‘Compare an eminent Victorian with an eminent Periclean,’ said Willie Weaver. He smiled, he was happy and eloquent.
On Peter Slipe the burgundy had acted as a depressant, not a stimulant. The wine had only enhanced his native dimness and melancholy.
‘What about Beatrice?’ he said to Walter, ‘Beatrice Gilray?’ he hiccoughed and tried to pretend that he had coughed. ‘I suppose you see her often, now that she works on the Literary World.’
Walter saw her three times a week and always found her well.
‘Give her my love, when you see her next,’ said Slipe.
‘The stertorous borborygms of the dyspeptic Carlyle!’ declaimed Willie Weaver, and beamed through his spectacles. The mot, he flattered himself, could hardly have been more exquisitely juste. He gave the little cough which was his invariable comment on the best of his phrases. ‘I would laugh, I would applaud,’ the little cough might be interpreted; ‘but modesty forbids.’
‘Stertorous what?’ asked Lucy. ‘Do remember that I’ve never been educated.’
‘Warbling your native woodnotes wild!’ said Willie. ‘May I help myself to some of that noble brandy? The blushful Hippocrene.’
‘She treated me badly, extremely badly.’ Peter Slipe was plaintive. ‘But I don’t want her to think that I bear her any grudge.’
Willie Weaver smacked his lips over the brandy. ‘Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion’s children know,’ he misquoted and repeated his little cough of self-satisfaction.
‘The trouble with Cuthbert,’ Spandrell was saying, ’is that he’s never quite learnt to distinguish art from pornography.’
‘Of course,’ continued Peter Slipe, ‘she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own house. But to turn me out at such short notice.’
At another time Walter would have been delighted to listen to poor little Slipe’s version of that curious story. But with Lucy on his other hand, he found it difficult to take much interest.
‘But I sometimes wonder if the Victorians didn’t have more fun than we did,’ she was saying. ‘The more prohibitions, the greater the fun. If you want to see people drinking with real enjoyment, you must go to America. Victorian England was dry in every department. For example, there was a nineteenth amendment about love. They must have made it as enthusiastically as the Americans drink whiskey. I don’t know that I really believe in Athenian enlargements – that is, if we’re one of them.’
‘You prefer Pecksniff to Alcibiades,’ Willie Weaver concluded.
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve had no experience of Pecksniff.’
‘I don’t know,’ Peter Slipe was saying, ‘whether you’ve ever been pecked by a goose.’
‘Been what?’ asked Walter, recalling his attention.
‘Been pecked by a goose.’
‘Never, that I can remember.’
‘It’s a hard, dry sensation.’ Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger. ‘Beatrice is like that. She pecks; she enjoys pecking. But she can be very kind at the same time. She insists on being kind in her way, and she pecks if you don’t like it. Pecking’s part of the kindness; so I always found. I never objected. But why should she have turned me out of the house as though I were a criminal? And rooms are so difficult to find now. I had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks. The food …’ He shuddered.
Walter could not help smiling.
‘She must have been in a great hurry to instal Burlap in your place.’
‘But why in such a hurry as all that?’
‘When it’s a case of off with the old love and on with the new …’
‘But what has love to do with it?’ asked Slipe. ‘In Beatrice’s case.’
‘A great deal,’ Willie Weaver broke in. ‘Everything. These superannuated virgins – always the most passionate.’
‘But she’s never had a love affair in her life.’
‘Hence the violence,’ concluded Willie triumphantly. ‘Beatrice has a nigger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.’
‘Perhaps she likes being well dressed,’ suggested Lucy.
Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.
‘That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.’ Willie hesitated a moment. ‘Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,’ he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.
Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole. She was thirty-five, but seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless. Her skin was clear and fresh. From shallow and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining. In a sharp, determined way her face was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the pouting mouth and round defiant chin. But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking and mischievously inquisitive.
She stitched away. The clock ticked. The moving instant which, according to Sir Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advanced inexorably through the dimension of time. Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man might suck for ever at an unending piece of macaroni. Every now and then Beatrice actualized a potential yawn. In a basket by the fireplace a black she-cat lay on her side purring and suckling four blind and parti-coloured kittens. The walls of the room were primrose yellow. On the top shelf of the bookcase the dust was thickening on the text-books of Assyriology which she had bought when Peter Slipe was the tenant of her upper floor. A volume of Pascal’s Thoughts, with pencil annotations by Burlap, lay open on the table. The clock continued to tick.
Suddenly the front door banged. Beatrice put down her pink silk camisole and sprang to her feet.
