‘Well, I’m not serious,’ Helen was saying. She felt a great need to unburden herself, to ask for help. There were moments – and they recurred whenever, for one reason or another, she felt doubtful of herself – moments when everything round her seemed terribly vague and unreliable. Everything – but in practice, of course, it all boiled down to the reliability of her mother. Helen was very fond of her mother, but at the same time she had to admit to herself that she was no use. ‘Mummy’s like a very bad practical joke,’ she had once said to Joyce. ‘You think you’re going to sit on it; but the chair’s whisked away and you come down with a horrible bump on your bottom.’ But all that Joyce had said was: ‘Helen, you simply mustn’t use those words.’ Ass of a girl! Though, of course, it had to be admitted, Joyce was a chair that could be sat on. But an inadequate chair, a chair only for unimportant occasions – and what was the good of that? Joyce was too young; and even if she’d been much older, she wouldn’t really have understood anything properly. And now that she was engaged to Colin, she seemed to understand things less and less. God, what a fool that man was! But all the same, there, if you liked, was a chair. A chair like the rock of ages. But so shaped, unfortunately, that it forced you to sit in the most grotesquely uncomfortable position. However, as Joyce didn’t seem to mind the discomfort, that was all right. Chairless in an exhausting world, Helen almost envied her. Meanwhile there was old Hugh. She sat down, heavily.
‘What’s wrong with me,’ she went on, ‘is that I’m so hopelessly frivolous.’
‘I can’t really believe that,’ he said; though why he said it he couldn’t imagine. For, obviously, he ought to be encouraging her to make confession, not assuring her that she had no sins to confess. It was as though he were secretly afraid of the very thing he had wished for.
‘I don’t think you’re . . .’
But fortunately nothing he said could put her off. She insisted on using him as a chair.
‘No, no, it’s quite true,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine how frivolous I am. I’ll tell you . . .’
Half an hour later, in the back drawing-room, he was writing out for her a list of the books she ought to read. Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophers; Phaedrus, Timaeus, The Apology, and The Symposium in Jowett’s translation; the Nicomachean Ethics; Cornford’s little anthology of the Greek moralists; Marcus Aurelius; Lucretius in any good translation; Inge’s Plotinus. His manner, as he spoke, was easy, confident, positively masterful. He was like a creature suddenly restored to its proper element.
‘Those will give you some idea of the way the ancients thought about things.’
She nodded. Her face as she looked at the pencilled list was grave and determined. She had decided that she would wear spectacles, and have a table brought up to her bedroom, so that she could sit undisturbed, with her books piled up and her writing materials in front of her. Note-books – or, better, a card index. It would be a new life – a life with some meaning in it, some purpose. In the drawing-room somebody started up the gramophone. As though on its own initiative, her foot began to beat out the rhythm. One two three, one two three – it was a waltz. But what was she thinking of? She frowned and held her foot still.
‘As for modern thought,’ Hugh was saying, ‘well, the two indispensable books, from which every modern culture must start, are’ – his pencil hurried across the paper – ‘Montaigne’s Essays and the Pensées of Pascal. Indispensable, these.’ He underlined the names. ‘Then you’d better glance at the Discourse on Method.’
‘Which method?’ asked Helen.
But Hugh did not hear the question. ‘And take a look at Hobbes, if you have the time,’ he went on with ever-increasing power and confidence. ‘And then Newton. That’s absolutely essential. Because if you don’t know the philosophy of Newton, you don’t know why science has developed as it has done. You’ll find all you need in Burt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.’ There was a little silence while he wrote. Tom had arrived, and Eileen and Sybil. Helen could hear them talking in the other room. ‘Then there’s Hume,’ he continued. ‘You’d better begin with the Essays. They’re superb. Such sense, such an immense sagacity!’
‘Sagacity,’ Helen repeated, and smiled to herself with pleasure. Yes, that was exactly the word she’d been looking for – exactly what she herself would like to be: sagacious, like an elephant, like an old sheep-dog, like Hume, if you preferred it. But at the same time, of course, herself. Sagacious, but young; sagacious, but lively and attractive; sagacious, but impetuous and . . .
