Wandering through the garden in her endless crusade against weeds, Mrs. Bidlake halted for a moment behind him and looked over his shoulder.
‘Admirable,’ she said, as much in comment on her husband’s activity as on its pictorial results.
She moved away and, having uprooted a dandelion, paused and, with eyes shut, began to repeat her own name, ‘Janet Bidlake, Janet Bidlake, Janet Bidlake,’ again and again, until the syllables had lost all significance for her and had become as mysterious, meaningless and arbitrary as the words of a necromancer’s spell. Abracadabra, Janet Bidlake—was she really herself? did she even exist? and the trees? and people? this moment and the past? everything….?
Meanwhile, in the nursery, an extraordinary thing had happened. Suddenly and without warning, little Phil had opened his eyes and looked about him. They met his mother’s. As well as his twisted face would permit him, he smiled.
‘But he can see!’ cried Elinor. And kneeling down by the bed, she put her arms round the child and began to kiss him with a love that was quickened by an outburst of passionate gratitude. After all these days of squinting blindness, she was thankful to him, she was profoundly grateful for that look of answering intelligence in his eyes, that poor twisted essay at a smile. ‘My darling,’ she repeated and, for the first time for days, she began to cry. She averted her face, so that the child should not see her tears, got up and walked away from the bed. ‘Too stupid,’ she said apologetically to her husband, as she wiped her eyes. ‘But I can’t help it.’
‘I’m hungry,’ said little Phil suddenly.
Elinor was down on her knees again beside the bed. ‘What would you like to eat, my darling?’ But the child did not hear her question.
‘I’m hungry,’ he repeated.
‘He’s still deaf,’ said Philip.
‘But he can see again, he can speak.’ Elinor’s face was transfigured. She had known all the time, in spite of everything, that it was impossible he shouldn’t get well. Quite impossible. And now she was being proved right. ‘Stay here,’ she went on. ‘I’ll run and get some milk.’ She hurried out of the room.
Philip remained at the bedside. He stroked the child’s hand and smiled. Little. Phil smiled back. He too began to believe that there really might have been a miracle.
‘Draw me something,’ the child commanded.
Philip pulled out his fountain pen and, on the back of an old letter, scribbled one of those landscapes full of elephants and airships, trains and flying pigs and steamers, for which his son had’such a special partiality. An elephant came into collision with a train. Feebly, but with a manifest enjoyment, little Phil began to laugh. There could be no doubt of it; the miracle had really happened.
Elinor returned with some milk and a plate of jelly. There was colour in her cheeks, her eyes were bright and the face which, all these days, had been drawn and rigidly set had in a moment recovered all its mobility of expression. It was as though she had suddenly come to life again.
‘Come and look at the elephants,’ said little Phil. ‘So funny!’ And between each sip of milk, each spoonful of jelly, Philip had to show him the latest additions to his crowded landscape—whales in the sea, and divers being pinched by lobsters, two submarines fighting and a hippopotamus in a balloon; a volcano in eruption, cannons, a lighthouse, a whole army of pigs.
‘Why don’t you ever say anything?’ the child suddenly asked.
They looked at one another. ‘He can’t hear us,’ said Philip.
Elinor’s expression of happiness was momentarily clouded. ‘Perhaps to-morrow,’ she said. ‘If the blindness has gone to-day why shouldn’t he hear to-morrow?’
‘Why do you whisper?’ said the child. The only answer she could make was to kiss him and stroke his forehead.
‘We mustn’t tire him,’ said Elinor at last. ‘I think he ought to go to sleep.’ She shook up his pillow, she smoothed the sheets, she bent over him. ‘Goodbye, my little darling.’ He could answer at least to her smile.
Elinor drew the curtains and they tiptoed out. In the passage she turned and waited for her husband to come up to her. Philip put his arm round her and she pressed herself against him with a great sigh.
‘I was beginning to be afraid,’ she said, ‘that the nightmare was going on for ever. To the end.’
Luncheon that day was like a festival of resurrection, an Easter sacrament. Elinor was unfrozen, a woman of flesh again, not of stone. And poor Miss Fulkes, in whom the symptoms of misery had been identical with those of a very bad cold in the head accompanied by pimples, reassumed an almost human appearance and was moved to all but hysterical laughter by the jokes and anecdotes of the resuscitated John Bidlake. The old man had come in, rubbing his hands.
‘What a landscape!’ he exclaimed as he took his seat.’so juicy, so succulent, if you know what I mean, so fleshy—there’s no other word. It makes one’s mouth water to look at it. Perhaps that’s why I’m so ravenously hungry.’
‘Here’s your broth,’ said Mrs. Bidlake.
‘But you can’t expect me to do a morning’s painting on slops!’ And in spite of protests, he insisted on eating a cutlet.
