Point Counter Point (54 page)

Elinor halted in front of one tall plant whose first flower-bells were on a level with her eyes. The red flesh of the petals was cool and resilient between her fingers. She peeped into the open bell-mouth.

‘Think of the discomfort of having freckles in one’s throat,’ she said. ‘Not to mention little beetles.’

They moved away in silence through the trees. It was Everard who first spoke.

‘Will you ever love me?’ he asked suddenly.

‘You know how fond I am of you, Everard.’ Her heart sank; the moment had come, he would want to kiss her. But he made no gesture, only laughed, rather mournfully.

‘Very fond of me,’ he repeated. ‘Ah, if only you could be a little less reasonable, a little more insane If only you knew what loving was!’

‘Isn’t it a good thing somebody should be sane? ‘ said Elinor. ‘Sane beforehand, I mean. For everybody can be sane afterwards. Much too sane, when the fit’s over and the lovers begin to wonder whether, after all, the world
was
well lost. Think, Everard, think first. Do you want to lose the world?’

‘I shouldn’t lose it,’ Everard answered, and his voice had that strange thrilling vibration which she seemed to hear, not with her ears, but with her body, in the very midriff. ‘They couldn’t take it away from me. Times have changed since Parnell’s day. Besides I’m not Parnell. Let them try to take it away!’ He laughed. ‘Love and the world—I’m going to have both, Elinor. Both.’ He smiled down at her, the power-lover triumphant.

‘You’re asking too much,’ she answered laughing, ‘you’re greedy.’ The exultation tingled again through her, was like the breath-taking warmth of hot wine.

He bent down and kissed her. Elinor did not shrink.

Another car had pulled up at the roadside, another couple strolled along the green path into the wood. Through the glaring pink and white of her cosmetics the woman’s face was old; the weary flesh had sagged out of its once charming shape.

‘Oh, isn’t it lovely!’ she kept exclaiming as she walked along, carrying her heavy body rather unsteadily on very high-heeled shoes over the uneven ground. ‘Isn’t it lovely!’

Spandrell—for it was he—did not answer.

‘Pick me some of that honeysuckle there!’ she begged.

He pulled down a flowered spray with the crook of his stick. Through the reek of chemical perfumery and not very clean underlinen the scent of the flowers came cool and delicious to his nostrils.

‘Don’t they smell simply divine!’ she exclaimed, rapturously sniffing. ‘Too divine!’

The corners of Spandrell’s mouth twitched into a smile. It amused him to hear the cast-off locutions of duchesses in the mouth of this ageing prostitute. He looked at her. Poor Connie! She
was
a skeleton at the feast—more gruesomely deathly for being covered with so much loose and sagging flesh. Really gruesome. There was no other word. Here, in the sun, she was like a piece of stage scenery seen by daylight and from close at hand. That was why he had gone to the expense of hiring the Daimler and taking her out—just because the poor superannuated punk was so gruesome. He nodded. ‘Quite nice,’ he said. ‘But I prefer your scent.’

They walked on. A little uncertain already of the distinction between a second and a minor third, a cuckoo was calling. In the slanting corridors of sunlight tunnelled through the green and purple of the forest shadows the little flies jerkily danced and zigzagged. There was no wind, the leaves hung down heavy with greenness. The trees were as though gorged with sap and sunshine.

‘Lovely, lovely,’ was Connie’s refrain. The place, the day reminded her, she said, of her childhood in the country. She sighed.

‘And you wish you’d been a good girl,’ said Spandrell sarcastically. ‘“The roses round the door make me love mother more.” I know, I know.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What I hate about trees in the summer,’ he went on, ‘is their beastly fat complacency. Bulging—that’s what they are; like bloated great profiteers. Bulging with insolence, passive insolence.’

‘Oh, the foxgloves!’ cried Connie, who hadn’t even been listening. She ran towards them, grotesquely unsteady on her high heels. Spandrell followed her.

‘Pleasingly phallic,’ he said, fingering one of the spikes of unopened buds. And he went on to develop the conceit, profusely.

‘Oh, be quiet, be quiet,’ cried Connie. ‘How can you say such things?’ She was outraged, wounded. ‘How can you—here?’

‘In God’s country,’ he mocked. ‘How can I?’ And raising his stick he suddenly began to lay about him right and left, slash, slash, breaking one of the tall proud plants at every stroke. The ground was strewn with murdered flowers.