‘I won’t inflict Kant on you,’ said Hugh indulgently. ‘But I think’ (he brought the pencil into play again), ‘I think you’ll have to read one or two of the modern Kantians. Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If, for example, and von Uexküll’s Theoretical Biology. You see, Kant’s behind all our twentieth-century science. Just as Newton was behind all the science of the eighteenth and nineteenth . . .’
‘Well, Helen!’
They started and looked up – looked up into the smiling, insolently handsome face of Gerry Watchett. Brilliantly blue against the sunburnt skin, the eyes glanced from one to the other with a kind of mockery. Coming a step nearer, he laid his hand familiarly on Helen’s shoulder. ‘What’s the fun? Crossword puzzles?’ He gave the shoulder two or three little pats.
‘As though she were his horse,’ Hugh said to himself indignantly. And, in effect, that was what the man looked like – a groom. That crisply waving, golden-brownish hair, that blunt-featured face, at once boyish and tough – they were straight from the table, straight from Epsom downs.
Helen smiled a smile that was intended to be contemptuously superior – an intellectual’s smile. ‘You would think it was crosswords!’ she said. Then, ‘By the way,’ she added in another tone, ‘you know each other, don’t you?’ she looked enquiringly from Gerry to Hugh.
‘We do,’ Gerry answered: and still keeping his right hand on Helen’s shoulder, he raised his left in the derisive caricature of a military salute. ‘Good evening, Colonel.’
Sheepishly, Hugh returned the salute. All his power and confidence had vanished with his forced return from the world of books to that of personal life; he felt like an albatross on dry land – helplessly awkward, futile, ugly. And yet how easy it should have been to put on a knowing smile, and say significantly, ‘Yes, I know Mr Watchett very well’ – know him, the tone would imply, for what he is: the gentleman share-pusher, the professional gambler and the professional lover. Mary Amberley’s lover at the moment, so it was supposed. ‘Know him very well indeed!’ That was what it would have been so easy to say. But he didn’t say it: he only smiled and rather foolishly raised his hand to his forehead.
Gerry, meanwhile, had sat down on the arm of the sofa, and through the smoke of his cigarette was staring at Helen with a calm and easy insolence, appraising her, so it seemed, point by point – hocks, withers, quarters, barrel. ‘Do you know, Helen,’ he said at last, ‘you’re getting prettier and prettier every day.’
Blushing, Helen threw back her head and laughed; then suddenly stiffened her face into an unnatural rigidity. She was angry – angry with Gerry for his damned impertinence, angry above all with herself for having been pleased by the damned impertinence, for having reacted with such a humiliatingly automatic punctuality to that offensive flattery. Going red in the face and giggling like a schoolgirl! And that Philosophy of As If, those horn-rimmed spectacles, and the new life, and the card index . . .? A man said, ‘You’re pretty,’ and it was as though they had never been so much as thought of. She turned towards Hugh; turned for protection, for support. But her eyes no sooner met his than he looked away. His face took on an expression of meditative absence; he seemed to be thinking of something else. Was he angry with her, she wondered? Had he been offended because she had been pleased by Gerry’s compliment? But it had been like blinking at the noise of a gun – something you couldn’t help doing. He ought to understand, ought to realize that she wanted to lead that new li
fe, was simply longing to be sagacious. Instead of which, he just faded out and refused to have anything to do with her. Oh, it wasn’t fair!
Behind that cold detached mask of his, Hugh was feeling more than ever like Baudelaire’s albatross.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
Ah, those strong and majestic swoopings in the neo-Kantian azure!
From the next room the gramophone was trumpeting, ‘Yes, sir, she’s my baby.’ Gerry whistled a couple of bars; then ‘What about a spot of fox-trotting, Helen?’ he suggested. ‘Unless, of course, you haven’t finished with the Colonel.’ He glanced mockingly at Hugh’s averted face. ‘I don’t want to interrupt . . .’
It was Helen’s turn to look at Hugh. ‘Well . . .’ she began doubtfully.
