Point Counter Point (8 page)

‘It’s good,’ he said again, when he had finished his exposition, and his tons was mournful; his face as he looked at his picture was sad. ‘But after all,’ he added, after a little pause and with a sudden explosion of voluntary laughter,’ after all, everything I do is good; damn good even.’ It was a bidding of defiance to the stupid critics who had seen a falling off in his later paintings; it was a challenge to his own past, to time and old age, to the real John Bidlake who had painted real Jenny and kissed her into silence.

‘Of course it’s good,’ said Lucy, and wondered why the old man’s painting had fallen off so much of late. This last exhibition—it was deplorable. He himself, after all, had remained so young, comparatively speaking. Though of course, she reflected, as she looked at him, he had certainly aged a good deal during the last few months.

‘Of course,’ he repeated. ‘That’s the right spirit.’

‘Though I must confess,’ Lucy added, to change the subject, ‘I always find your bathers rather an insult.’

‘An insult?’

‘Speaking as a woman, I mean. Do you really find us so profoundly silly as you paint us?’

‘Yes, do you?’ another voice enquired. ‘Do you really?’ It was an intense, emphatic voice, and the words came out in gushes, explosively, as though they were being forced through a narrow aperture under emotional pressure.

Lucy and John Bidlake turned and saw Mrs. Betterton, massive in dove grey, with arms, old Bidlake reflected, like thighs, and hair that was, in relation to the fleshy cheeks and chins, ridiculously short, curly and auburn. Her nose, which had tilted up so charmingly in the days when he had ridden the black horse and she the bay, was now preposterous, an absurd irrelevance in the middleaged face. Real Bidlake had ridden with her, just before he had painted these bathers. She had talked about art with a naive, schoolgirlish earnestness which he had found laughable and charming. He had cured her, he remembered, of a passion for Burne-Jones, but never, alas, of her prejudice in favour of virtue. It was with all the old earnestness and a certain significant sentimentality as of one who remembers old times and would like to exchange reminiscences as well as general ideas, that she now addressed him. Bidlake had to pretend that he was pleased to see her after all these years. It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her; he could not remember having spoken to her more than three or four times in all the quarter of a century which had turned Mary Betterton into a memento mori.

‘Dear Mrs. Betterton!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is delightful.’ But he disguised his repugnance very badly. And when she addressed him by his Christian name— ‘Now, John,’ she said, ‘you must give us an answer to our question,’ and she laid her hand on Lucy’s arm, so as to associate her in the demand—old Bidlake was positively indignant. Familiarity from a memento mori—it was intolerable. He’d give her a lesson. The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous. Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul. Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure. Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables. True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing. Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive. It was the same with women. He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality. It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts. He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane. When one is in high spirits, memento mori’s cease to remind.

‘John, you’re incorrigible,’ said Mrs. Betterton, indulgently. She turned to Lucy, smiling. ‘But he doesn’t mean a word he says.’

‘I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,’ objected Lucy. ‘I’ve noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.’

Old Bidlake laughed.

‘Because they’re the ones who know women most intimately.’

‘Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.’

‘But I assure you,’ Mrs. Betterton insisted, ‘he doesn’t mean it. I knew him before you were born, my dear.’

The gaiety went out of John Bidlake’s face. The memento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton’s flabby mask.

‘Perhaps he was different then,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose. We’re dangerous company, Uncle John. You ought to be careful.’

She had started one of Mrs. Betterton’s favourite hares. That lady dashed off in serious pursuit. ‘It’s the upbringing,’ she explained. ‘Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays. No wonder they’re cynical.’ She proceeded eloquently. Children were given too much, too early. They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle. ‘I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen’ she declared, with pride.

‘My poor dear lady!’

‘I began going when I was six,’ said Lucy.

‘And dances,’ Mrs. Betterton continued. ‘The hunt ball—what an excitement! Because it only happened once a year.’ She quoted Shakespeare.

‘Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,

Since seldom coming, in the long year set,

Like stones of worth they thinly placed….

‘They’re a row of pearls nowadays.’

‘And false ones at that,’ said Lucy.

Mrs. Betterton was triumphant. ‘False ones-you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t “blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure” by daily wear. Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age. A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.’

‘And what’s your remedy? ‘ enquired John Bidlake. ‘If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,’ he added ironically.

‘Naughty!’ cried Mrs. Betterton with an appalling playfulness. Then, becoming serious, ‘The remedy,’ she went on, ‘is fewer diversions.’

‘But I don’t want them fewer,’ objected John Bidlake. ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘they must be strongerprogressively.’

‘Progressively?’ Mrs. Betterton repeated. ‘But where would that sort of progress end?’

‘In bull fighting?’ suggested John Bidlake. ‘Or gladiatorial shows? Or public executions, perhaps? Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade? Where?’

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?’

Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.

‘I think it’s detestable,’ Polly was saying—and her face was flushed with anger, ‘to make war on the poor.’

‘But the Freemen don’t make war on the poor.’

‘They do.’

‘They don’t,’ said Hugo. ‘Read Webley’s speeches.’

‘I only read about his actions.’

‘But they’re in accordance with his words.’

‘They are not.’