‘Don’t forget that you must drink your hot milk, Denis,’ she said, looking out into the hall. Her voice was clear, sharp and commanding.
Burlap hung up his coat and came to the door. ‘You oughtn’t to have sat up for me,’ he said, with tender reproachfulness, giving her one of his grave and subtle Sodoma smiles.
‘I had some work I simply had to get finished,’ Beatrice lied.
‘Well, it was most awfully sweet of you.’ These pretty colloquialisms, with which Burlap liked to pepper his conversation, had for sensitive ears a most curious ring. ‘He talks slang,’ Mark Rampion once said, ‘as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English – but a foreigner’s command. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard an Indian calling anyone a “jolly good sport”. Burlap’s slang reminds me of that.’
For Beatrice, however, that ‘awfully sweet’ sounded entirely natural and un-alien. She flushed with a young-girlishly timid pleasure. But, ‘Come in and shut the door,’ she rapped out commandingly. Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny; there was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient. ‘Sit down there,’ she ordered; and while she was briskly busy over the milk-jug, the saucepan, the gas-ring, she asked him if he had enjoyed the party.
Burlap shook his head. ‘Fascinatio nugacitatis,’ he said. ‘Fascinatio nugacitatis.’ He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from Piccadilly Circus.
Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words connoted disapproval. ‘Parties are rather a waste of time, aren’t they?’ she said.
Burlap nodded. ‘A waste of time,’ he echoed in his slow ruminant’s voice, keeping his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice’s left. ‘One’s forty, one has lived more than half one’s life, the world is marvellous and mysterious. And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount House. Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one? Is it some vague fanta
stic hope that one may meet the messianic person one’s always been looking for, or hear the revealing word?’ Burlap wagged his head as he spoke with a curious loose motion, as though the muscles of his neck were going limp. Beatrice was so familiar with the motion that she saw nothing strange in it any more. Waiting for the milk to boil, she listened admiringly, she watched him with a serious church-going face. A man whose excursions into the drawing-rooms of the rich were episodes in a lifelong spiritual quest might justifiably be regarded as the equivalent of Sunday morning church.
‘All the same,’ Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous, gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, ‘the champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.’ It was the demon that had suddenly interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations. Burlap had allowed him to speak out loud. Why not? It amused him to be baffling. He looked at Beatrice.
Beatrice was duly baffled. ‘I’m sure they were,’ she said, readjusting her church-going face to make it harmonize with the grin. She laughed rather nervously and turned away to pour out the milk into a cup. ‘Here’s your milk,’ she rapped out, taking refuge from her bafflement in officious command. ‘Mind you drink it while it’s hot.’
There was a long silence. Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly knew for what.
‘You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffet,’ said Burlap at last.
Beatrice smiled. ‘Luckily there’s no big spider.’
‘Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.’
‘Yes it is,’ said Beatrice. That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she reflected; he was so trustworthy. Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw you about and kiss you. Dreadful that was, quite dreadful. Beatrice had never really got over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie’s brother-in-law, whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a hansom. The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such a panic fear of being touched. She was over thirty now and had never allowed anyone to touch her. The soft quivering little girl underneath the business-like shell of her had often fallen in love. But the terror of being pawed about, of being even touched, had always been stronger than the love. At the first sign of danger, she had desperately pecked, she had hardened her shell, she had fled. Arrived in safety, the terrified little girl had drawn a long breath. Thank Heaven! But a little sigh of disappointment was always included in the big sigh of relief. She wished she hadn’t been frightened, she wished that the happy relationship that had existed before the pawing could have gone on for ever, indefinitely. Sometimes she was angry with herself, more often she thought there was something fundamentally wrong with love, something fundamentally dreadful about men. That was the wonderful thing about Denis Burlap; he was so reassuringly not a pouncer or a pawer. Beatrice could adore him without a qualm.
‘Susan used to sit on poufs, like little Miss Muffett,’ Burlap resumed after a pause. His voice was melancholy. He had spent the last minutes in ruminating the theme of his dead wife. It was nearly two years now since Susan had been carried off in the influenza epidemic. Nearly two years: but the pain, he assured himself, had not diminished, the sense of loss had remained as overwhelming as ever. Susan, Susan, Susan – he had repeated the name to himself over and over again. He would never see her any more, even if he lived for a million years. A million years, a million years. Gulfs opened all round the words. ‘Or on the floor,’ he went on, reconstructing her image as vividly as he could. ‘I think she liked sitting on the floor best. Like a child.’ A child, a child, he repeated to himself. So young.
