almost two years; dead, and still so young. The tears came faster. She wiped them away. The music was infinitely sad; and yet it consoled. It admitted everything, so to speak-poor Eric’s dying before his time, the pain of his illness, his reluctance to go-it admitted everything. It expressed the whole sadness of the world, and from the depths of that sadness it was able to affirm-deliberately, quietly, without protesting too much-that everything was in some way right, acceptable. It included the sadness within some vaster, more comprehensive happiness. The tears kept welling up into Mrs. Logan’s eyes; but they were somehow happy tears, in spite of her sadness. She would have liked to tell Polly, her daughter, what she was feeling. But Polly was sitting in another row. Mrs. Logan could see the back of her head, two rows further forward, and her slim little neck with the pearls that darling Eric had given her on her eighteenth birthday, only a few months before he died. And suddenly, as though she had felt that her mother was looking at her, as though she understood what she was feeling, Polly turned round and gave her a quick smile. Mrs. Logan’s sad and musical happiness was complete. Her mother’s were not the only eyes that looked in Polly’s direction. Advantageously placed behind and to one side of her, Hugo Brockle admiringly studied her profile. How lovely she was! He was wondering whether he would have the courage to tell her that they had played together in Kensington Gardens when they were children. He would come up to her when the music was over and boldly say: ‘We were introduced in our perambulators, you know.’ Or, if he wanted to be more unconventionally witty, ‘You’re the person who hit me on the head with a battledore.’