‘They are. All he’s opposed to is dictatorship of a class.’

‘Of the poor class.’

‘Of any class,’ Hugo earnestly insisted. ‘That’s his whole point. The classes must be equally strong. A strong working class clamouring for high wages keeps the professional middle class active.’

‘Like fleas on a dog,’ suggested Polly and laughed with a return towards good humour. When a ludicrous thought occurred to her she could never prevent herself from giving utterance to it, even when she was supposed to be serious, or, as in this case, in a rage.

‘They’ve jolly well got to be inventive and progressive,’ Hugo continued, struggling with the difficulties of lucid exposition. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to pay the workers what they demand and make a profit for themselves. And at the same time a strong and intelligent middle class is good for the workers, because they get good leadership and good organization. Which means better wages and peace and happiness.’

‘Amen,’ said Polly.

‘So the dictatorship of one class is nonsense,’ continued Hugo. ‘Webley wants to keep all the classes and strengthen them. He wants them to live in a condition of tension, so that the state is balanced by each pulling as hard as it can its own way. Scientists say that the different organs of the body are like that. They live in a state—’ he hesitated, he blushed—’of hostile symbiosis.’

‘Golly!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo apologized.

‘All the same,’ said Polly, ‘he doesn’t want to allow men to strike.’

‘Because strikes are stupid.’

‘He’s against democracy.’

‘Because it allows such awful people to get power. He wants the best to rule.’

‘Himself, for example,’ said Polly sarcastically.

‘Well, why not? If you knew what a wonderful chap he was.’ Hugo became enthusiastic. He had been acting as one of Webley’s aides-de-camp for the last three months. ‘I never met anyone like him,’ he said.

Polly listened to his outpourings with a smile. She felt old and superior. At school she herself had felt and talked like that about the domestic economy mistress. All the same, she liked him for being so loyal.

A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers—it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake’s imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance. The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas—yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.

The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, towards the floor. But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night. He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky. Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cockatoos, up through the perennial mist of London, into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke. He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise. That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left-it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon. And all these voices (what were they saying? ‘… made an excellent speech…’; ‘… no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you’ve tried them…’; ‘… such a bore…’; ‘… eloped with the chauffeur…’), all these voices—how exquisite and tiny they’d be up there! But meanwhile down here, in the jungle… Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous.

Looking over the heads of the people who surrounded him, he saw Frank Illidge, alone, leaning against a pillar. His attitude, his smile were Byronic, at once world-weary and contemptuous; he glanced about him with a languid amusement, as though he were watching the drolleries of a group of monkeys. Unfortunately, Walter reflected, as he made his way through the crowd towards him, poor Illidge hadn’t the right physique for being Byronically superior. Satirical romantics should be long, slow-moving, graceful and handsome. Illidge was small, alert and jerky. And what a comic face! Like a street Arab’s, with its upturned nose and wide slit of a mouth; a very intelligent, sharp-witted street Arab’s face, but not exactly one to be languidly contemptuous with. Besides, who can be superior with freckles? Illidge’s complexion was sandy with them. Protectively coloured, the sandy-brown eyes, the sandyorange eyebrows and lashes disappeared, at a little distance, into the skin, as a lion dissolves into the desert. From across a room his face seemed featureless and unregarding, like the face of a statue carved out of a block of sandstone. Poor Illidge! The Byronic part made him look rather ridiculous.

‘Hullo,’ said Walter, as he got within speaking distance. The two young men shook hands. ‘How’s science?’ What a silly question! thought Walter as he pronounced the words.

Illidge shrugged his shoulders. ‘Less fashionable than the arts, to judge by this party.’ He looked round him. ‘I’ve seen half the writing and painting section of Who’s Who this evening. The place fairly stinks of art.’

‘Isn’t that rather a comfort for science?’ said Walter. ‘The arts don’t enjoy being fashionable.’

‘Oh, don’t they! Why are you here, then?’

‘Why indeed?’ Walter parried the question with a laugh. He looked round, wondering where Lucy could have gone. He had not caught sight of her since the music stopped.

‘You’ve come to do your tricks and have your head patted,’ said Illidge, trying to get a little of his own back; the memory of that slip on the stairs, of Lady Edward’s lack of interest in newts, of the military gentlemen’s insolence, still rankled. ‘Just look at that girl there with the frizzy dark hair, in cloth of silver. The one like a little white negress. What about her, for example? It’d be pleasant to have one’s head patted by that sort of thing—eh?’

‘Well, would it?’

Illidge laughed. ‘You take the high philosophical line, do you? But, my dear chap, admit it’s all humbug I take it myself, so I ought to know. To tell you the honest truth, I envy you art-mongers your success. It makes me really furious when I see some silly, halfwitted little writer…’

‘Like me, for example.’

‘No, you’re a cut above most of them,’ conceded Illidge. ‘But when I see some wretched little scribbler with a tenth of my intelligence, making money and being cooed over, while I’m disregarded, I do get furious sometimes.’

‘You ought to regard it as a compliment. If they coo over us, it’s because they can understand, more or less, what we’re after. They can’t understand you; you’re above them. Their neglect is a compliment to your mind.’