The news that little Phil was better increased his satisfaction. (He touched wood three times with both hands at once.) Besides, he was really very fond of his grandchild. He began to talk, and it was the old Gargantuan Bidlake who spoke. Miss Fulkes laughed so violently at one of his anecdotes about Whistler that she choked and had to hide her face in her napkin. In the vague benevolence even of Mrs. Bidlake’s smile there was a hint of something like hilarity.
At about three o’clock John Bidlake began to feel a familiar discomfort, growing momently more acute, in the region of his midriff. He was shaken by spasmodic hiccoughs. He tried to go on painting; but all his pleasure in the work had evaporated. Diana’s breasts and the angel’s hind-quarters had lost all their charm for him. ‘A slight obstruction at the pylorus.’ Sir Herbert’s medical phrases re-echoed in his memory. ‘The contents of the stomach…a certain difficulty in passing into the duodenum.’ After a particularly violent hiccough, he put down his brushes and walked into the house to lie down.
‘Where’s father?’ Elinor enquired, when she came down to tea.
Mrs. Bidlake shook her head. ‘He’s not feeling very well again.’
‘Oh, dear.’
There was a silence, and it was as though death were suddenly in the room with them. But, after all, he was old, Elinor reflected; the thing was inevitable. He might be worse, but little Phil was better; and that was all that really mattered. She began to talk to her mother about the garden. Philip lighted a cigarette.
There was a knock at the door. It was the housemaid with a message from Nurse Butler: would they please come up at once.
The convulsions had been very violent; the wasted body was without strength. By the time they reached the nursery, little Phil was dead.
CHAPTER XXXVI
The Webley Mystery, as the papers lost no time in calling it, was complete. There was no clue. At the offices of the British Freemen nobody knew anything. Webley had left at the usual hour and by his usual mode of conveyance. He was not in the habit of talking to his subordinates about his private affairs; nobody had been told where he was going. And outside the office nobody had observed the car from the time Webley had told his chauffeur he could go and the time when the policeman in St. James’s Square began to wonder, at about midnight, how much longer it was going to be left there unattended. Nobody had noticed the car being parked, nobody had remarked the driver as he left it. The only finger-prints on the paintwork and the steering wheel were those of the dead man. The person who drove the car after the murder had evidently worn gloves. No, there was no clue. Direct evidence was absolutely lacking. The police did what they could with the indirect. The fact that the body had not been robbed seemed obviously to point to a political motive for the crime. At the offices of the British Freemen reposed a whole collection of threatening letters.
Webley received two or three of them every week. ‘They’re my favourite reading,’ he was fond of saying. A search was made for the writers. Two Russian Jews from Houndsditch, a Nottingham typist and an ardent young undergraduate of Balliol, were identified as the authors of the most menacing and arrested, only to be released again almost immediately. The days passed. The murderers remained at large. Public interest in the crime was not allowed to abate. In part of the conservative press it was openly affirmed that the LiberalLabour Government had given orders to the police that the affair was not to be too closely looked into. ‘Screening the Murderers.’ ‘Socialists fear the Light.’ ‘Politics before the Ten Commandments.’ The headlines were lively. The crime was a godsend to the opposition. The Daily Mail offered ten thousand pounds reward to any person who would give information leading to the arrest of Webley’s murderers. Meanwhile, the British Freemen had almost doubled their numbers in a week. ‘Are you on the side of Murder? If not, join the British Freemen.’ The posters glared from every hoarding. Troops of Freemen in uniform and plain clothes scoured London canvassing for recruits, making patriotic demonstrations, doing amateur detective work. They also took the opportunity to beat a number of people with whose opinions they disagreed. In Tottenham and East Ham they fought pitched battles with hostile crowds and damaged numerous policemen. At Everard’s funeral a green procession more than three miles long followed the coffin to the grave.
Spandrell read all the papers every morning. They amused him. What a farce! What knockabout! What an incomparable idiocy! To Illidge, who had gone down to Lancashire to stay with his mother, he sent a picture postcard of Everard in uniform on his white horse—the shops were full of them now; hawkers peddled them in the streets. ‘The dead lion seems likely to do much more damage than the live dog,’ he wrote on the back. ‘God was always a joker.’
God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there. Simply not there. Neither God nor the devil. For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too. All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout. First an affair of dust-bins and then a farce. But perhaps that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dust-bins. And God? God in that case would be simply the absence of dust-bins.
‘God’s not apart, not above, not outside.’ He remembered what Rampion had once said. ‘At any rate, no relevant, humanly important aspect of God’s above and outside. Neither is God inside, in the sense that the Protestants use the phrase—safely stowed away in the imagination, in the feelings and intellect, in the soul. He’s there, of course among other places. But he’s also inside in the sense that a lump of bread’s inside when you’ve eaten it. He’s in the very body, in the blood and bowels, in the heart and skin and loins. God’s the total result, spiritual and physical, of any thought or action that makes for life, of any vital relation with the world. God’s a quality of actions and relations—a felt, experienced quality. At any rate, he’s that for our purposes, for purposes of living. Because, of course for purposes of knowing and speculating he may be dozens of other things as well. He may be a Rock of Ages; he may be the Jehovah of the Old Testament; he may be anything you like. But what’s that got to do with us as living corporeal beings? Nothing, nothing but harm, at any rate. The moment you allow speculative truth to take the place of felt instinctive truth as a guide to living, you ruin everything.’
