Point Counter Point (9 page)

‘Perhaps; but it’s a damned insult to my body.’ Illidge was painfully conscious of his appearance. He knew that he was ugly and looked undistinguished. And knowing, he liked to remind himself of the unpleasant fact, like a man with an aching tooth, who is for ever fingering the source of his pain, just to make sure it is still painful. ‘If I looked like that enormous lout, Webley, they wouldn’t neglect me, even if my mind were like Newton’s. The fact is,’ he said, giving the aching tooth a good tug this time, ‘ I look like an anarchist. You’re lucky, you know. You look like a gentleman, or at least like an artist. You’ve no idea what a nuisance it is to look like an intellectual of the lower classes.’ The tooth was responding excruciatingly; he pulled at it the harder. ‘It’s not merely that the women neglect you—these women, at any rate. That’s bad enough. But the police refuse to neglect you; they take a horrid inquisitive interest. Would you believe it, I’ve been twice arrested, simply because I look like the sort of man who makes infernal machines.’

‘It’s a good story,’ said Walter sceptically.

‘But true, I swear. Once it was in this country. Near Chesterfield. They were having a coal strike. I happened to be looking on at a fight between strikers and blacklegs. The police didn’t like my face and grabbed me. It took me hours to get out of their clutches. The other time was in Italy. Somebody had just been trying to blow up Mussolini, I believe. Anyhow, a gang of black-shirted bravoes made me get out of the train at Genoa and searched me from top to toe. Intolerable! Simply because of my subversive face.’

‘Which corresponds, after all, to your ideas.’

‘Yes, but a face isn’t evidence, a face isn’t a crime. Well yes,’ he added parenthetically,’ perhaps some faces are crimes. Do you know General Knoyle? ‘ Walter nodded. ‘His is a capital offence. Nothing short of hanging would do for a man like that. God! how I’d like to kill them all!’ Had he not slipped on the stairs and been snubbed by a stupid man-butcher?’How I loathe the rich! Loathe them! Don’t you think they’re horrible?’

‘More horrible than the poor?’ The recollection of Wetherington’s sickroom made him almost at once feel rather ashamed of the question.

‘Yes, yes. There’s something peculiarly base and ignoble and diseased about the rich. Money breeds a kind of gangrened insensitiveness. It’s inevitable. Jesus understood. That bit about the camel and the needle’s eye is a mere statement of fact. And remember that other bit about loving your neighbours. You’ll be thinking I’m a Christian at this rate,’ he added with parenthetic apology. ‘But honour where honour is due. The man had sense; he saw what was what. Neighbourliness is the touchstone that shows up the rich. The rich haven’t got any neighbours.’

‘But, damn it, they’re not anchorites.’

‘But they have no neighbours in the sense that the poor have neighbours. When my mother had to go out, Mrs. Cradock from next door on the right kept an eye on us children. And my mother did the same for Mrs. Cradock when it was her turn to go out. And when somebody had broken a leg, or lost his job, people helped with money and food. And how well I remember, as a little boy, being sent running round the village after the nurse, because young Mrs. Foster from next door on the left had suddenly been taken with birth pains before she expected! When you live on less than four pounds a week, you’ve damned well got to behave like a Christian and love your neighbour. To begin with, you can’t get away from him; he’s practically in your back-yard. There can be no refined and philosophical ignoring of his existence. You must either hate or love; and on the whole you’d better make a shift to love, because you may need his help in emergencies and he may need yours—so urgently, very often, that there can be no question of refusing to give it. And since you must give, since, if you’re a human being, you can’t help giving, it’s better to make an effort to like the person you’ve anyhow got to give to.’

Walter nodded. ‘Obviously.’

‘But you rich,’ the other went on, ‘you have no real neighbours. You never perform a neighbourly action or expect your neighbours to do you a kindness in return. It’s unnecessary. You can pay people to look after you. You can hire servants to simulate kindness for three pounds a month and board. Mrs. Cradock from next door doesn’t have to keep an eye on your babies when you go out. You have nurses and governesses doing it for money. No, you’re generally not even aware of your neighbours. You live at a distance from them. Each of you is boxed up in his own secret house. There may be tragedies going on behind the shutters; but the people next door don’t know anything about it.’