‘Stop, stop!’ She caught at his arm. Silently laughing, Spandrell wrenched himself away from her and went on beating down the plants. ‘Stop! Please! Oh, don’t, don’t.’ She made another dash at him. Still laughing, still laying about him with his stick, Spandrell dodged away from her.

‘Down with them,’ he shouted, ‘down with them.’ Flower after flower fell under his strokes. ‘There!’ he said at last, breathless with laughter and running and slashing. ‘There!’ Connie was in tears.

‘How could you?’ she said ‘How could you do it?’

He laughed again, silently, throwing back his head. ‘Serve them right,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m going to sit still and let myself be insulted? The insolence of the brutes! Ah, there’s another!’ He stepped across the glade to where one last tall foxglove stood as though hiding among the hazel saplings. One stroke was enough. The broken plant fell almost noiselessly.

‘Damn their insolence! It serves them right. Let’s come back to the car.’

Rachel Quarles had no sympathy with those sentiA mental philanthropists who blur the distinction between right and wrong, between wrong-doers and the righteous. Criminals, in her eyes, and not the society in which they lived, were responsible for their crimes. Sinners committed their own sins; their environment did not do it for them. There were excuses, of course, palliations, extenuating circumstances. But good was always good, bad remained bad. There were circumstances in which the choice of good was very difficult; but it was always the individual who made the choice and who, having made, must answer for it. Mrs. Quarles, in a word, was a Christian and not a humanitarian. As a Christian she thought that Marjorie had done wrong to leave her husband—even such a husband as Carling—for another man. She disapproved the act, but did not presume to judge the person, the more so since, in spite of what she had done, Marjorie’s heart and head were still, from Mrs. Quarles’s Christian point of view, ‘in the right place.’ Rachel found it easier to like a person who had acted wrongly, while continuing to think rightly, than one who, like her daughter-in-law, Elinor, thought wrongly, while acting, so far as she knew, in a manner entirely blameless. There were circumstances, too, in which wrong action seemed to her almost less reprehensible than wrong thought. It was not that she had any sympathy for hypocrisy. The person who thought and spoke well while consistently and consciously acting ill was detestable to her. Such people, however, are rare. Most of those who do wrong, in spite of their sound beliefs, do so in a moment of weakness and afterwards regret their wrongdoing. But the person who thinks wrongly does not admit the wrongness of bad actions. He sees no reason why he should not commit them or why, having committed them, he should repent and mend his ways. And even if he in fact behaves virtuously, he may be the means, by his wrong thinking, of leading others into wrong action.

‘An admirable woman,’ had been John Bidlake’s verdict; ‘but rather too fond of fig-leaves—especially over the mouth.’

Herself, Rachel Quarles was only conscious of being a Christian. She could never imagine how people contrived to live without being Christians. But a great many, she sadly had to admit, did so contrive. Almost all the young people of her acquaintance. ‘It’s as though one’s children talked a different languages’ she had once complained to an old friend.

In Marjorie Carling she discovered someone who spoke and understood her own spiritual idiom.

‘You’ll find her, I’m afraid, a bit of a bore,’ Philip had warned her, when he announced his intention of lending his little house at Chamford to Walter and Marjorie. ‘But be nice to her, all the same. She deserves it, poor woman. She’s had a very thin time of it.’ And he detailed a story that made his mother sigh to listen to.

‘I shouldn’t have expected Walter Bidlake to be like that,’ she said.

‘But in these matters one doesn’t expect anything of anybody. Things happen to them, that’s all. They don’t do them.’

Mrs. Quarles did not answer. She was thinking of the time when she had first discovered one of Sidney’s infidelities. The astonishment, the pain, the humiliation…. ‘But still,’ she said aloud, ‘one wouldn’t have thought he’d knowingly have made somebody unhappy.’

‘Still less that he’d knowingly have made himself unhappy. And yet I think he’s really made himself quite as wretched as Marjorie. Perhaps that’s his chief justification.’

His mother sighed. ‘It all seems so extraordinarily unnecessary.’

Mrs. Quarles called on Marjorie almost as soon as she had settled in.