But without looking up, ‘Oh, not at all, not at all,’ Hugh made haste to say; and wondered, even as he did so, what on earth had induced him to proclaim his own defeat before even there had been a battle. Leaving her to that groom! Fool, coward! Still, he told himself cynically, she probably preferred the groom. He got up, mumbled something about having to talk to someone about some point that had turned up, and moved away towards the door that gave on to the landing and the stairs.
‘Well, if he doesn’t want me to stay,’ Helen thought resentfully, ‘if he doesn’t think it’s worth his while to keep me.’ She was hurt.
‘Exit the Colonel,’ said Gerry. Then, ‘What about that spot of dancing?’ He rose, came towards her and held out his hand. Helen took it and pulled herself up from the low chair. ‘No, sir, don’t say maybe,’ he sang as he put his arm about her. They stepped out into the undulating stream of the music. Zigzagging between chairs and tables, he steered towards the door that led into the other room.
CHAPTER XV
June 1903–January 1904
IT HAD BECOME a rite, a sacrament (that was how John Beavis described it to himself): a sacrament of communion. First, the opening of the wardrobe door, the handling of her dresses. Closing his eyes, he breathed the perfume they exhaled, the faint sweet essence of her body from across the widening abyss of time. Then there were the drawers. These three, on the left, contained her linen. The lavender bags were tied with pale blue ribbon. This lace on the night-gown he now unfolded had touched . . . Even in thought, John Beavis avoided the pronunciation of the words ‘her breasts,’ but only imagined the rounded flesh softly swelling and sinking under the intricacies of the patterned thread; then recalled those Roman nights; and finally thought of Lollingdon and the hollow vale, the earth, the terrible dark silence. The night-gown refolded and once more shut away, it was the turn of the two small drawers on the right – of the gloves that had encased her hands, the belts that had girdled her body and that now he wound round his wrist or tightened like a phylactery about his temples. And the rite concluded with the reading of her letters – those touchingly childish letters she had written during their engagement. That consummated the agony for him; the rite was over and he could go to bed with yet another sword in his heart.
But recently, it seemed, the sword had grown blunter. It was as though her death, till now so poignantly alive, had itself begun to die. The rite seemed to be losing its magic: consummation became increasingly difficult of achievement, and, when achieved, was less painful and, for that reason, less satisfying. For the thing which had made life worth living all these months was precisely the pain of his bereavement. Desire and tenderness had suddenly been deprived of their object. It was an amputation – agonizing. And now this pain – and it was all of her that was left him – this precious anguish was slipping away from him, was dying, even as Maisie herself had died.
Tonight it seemed to have vanished altogether. He buried his face in the scented folds of her dresses, he spread out the lace and lawn she had worn next her skin, he blew into one of her gloves and watched the gradual deflation of this image of her hand – dying, dying, till the skin hung limp again and empty of even the pretence of life. But the rites were without effect; John Beavis remained unmoved. He knew that she was dead and that his bereavement was terrible. But he felt nothing of this bereavement – nothing except a kind of dusty emptiness of spirit.
He went to bed unfulfilled, somehow humiliated. Magic rites justify themselves by success; when they fail to produce their proper emotional results, the performer feels that he has been betrayed into making a fool of himself.
Dry, like a mummy, in the dusty emptiness of his own sepulchre, John Beavis lay for a long time, unable to sleep. Twelve; one; two; and then, when he had utterly despaired of it, sleep came, and he was dreaming that she was there beside him; and it was Maisie as she had been in the first year of their marriage, the round flesh swelling and subsiding beneath the lace, the lips parted and, oh, innocently consenting. He took her in his arms.
It was the first time since her death that he had dreamed of her except as dying.
John Beavis woke to a sense of shame; and when, later in the day, he saw Miss Gannett evidently waiting for him, as usual, in the corridor outside his lecture-room, he pretended not to have noticed her, but hurried past with downcast eyes, frowning, as though preoccupied by some abstruse, insoluble problem in the higher philology.
But the next afternoon found him at his old Aunt Edith’s weekly At Home. And of course – though he expressed a perhaps excessive surprise at seeing her – of course Miss Gannett was there, as he knew she would be; for she never missed one of Aunt Edith’s Thursdays.
‘You were in a terrible hurry yesterday,’ she said, when his surprise had had time to die down.