‘Thank God!’ ejaculated Walter.

‘Thank him by all means. Privacy’s a great luxury. Very pleasant, I agree. But you pay for luxuries. People aren’t moved by misfortunes they don’t know about. Ignorance is insensitive bliss. In a poor street misfortune can’t be hidden. Life’s too public. People have their neighbourly feeling kept in constant training. But the rich never have a chance of being neighbourly to their equals. The best they can do is to feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind. Horrible! And that’s when they’re doing their best. When they’re at their worst, they’re like this.’ He indicated the crowded room. ‘They’re Lady Edward —the lowest hell! They’re that daughter of hers….’ He made a grimace, he shrugged his shoulders.

Walter listened with a strained and agonized attention.

‘Damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted,’ Illidge went on like a denouncing prophet. He had only once spoken to Lucy Tantamount, casually, for a moment. She had seemed hardly to notice that he was there.

It was true, Walter was thinking. She was all that people enviously or disapprovingly called her, and yet the most exquisite and marvellous of beings. Knowing all, he could listen to anything that might be said about her. And the more atrocious the words the more desperately he loved her. Credo quia absurdum. Amo quia turpe, quia indignum….

‘What a putrefaction!’ Illidge continued grandiloquently. ‘The consummate flower of this charming civilization of ours—that’s what she is. A refined and perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal. The logical conclusion, so far as most people are concerned, of having money and leisure.’

Walter listened, his eyes shut, thinking of Lucy. ‘A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.’ The words were true and an excruciation; but he loved her all the more because of the torment and because of the odious truth.

‘Well,’ said Illidge in a changed voice, ‘I must go and see if the Old Man wants to go on working to-night. We don’t generally knock off before halfpast one or two. It’s rather pleasant living upside down like this. Sleeping till lunch-time, starting work after tea. Very pleasant, really.’ He held out his hand.’So long.’

‘We must dine together one evening,’ said Walter without much conviction. Illidge nodded.

‘Let’s fix it up one of these days,’ he said and was gone.

Walter edged his way through the crowd, searching.

Everard Webley had got Lord Edward into a corner and was trying to persuade him to support the British Freemen.

‘But I’m not interested in politics,’ the Old Man huskily protested. ‘I’m not interested in politics….’ Obstinately, mulishly, he repeated the phrase, whatever Webley might say.

Webley was eloquent. Men of good will, men with a stake in the country ought to combine to resist the forces of destruction. It was not only property that was menaced, not only the material interests of a class; it was the English tradition, it was personal initiative, it was intelligence, it was all natural distinction of any kind. The Freemen were banded to resist the dictatorship of the stupid; they were armed to protect individuality from the mass man, the mob; they were fighting for the recognition of natural superiority in every sphere. The enemies were many and busy.

But forewarned was forearmed; when you saw the bandits approaching, you formed up in battle order and drew your swords. (Webley had a weakness for swords; he wore one when the Freemen paraded, his speeches were full of them, his house bristled with panoplies.) Organization, discipline, force were necessary. The battle could no longer be fought constitutionally. Parliamentary methods were quite adequate when the two parties agreed about fundamentals and disagreed only about trifling details. But where fundamental principles were at stake, you couldn’t allow politics to go on being treated as a Parliamentary game. You had to resort to direct action or the threat of it.

‘I was five years in Parliament,’ said Webley. ‘Long enough to convince myself that there’s nothing to be done in these days by Parliamentarism. You might as well try to talk a fire out. England can only be saved by direct action. When it’s saved we can begin to think about Parliament again. (Something very unlike the present ridiculous collection of mob-elected rich men it’ll have to be.) Meanwhile, there’s nothing for it but to prepare for fighting. And preparing for fighting, we may conquer peacefully. It’s the only hope. Believe me, Lord Edward, it’s the only hope.’

Harassed, like a bear in a pit set upon by dogs, Lord Edward turned uneasily this way and that, pivoting his bent body from the loins. ‘But I’m not interested in pol…’ He was too agitated to be able to finish the word.

‘But even if you’re not interested in politics,’ Webley persuasively continued, ‘you must be interested in your fortune, your position, the future of your family. Remember, all those things will go down in the general destruction.’

