Point Counter Point (44 page)

‘Do you remember,’ he said slowly, without looking up, ‘what I told you before you went away?’

‘I thought we’d agreed not to talk about it again.’

He threw back his head with a little laugh. ‘Well, you thought wrong.’ He looked at her and saw in her eyes an expression of distress and anxiety, an appeal for mercy. But Everard was merciless. He planted his elbows on the table and leaned towards her. She dropped her eyes.

‘You said I hadn’t changed to look at,’ he said in his soft voice with its latencies of violence. ‘Well, my mind hasn’t changed either. It’s still the same, Elinor, still the same as it was when you went away. I love you just as much, Elinor. No, I love you more.’ Her hand lay limp on the table in front of her. He stretched out one of his and took it. ‘Elinor,’ he whispered.

She shook her head, without looking at him.

Softly and passionately he talked on. ‘You don’t know what love can be,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what I can give you. Love that’s desperate and mad, like a forlorn hope. And at the same time tender, like a mother’s love for a sick child. Love that’s violent and gentle, violent like a crime and as gentle as sleep.’

‘Words,’ Elinor was thinking, ‘absurd melodramatic words.’ But they moved her, as his boasting had moved her

‘Please, Everard,’ she said aloud,’ no more.’ She didn’t want to be moved. With an effort she held her glance steady while she looked into his face, into those bright and searching eyes. She essayed a laugh, she shook her head. ‘Because it’s impossible, and you know it.’

‘All I know,’ he said slowly, ‘is that you’re afraid. Afraid of coming to life. Because you’ve been half dead all these years. You haven’t had a chance to come fully alive. And you know I can give it you. And you’re afraid, you’re afraid.’

‘What nonsense!’ she said. It was just ranting and melodrama.

‘And perhaps you’re right, in a way,’ he went on. ‘Being alive, really alive, isn’t entirely a joke. It’s dangerous. But by God,’ he added, and the latent violence in his soft voice suddenly broke out into ringing actuality, ‘it’s exciting.’

‘If you knew what a fright you gave me!’ she said.’shouting like that!’ But it was not only a fright she had had. Her nerves and her very flesh still crept and quivered with the obscure and violent exultations which his voice had evoked in her. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she assured herself. But it was as though she had heard the voice directly with her body. The echoes of it seemed to vibrate at her very midriff. ‘Ridiculous,’ she repeated. And then what was this love he talked about so thrillingly? Just an occasional brief violence in the intervals of business. He despised women, resented them because they wasted a man’s time and energy. She had often heard him say that he had no time for love-making. His advances were almost an insult—the propositions one makes to a woman of the streets.

‘Do be reasonable, Everard,’ she said.

Everard withdrew his hand from hers and, with a laugh, leaned back in his chair. ‘Very well,’ he answered. ‘For to-day.’

‘For every day.’ She felt profoundly relieved. ‘Besides,’ she added, quoting a phrase of his, with a little ironical smile, ‘you’re not a member of the leisured class. You’ve got more important things to do than make love.’

Everard looked at her for a little in silence and his face was grave with a kind of lowering thoughtfulness. More important things to do? It was true, of course. He was angry with himself for wanting so much to have her. Angry with Elinor for keeping him unsatisfied.’shall we talk about Shakespeare?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Or the musical glasses?’

The fare was three-and-six. Philip gave the driver two half-crowns and climbed the steps of the club’s pillared portico pursued by the sound of thanks. He made a habit of overtipping. It was not out of ostentation or because he had asked, or meant to ask, special services. (Indeed, few men could have demanded less of their servants than did Philip, could have been more patient to put up with bad service, and more willing to excuse remissness.) His overtipping was the practical expression of a kind of remorseful and apologetic contempt. ‘My poor devil!’ the superfluous gratuity seemed to imply, ‘I’m sorry to be your superior.’ And perhaps also there was a shilling’s worth of apology for his very considerateness as an employer. For if he was unexacting in his demands, that was due as much to a dread and dislike of unnecessary human contacts as to consideration and kindness. From those who served him Philip demanded little, for the good reason that he wanted to have as little as possible to do with them. Their presence disturbed him. He did not like to have his privacy intruded upon by alien personalities. To be compelled to speak with them, to have to establish a direct contact—not of intelligences, but of wills, feelings, intuitions—with these intruders was always disagreeable to him. He avoided it as much as he could; and when contact was necessary, he did his best to dehumanize the relation. Philip’s generosity was in part a compensation for his inhuman kindness towards its recipients. It was conscience money.