‘Come and see me often,’ she said, as she took her leave. ‘Because I like you,’ she added, with a sudden smile, for which poor Marjorie was quite pathetically grateful. It wasn’t often that people liked her. That she had fallen so deeply in love with Walter was due, above everything, to his having been one of the few people who had ever shown any interest in her. ‘And I hope you like me,’ Mrs. Quarles added.

Marjorie could only blush and stammer. But she already adored.

Rachel Quarles had spoken in all sincerity. She did like Marjorie—liked her, even, for the very defects which made other people find her such a bore; for her stupidity—it was so good and well-meaning; for her lack of humour—it was the mark of such earnestness. Even those intellectual pretensions, those deep or informative remarks dropped portentously out of a meditative silence, did not displease her. Mrs. Quarles recognized in them the rather absurd symptoms of a genuine love of the good, the true and the beautiful, of a genuine desire for self-improvement.

At their third meeting Marjorie confided all her story. Mrs. Quarles’s comments were sensible and Christian. ‘There’s no miraculous cure for these things,’ she said; ‘no patent medicine for unhappiness. Only the old dull virtues, patience, resignation and the rest; and the old consolation, the old source of strength—old, but not dull. There’s nothing less dull than God. But most young people won’t believe me when I tell them so, even though they’re bored to death with jazz bands and dancing.’

Marjorie’s first adoration was confirmed and increased—increased so much, indeed, that Mrs. Quarles felt quite ashamed, as though she had extorted something on false pretences, as though she had fraudulently acted a part.

‘You’re such a wonderful help and comfort,’ Marjorie declared.

‘No, I’m not,’ she answered almost angrily. ‘The truth is that you were lonely and unhappy and I was conveniently there at the right moment.’

Marjorie protested; but the older woman would not permit herself to be praised or thanked.

They talked a good deal about religion. Carling had given Marjorie a horror for all that was picturesque or formal in Christianity. Piran of Peranzabuloe, vestments, ceremonials—everything remotely connected with a saint, a rite, a tradition was hateful to her. But she preserved a vague inchoate faith in what she regarded as the essentials; she had retained from girlhood a certain habit of Christian feeling and thought. Under the influence of Rachel Quarles the faith became more definite, the habitual emotions were reinforced.

‘I feel so enormously much happier since I’ve been here, with you,’ she announced hardly more than a week after her arrival.

‘It’s because you’re not trying to be happy or wondering why you should have been made unhappy, because you’ve stopped thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That’s the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,’ Mrs. Quarles went on; ‘they never think of life except in terms of happiness. How shall I have a good time? That’s the question they ask. Or they complain. Why am I not having a better time? But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it’s inevitably a disappointment—for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it’s been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody’s happy. It’s because they’re on the wrong road. The question they ought to be asking themselves isn’t: Why aren’t we happy, and how shall we have a good time? It’s: How can we please God, and why aren’t we better? If people asked themselves those questions and answered them to the best of their ability in practice, they’d achieve happiness without ever thinking about it. For it’s not by pursuing happiness that you find it; it’s by pursuing salvation. And when people were wise, instead of merely clever, they thought of life in terms of salvation and damnation, not of good times and bad times. If you’re feeling happy now, Marjorie, that’s because you’ve stopped wishing you were happy and started trying to be better. Happiness is like coke—something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.’

At Gattenden, meanwhile, the days passed gloomily.

‘Why don’t you do a little painting?’ Mrs. Bidlake suggested to her husband on the morning that followed his arrival.

Old John shook his head.

‘You’d enjoy it so much once you started,’ coaxed Elinor.

But her father would not allow himself to be persuaded. He didn’twant to paint, precisely because painting would have been so enjoyable. His very dread of pain, sickness and death made him perversely refuse to let his mind be distracted from their abhorred contemplation. It was as though some part of him obscurely desired to accept defeat and misery, were anxious to make abjection yet more abject. His courage, his Gargantuan power, his careless high spirits had been the fruits of a deliberate and lifelong ignorance. But now that to ignore was no longer possible, now that the enemy was installed in his very vitals, the virtue had gone out of him. He was afraid and could not conceal his terrors. He no longer even desired to conceal them. He somehow wanted to be abject. And abject he was. Mrs. Bidlake and Elinor did their best to rouse him from the apathetic misery in which he spent the greater part of his days at Gattenden. But he would not be roused except to complain and occasionally fly into a querulous rage.