‘Yes, but… No….’ Lord Edward was growing desperate

‘I… I’m not interested in money.’

Once, years before, the head of the firm of solicitors to whom he left the entire management of his affairs, had called, in spite of Lord Edward’s express injunction that he was never to be troubled with matters of business, to consult his client about a matter of investments. There were some eighty thousand pounds to be disposed of. Lord Edward was dragged from the fundamental equations of the statics of living systems. When he learned the frivolous cause of the interruption, the ordinarily mild Old Man became unrecognizably angry. Mr. Figgis, whose voice was loud and whose manner confident, had been used, in previous interviews, to having things all his own way. Lord Edward’s fury astonished and appalled him. It was as though, in his rage, the Old Man had suddenly thrown back atavistically to the feudal past, had remembered that he was a Tantamount, talking to a hired servant. He had given orders; they had been disobeyed and his privacy unjustifiably disturbed. It was insufferable. If this sort of thing should ever happen again, he would transfer his affairs to another solicitor. And with that he wished Mr. Figgis a very good afternoon.

‘I’m not interested in money,’ he now repeated.

Illidge, who had approached and was hovering in the neighbourhood, waiting for an opportunity to address the Old Man, overheard the remark and exploded with inward laughter. ‘These rich! ‘ he thought. ‘These bloody rich!’ They were all the same.

‘But if not for your own sake,’ Webley insisted, attacking from another quarter, ‘for the sake of civilization, of progress.’

Lord Edward started at the word. It touched a trigger, it released a flood of energy. ‘Progress! he echoed, and the tone of misery and embarrassment was exchanged for one of confidence. ‘Progress! You politicians are always talking about it. As though it were going to last. Indefinitely. More motors, more babies, more food, more advertising, more money, more everything, for ever. You ought to take a few lessons in my subject. Physical biology. Progress, indeed! What do you propose to do about phosphorus, for example? ‘ His question was a personal accusation.

‘But all this is entirely beside the point,’ said Webley impatiently.

‘On the contrary,’ retorted Lord Edward, ‘ it’s the only point.’ His voice had become loud and severe. He spoke with a much more than ordinary degree of coherence. Phosphorus had made a new man of him; he felt very strongly about phosphorus and, feeling strongly, he was strong. The worried bear had become the worrier. ‘With your intensive agriculture,’ he went on, ‘you’re simply draining the soil of phosphorus. More than half of one per cent. a year. Going clean out of circulation. And then the way you throw away hundreds of thousands of tons of phosphorus pentoxide in your sewage! Pouring it into the sea. And you call that progress. Your modern sewage systems!’ His tone was witheringly scornful. ‘You ought to be putting it back where it came from. On the land.’ Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned. ‘On the land, I tell you.’

‘But all this has nothing to do with me,’ protested Webley.

‘Then it ought to,’ Lord Edward answered sternly. ‘That’s the trouble with you politicians. You don’t even think of the important things. Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea. It’s idiotic, it’s criminal, it’s… it’s fiddling while Rome is burning.’ He saw Webley opening his mouth to speak and made haste to anticipate what he imagined was going to be his objection. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks. But what’ll you do when the deposits are exhausted? ‘ He poked Everard in the shirt front. ‘What then? Only two hundred years and they’ll be finished. You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre—squander them all. That’s your policy. And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions.’

‘But damn it all,’ said Webley, half angry, half amused, ‘your phosphorus can wait. This other danger’s imminent. Do you want a political and social revolution?’

‘Will it reduce the population and check production?’ asked Lord Edward.

‘Of course.’

‘Then certainly I want a revolution.’ The Old Man thought in terms of geology and was not afraid of logical conclusions. ‘Certainly.’ Illidge could hardly contain his laughter.

‘Well, if that’s your view…’ began Webley; but Lord Edward interrupted him.

‘The only result of your progress,’ he said, ‘ will be that in a few generations there ‘II be a real revolutiona natural, cosmic revolution. You’re upsetting the equilibrium. And in the end, nature will restore it. And the process will be very uncomfortable for you. Your decline will be as quick as your rise. Quicker, because you’ll be bankrupt, you’ll have squandered your capital. It takes a rich man a little time to realize all his resources. But when they’ve all been realized, it takes him almost no time to starve.’