Beatrice sat in silence, looking into the empty grate. To have looked at Burlap, she felt, would have been indiscreet, indecent almost. Poor fellow! When she turned towards him at last, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks. The sight filled her with a sudden passion of maternal pity. ‘Like a child,’ he had said. But he was like a child himself. Like a poor unhappy child. Leaning forward she drew her fingers caressingly along the back of his limply hanging hand.
‘Batrachian grapplings!’ Lucy repeated and laughed. ‘That was a stroke of genius, Willie.’
‘All my strokes are strokes of genius,’ said Willie modestly. He acted himself; he was Willie Weaver in the celebrated rôle of Willie Weaver. He exploited artistically that love of eloquence, that passion for the rotund and reverberating phrase with which, more than three centuries too late, he had been born. In Shakespeare’s youth he would have been a literary celebrity. Among his contemporaries, Willie’s euphuisms only raised a laugh. But he enjoyed applause, even when it was derisive. Moreover, the laughter was never malicious; for Willie Weaver was so good-natured and obliging that everybody liked him. It was to a hilariously approving audience that he played his part; and, feeling the approval through the hilarity, he played it for all it was worth. ‘All my strokes are strokes of genius.’ The remark was admirably in character. And perhaps true? Willie jested, but with a secret belief. ‘And mark my words,’ he added, ‘one of these days the batrachians will erump, they’ll break out.’
‘But why batrachians?’ asked Slipe. ‘Anything less like a batrachian than Beatrice …’
‘And why should they break out?’ put in Spandrell.
‘Frogs don’t peck.’ But Slipe’s thin voice was drowned by Mary Rampion’s.
‘Because things do break out,’ she cried. ‘They do.’
‘Moral,’ Cuthbert concluded: ‘don’t shut anything up. I never do.’
‘But perhaps the fun consists in breaking out,’ Lucy speculated.
‘Perverse and paradoxical prohibitionist!’
‘But obviously,’ Rampion was saying, ‘you get revolutions occurring inside as well as outside. It’s poor against rich in the state. In the individual, it’s the oppressed body and instincts against the intellect. The intellect’s been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel.’
‘Hear, hear!’ shouted Cuthbert, and banged the table.
Rampion frowned. He felt Cuthbert’s approbation as a personal insult.
‘I’m a counter-revolutionary,’ said Spandrell. ‘But the spiritual lower classes in their place.’
‘Except in your own case, eh?’ said Cuthbert grinning.
‘Mayn’t one theorize?’
‘People have been forcibly putting them in their place for centuries,’ said Rampion; ‘and look at the result. You, among other things.’ He looked at Spandrell, who threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. ‘Look at the result,’ he repeated. ‘Inward personal revolution and consequent outward and social revolution.’
‘Come, come,’ said Willie Weaver. ‘You talk as though the thermidorian tumbrils were already rumbling. England still stands very much where it did.’
‘But what do you know of England and Englishmen?’ Rampion retorted. ‘You’ve never been out of London or your class. Go to the North.’
‘God forbid!’ Willie piously interjected.
‘Go to the coal and iron country. Talk a little with the steel workers. It isn’t revolution for a cause. It’s a revolution as an end in itself. Smashing for smashing’s sake.’
‘Rather sympathetic it sounds,’ said Lucy.
‘It’s terrifying. It simply isn’t human. Their humanity has all been squeezed out of them by civilized living, squeezed out by the weight of coal and iron. It won’t be a rebellion of men. It’ll be a revolution of elementals, monsters, pre-human monsters. And you just shut your eyes and pretend everything’s too perfect.’
‘Think of the disproportion,’ Lord Edward was saying, as he smoked his pipe. ‘It’s positively …’ His voice failed. ‘Take coal
, for example. Man’s using a hundred and ten times as much as he used in 1800. But population’s only two and a half times what it was. With other animals … Surely quite different. Consumption’s proportionate to numbers.’
Illidge objected. ‘But if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.’ Illidge spoke with gusto. Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘A coal-field’s discovered; oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates – at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.”’
‘Like ostriches,’ said Mary Rampion. ‘You live like ostriches.’
‘And not about revolutions only,’ said Spandrell, while Willie Weaver was heard to put in something about ‘strouthocamelian philosophies’. ‘About all the important things that happen to be disagreeable. There was a time when people didn’t go about pretending that death and sin didn’t exist. “Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme,”’ he quoted. ‘Baudelaire was the last poet of the Middle Ages as well as the first modern. “Et pourtant,”’ he went on, looking with a smile to Lucy and raising his glass,
‘“Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 100