‘Me? When?’ He pretended not to know what she meant.
‘At the College, after your lecture.’
‘But were you there? I didn’t see you.’
‘Now he thinks I shirked his lecture,’ she wailed to some non-existent third party. Ever since, two months before, she had first met him in Aunt Edith’s drawing-room, Miss Gannett had faithfully attended every one of his public lectures. ‘To improve my mind,’ she used to explain. ‘Because,’ with a jocularity that was at the same time rather wistful, ‘it does so need improving!’
Mr Beavis protested. ‘But I didn’t say anything of the kind.’
‘I’ll show you the notes I took.’
‘No, please don’t do that!’ It was his turn to be playful. ‘If you knew how my own lectures bored me!’
‘Well, you nearly ran me over in the corridor, after the lecture.’
‘Oh, then!’
‘I never saw anyone walk so fast.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I was in a hurry; it’s quite true. I had a Committee. Rather a special one,’ he added impressively.
She opened her eyes at him very wide, and, from playful, her tone and expression became very serious. ‘It must be rather a bore sometimes,’ she said, ‘to be such a very important person – isn’t it?’
Mr Beavis smiled down at the grave and awestruck child before him – at the innocent child who was also a rather plump and snubbily pretty young woman of seven and twenty – smiled with pleasure and stroked his moustache. ‘Oh, not quite so important as all that,’ he protested. ‘Not quite such . . .’ he hesitated for a moment; his mouth twitched, his eyes twinkled; then the colloquialism came out: ‘not quite such a “howling toff” as you seem to imagine.’
There was only one letter that morning. From Anthony, Mr Beavis saw as he tore open the envelope.
‘BULSTRODE, June 26th.
‘DEAREST FATHER, – Thank you for your letter. I thought we were going to Tenby for the holidays. Did you not arrange it with Mrs Foxe? Foxe says she expects us, so perhaps we ought not to go to Switzerland instead as you say we are doing. We had two matches yesterday, first eleven v. Sunny Bank, second v. Mumbridge, we won both which was rather ripping. I was playing in the second eleven and made six not out. We have begun a book called Lettres de mon Moulin in French, I think it is rotten. There is no more news,
so with much love. – Your loving son,
‘ANTHONY.
‘P.S. – Don’t forget to write to Mrs Foxe, because Foxe says he knows she thinks we are going To Tenby.’
Mr Beavis frowned as he read the letter, and when breakfast was over, sat down at once to write an answer.
‘EARL’S COURT SQUARE,
27.vi.03.
‘DEAREST ANTHONY, – I am disappointed that you should have received what I had hoped was a piece of very exciting news with so little enthusiasm. At your age I should certainly have welcomed the prospect of “going abroad,” especially to Switzerland, with unbounded delight. The arrangements with Mrs Foxe were always of the most indeterminate nature. Needless to say, however, I wrote to her as soon as the golden opportunity for exploring the Bernese Oberland in congenial company turned up, as it did only a few days since, and made me decide to postpone the realization of our vague Tenby plans. If you want to see exactly where we are going, take your map of Switzerland, find Interlaken and the Lake of Brienz, move eastward from the end of the lake to Meiringen and thence in a southerly direction towards Grindelwald. We shall be staying at the foot of the Scheideck Pass, at Rosenlaui, almost in the shadow of such giants as the Jungfrau, Weisshorn and Co. I do not know the spot, but gather from all accounts that it is entirely “spiffing” and paradisal.
‘I am delighted to hear you did so creditably in your match. You must go on, dear boy, from strength to strength. Next year I shall hope to see you sporting the glories of the First Eleven colours.
‘I cannot agree with you in finding Daudet “rotten.” I suspect that his rottenness mainly consists in the difficulties he presents to a tyro. When you have acquired a complete mastery of the language, you will come to appreciate the tender charm of his style and the sharpness of his wit.
‘I hope you are working your hardest to make good your sad weakness in “maths.” I confess that I never shone in the mathematical line myself, so am able to sympathize with your difficulties. But hard work will do wonders, and I am sure that if you really “put your back into” algebra and geometry, you can easily get up to scholarship standards by this time next year. – Ever your most affectionate father,
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