The doors stood open; he entered. The hall was vast, dim, pillared and cool. Sir Francis Chantrey’s allegorical marble group of Science and Virtue subduing the Passions writhed with classical decorum in a niche on the stairs. He hung up his hat and went to the smokingroom to look at the papers and await the arrival of his guests. Spandrell was the first to arrive.

‘Tell me,’ said Philip, as soon as the greetings were over and the vermouth ordered, ‘tell me quickly, before he comes, what about my absurd young brother-in-law. What’s happening with him and Lucy Tantamount?’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘What
does
usually happen on these occasions? And in any case, is this the place and time to go into details?’ He indicated the other occupants of the smokingroom. A cabinet minister, two judges and a bishop were within earshot.

Philip laughed. ‘But I only wanted to know how serious the affair really was, how long it’s likely to last…’

‘Very serious as far as Walter’s concerned. As for duration—who knows? But Lucy’s going abroad very soon.’

‘Thank heaven for small mercies! Ah, here you are!’ It was Walter. ‘And there’s Illidge.’ He waved his hand. The newcomers refused an aperitive. ‘Let’s come and eat at once, then,’ said Philip.

The dining-room at Philip’s club was enormous. A double row of stucco Corinthian pillars supported a gilded ceiling. From the pale chocolate-brown walls, the portraits of distinguished members, now deceased, glared down. Curtains of claretcoloured velvet were looped up at either side of the six windows, a claretcoloured carpet muffled the floor and in their claretcoloured liveries the waiters darted about almost invisibly, like leaf-insects in a forest.

‘I always like this room,’ said Spandrell as they entered. ‘It’s like a scene for Belshazzar’s feast.’

‘But a very Anglican Belshazzar,’ Walter qualified.

‘Gosh!’ exclaimed Illidge, who had been looking round

‘This is the sort of thing that really does make me feel pleb-ish.’

Philip laughed, rather uncomfortably. Changing the subject, he pointed out the protectively coloured waiters. They proved the Darwinian hypothesis. ‘Survival of the fittest,’ he said as they sat down at their appointed table. ‘The men in other colours must have been killed off by infuriated members.’ One of the claretcoloured survivors brought the fish. They began to eat.

‘It’s curious,’ said Illidge, pursuing the train of thought suggested by his first impressions of the room, ‘it’s really extraordinary that I should be here at all. Sitting with you, at any rate, as a guest. For there wouldn’t have been anything so very surprising about my being here in one of these wine-coloured coats. That at least would have been in harmony with what the parsons would call “my station in life.”’ He uttered a brief resentful laugh. ‘But to be sitting with you—that’s really almost incredible. And it’s all due to the fact that a Manchester shopkeeper had a son with tendencies to scrofula. If Reggie Wright had been normally healthy, I’d probably be cobbling shoes in Lancashire. But luckily Reggie had tubercle bacilli in his lymph-system. The doctors prescribed a country life. His father took a cottage in our village for his wife and child, and Reggie went to the village school. But his father was ambitious for Reggie. (What a disgusting little rat he was!) ‘ Illidge remarked parenthetically. ‘Wanted him to go to Manchester Grammar School, later on. With a scholarship. Paid our schoolmaster to give him special coaching. I was a bright boy; the master liked me. While he was coaching Reggie, he thought he might as well coach me. Gratis, what’s more. Wouldn’t let my mother pay a penny. Not that she could have done so very easily, poor woman. The time came, and it was I who got the scholarship. Reggie failed.’ Illidge laughed. ‘Miserable scrofulous little squit! But I’m eternally grateful to him and the busy bacilli in his glands. But for them I’d be carrying on my uncle’s cobbling business in a Lancashire village. And that’s the sort of thing one’s life hinges on—some absolutely absurd, million-to-one chance. An irrelevance, and youi life’s altered.’