Spandrell had protested. Men must have absolutes, must steer by fixed external marks. ‘Music exists,’ he concluded, ‘even though you personally happen to be unmusical. You must admit its existence, absolutely, apart from your own capacity for listening and enjoying.
‘Speculatively, theoretically, yes. Admit it as much as you like. But don’t allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life. In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic musicsnobs one meets at Lady Edward Tantamount’s. Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It’s exactly the same with God. The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs. They’re as grotesque and contemptible as the musicsnobs at Lady Edward’s. But nobody has the sense to say so. The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian. When they’re merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.’
Spandrell thought of the conversation now, as he addressed his postcard to Illidge. God was not there, the devil was not there; only the memory of a piece of squalid knockabout among the dust-bins, a piece of dirty dung-beetle’s scavengering. A God-snob—that’s what Rampion would call him. Dung-beetling in search of a non-existent God. But no, but no, God was there, outside, absolute. Else how account for the efficacy of prayer—for it was efficacious; how explain providence and destiny? God was there, but hiding. Deliberately hiding. It was a question of forcing him to come out of his lair, his abstract absolute lair, and compelling him to incarnate himself as a felt experienced quality of personal actions. It was a matter of violently dragging him from outsideness and aboveness to insideness. But God was a joker. Spandrell had conjured him with violence to appear; and out of the bloody steam of the magically compelling sacrifice had emerged only a dust-bin. But the very failure of the incantation had been a proof that God was there, outside. Nothing happens to a man except that which is like himself. Dust-bin to dust-bin, dung to dung. He had not succeeded in compelling God to pass from outsideness to insideness But the appearance of the dust-bin confirmed the reality of God as a providence, God as a destiny, God as the giver or withholder of grace, God as the predestinating saviour or destroyer. Dust-bins had been his predestined lot. In giving him dust-bins yet again, the providential joker was merely being consistent.
One day, in the London Library, he met Philip Quarles.
‘I was very sorry to hear about your little boy,’ he said.
Philip mumbled something and looked rather uncomfortable, like a man who finds himself involved in an embarrassing situation. He could not bear to let anyone come near his misery. It was private, secret, sacred. It hurt him to expose it, it made him feel ashamed.
‘It was a peculiarly gratuitous horror,’ he said, to bring the conversation away from the particular and personal to the general.
‘All horrors are gratuitous,’ said Spandrell. ‘How’s Elinor standing it?’
The question was direct, had to be answered. ‘Badly.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s quite broken her down.’ Why did his voice, he wondered, sound so strangely unreal and, as it were, empty?
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘We shall go abroad in a few days, if Elinor feels up to the journey. To Siena, I’d thought. And then perhaps to the seaside somewhere in the Maremma.’ It was a comfort to be able to go into these geographical details.
‘No more English domesticity then,’ said Spandrell after a little pause.
‘The reason of it has been taken away.’
Spandrell nodded slowly. ‘Do you remember that conversation we had at the Club, with Illidge and Walter Bidlake? Nothing ever happens to a man except what’s like him. Settling down in the country in England wasn’t at all like you. It didn’t happen. It’s been prevented. Ruthlessly, by God! But providence uses foul means as well as fair. Travelling about, being unfixed, being a spectator—that was like you. You’re being compelled to do what’s like you.’ There was a silence. ‘And living in a kind of dustheap,’ Spandre
ll added, ‘that’s like me. Whatever I do, however hard I try to escape, I remain on the dustheap. I suppose I always shall.’ Yes always, he went on thinking. He had played the last card and lost. No, not the last card; for there was one other. The last but one. Would he also lose with the last?
CHAPTER XXXVII
Spandrell was very insistent that they should come without delay. The heilige Dankgesang eines genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart simply must be heard.
‘You can’t understand anything until you have heard it,’ he declared. ‘It proves all kinds of things—God, the soul, goodness—unescapably. It’s the only real proof that exists; the only one, because Beethoven was the only man who could get his knowledge over into expression. You must come.’
‘Most willingly,’ said Rampion, ‘But…’
Spandrell interrupted him. ‘I heard quite by accident yesterday that the A minor quartet had been recorded for the gramophone. I rushed out and bought a machine and the records specially for you.’
‘For me? But why this generosity?’
‘No generosity,’ Spandrell answered laughing. ‘Pure selfishness. I want you to hear and confirm my opinion.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I believe in you and, if you confirm, I shall believe in myself.’
‘What a man!’ mocked Rampion. ‘Ought to join the Church of Rome and have a confessor.’
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