‘Not an irrelevance,’ objected Spandrell. ‘Your scholarship wasn’t irrelevant; it was very much to the point, it was in harmony with you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have won it, you wouldn’t be here. I doubt if anything is really irrelevant. Everything that happens Jis intrinsically like the man it happens to.’

‘That’s a bit oracular, isn’t it?’ Philip objected. ‘Perceiving events, men distort them—put it like that—so that what happens seems to be like themselves.’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘There may be that sort of distortion. But I believe that events come ready-made to fit the people they happen to.’

‘What rot!’ said Illidge, disgustedly.

Philip dissented more politely. ‘But many people can be influenced by the same event in entirely different and characteristic ways.’

‘I know,’ Spandrell answered. ‘But in some indescribable way the event’s modified, qualitatively modified, so as to suit the character of each person involved in it. It’s a great mystery and a paradox.’

‘Not to say an absurdity and impossible,’ put in Illidge.

‘Absurd, then, and impossible,’ Spandrell agreed. ‘But all the same, I believe that’s how it happens. Why should things be logically explainable?’

‘Yes, why indeed? ‘ Walter echoed.

‘Still,’ said Philip, ‘your providence that makes the same event qualitatively different for different peopleisn’t that a bit thick?’

‘No thicker than our being here at all. No thicker than all this.’ With a wave of his hand he indicated the Belshazzaresque dining-room, the eaters, the plumcoloured waiters and the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy, who happened at that moment to be entering the room with the Professor of Poetry at the University of Cambridge.

But Philip was argumentatively persistent. ‘But assuming, as the scientists do, that the simplest hypothesis is the best—though I could never for the life of me see what justification, beyond human ineptitude, they had for doing so…’

‘Hear, hear.’

‘What justification?’ repeated Illidge. ‘Only the justification of observed fact, that’s all. It happens to be found experimentally that nature does do things in the simplest way.’

‘Or else,’ said Spandrell, ‘that human beings understand only the simplest explanations. In practice, you couldn’t distinguish between those alternatives.’

‘But if a thing has a simple, natural explanation, it can’t at the same time have a complicated supernatural one.’

‘Why not?’ asked Spandrell. ‘You mayn’t be able to understand or measure the supernatural forces behind the superficially natural ones (whatever the difference between natural and supernatural may be). But that doesn’t prove they’re not there. You’re simply raising your stupidity to the rank of a general law.’

Philip took the opportunity to continue his argument. ‘But assuming, all the same,’ he broke in before Illidge could speak again, ‘that the simpler explanation is likely to be the truer—aren’t the facts more simply explained by saying it’s the individual, with his history and character, who distorts the event into his own likeness? We can see individuals, but we can’t see providence; we have to postulate it. Isn’t it best, if we can do without it, to omit the superfluous postulate?’

‘But
is
it superfluous?’ said Spandrell. ‘_Can_ you cover the facts without it? I have my doubts. What about the malleable sort of people—and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born? What about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it’s the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of—what then? Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?’

‘Who decides whether a penny shall come down heads or tails?’ asked Illidge contemptuously.

‘But why bring in pennies?’ Spandrell retorted. ‘Why bring in pennies, when we’re talking about human beings? Consider yourself. Do you
feel
like a penny when things happen to you?’

‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Feelings have nothing to do with objective facts.’

‘But sensations have. Science is the rationalization of sense-perceptions. Why should one class of psychological intuitions be credited with scientific value and all others denied it? A direct intuition of providential action is just as likely to be a bit of information about objective facts as a direct intuition of blueness and hardness. And when things happen to one, one doesn’t feel like a penny. One feels that events are significant; that they’ve been arranged. Particularly when they occur in series. Tails a hundred times in succession, shall we say?’