She reflected lucidly that she was paying now, in her fiftieth year, for not having made herself any allies. After all these years of hard and on the whole honest work, she was back exactly where she started as a very young woman, without security, without money, and with fast-diminishing energy — she was strong but she had used herself mercilessly hard. An unworldly fool. A freak who does not even amuse. She did not know how to talk to people, she could not make herself respected: no one, not the weakest or youngest, had any reason to fear her — and so no reason to help her. (Her mind darted aside a second to ask: Which is the more useful, to be loved or feared? Obviously — to be feared: since love confers its benefits in private.) She had no power, no strings she could pull, no worldly sense, none of the small change (a job as a reviewer, an easy chair as publisher’s adviser) with which cleverer writers pay their way. She had never tried to elbow her way forward, never reached over to scratch a back while presenting her own to be scratched, never taken the trouble to secure her lines of advance or retreat, never known how to sell herself. And all this not, ludicrously not, because she was noble or virtuous, but out of one sort of indolence, out of that pride of the very timid, and out of an acute distaste for paddling in muddy streams. She had only one friend who was powerful and well-off: Gregory Mott. And never, she had never — from pride, diffidence, delicacy — made use of him. Never until now. And when, in extremis, she appealed to him, he had failed her.
As I ought to have expected, she thought, with irony, but without a touch of resentment. Hadn’t she always known that the surest way to be refused help is to need it — and to ask for it?
A sense of the absurdity of life, all life, human as well as social, had never been far below the surface of her mind. It was born with her. It had never struck her as in any way disturbing, or worth making a fuss about. That a whole new philosophy has been founded on it and a great many dazzling reputations made by foaming at the mouth with it, started up a jeering laugh in her. So much chatter and heart-burning and agony (as they say) of spirit, and inflated verbiage, spent on a platitude — the most obvious of platitudes. One of politeness — and cowardice — she had always stifled her laughter…. But now, suddenly, with the infernal pain of a seared nerve, she thought: If this is really all there is, what terrible nonsense!
‘You didn’t always feel like this,’ she accused the image watching her, in glum disapproval, from the depths of the glass.
‘I wasn’t always fifty.’
‘So what?’
‘So,’ she said drily, ‘I shall go on, with my brute patience, to the end.’
Stretching out a long roughened hand, she fingered Gregory’s letter. She could not bring herself to read it again — the humiliation was too fresh. She sat for a long time, her face, unnoticed by her now, falling into the lines it would take when she was an old woman. Less clown than heavy staring mask.
Something was happening in her, a deep confused shifting of her energies, a change, hard and cruel, like a birth. Cheated of the promise Gregory had made her, of her chance, her one chance, to be safe, alone, and afraid — afraid as she had never been — she was beginning to know in some sense what her life had been and what it might still be. Or must be…. For a great many years, when she was young, when her energy and the energy of her mind and her imagination were at their strongest and boldest, she had written book after book, some bad, some not wholly bad, some almost good, but all written hurriedly, against time, writing when she was very ill, when she was tired, when she was sick with anxiety. All these struggles, made chiefly, but not wholly, for her son — she had not brought him up roughly or cheaply, as, if she had been hard or wise, she would — Gregory had condemned, brutally. They were the proof that she was no artist. If she had been, she would have refused to ruin herself as a writer by them. Right. Absolutely right and just. She did not dream of defending herself. But — she thought — it would be true of any woman with a child to bring up. To be a good writer, a good painter, a good whatever you like which is not as necessary as a loaf of bread, a woman must be content to be a nun, or a tramp, or both at once.
I have failed, she thought coldly. My own fault…. Yet not my fault. My nature, my ignorance, my folly, my life. Poor Harriet, she thought, mocking. Poor driven Harriet.
She touched her lowest point of fear and defeat.
And now what? A membrane tore in her mind. She almost cried out. What had she to live for? Nothing. She could kill herself if she liked: no one, not her son, none of her friends, would miss her for more than a little time. So, if she had nothing to live for, why not live for herself? Long enough, at least, to force her way back against the current of her life, against the whole of her past until this moment of rat-in-a-ditch cold. Why not?… A window opened in front of her. If she could somehow squeeze into words, into a book, the complete meaning of her life — hers and not hers. Live for it, ask for nothing else, accept solitude and poverty in order to write it. And afterwards? Afterwards? Let that take care of itself, she thought, with her clown’s smile.
‘You are arranging another failure for yourself, my poor girl.’
‘Never mind, never mind.’
‘But can you help minding?’
Yes, yes, a hundred times yes — if only she could use her confused clumsy wasteful life as a preface to this moment. If, naked, alone, selfish, she could say once: It was not wasted. Now that she was defenceless, with no energy left to keep up, to be seen in the world. Let everything go except this last supreme hope — to which she would cling like the woman she had once seen in the hills behind Manosque, clinging, a wind like a razor cutting her fingers open, to the branch of an olive-tree she was stripping of its violet fruit.
She felt a pang of shame when she thought of the efforts she had made to keep up in Gregory’s world — more Beatrice’s world than his, but he had embraced it and was at home in it. Why had she done it — spending more on her clothes than she could afford, giving Beatrice luncheon at fashionable restaurants, buying flowers for her? That rich woman! Out of love for Gregory — but not only out of love for him. Out of a snobbish weakness, too. Acts of Harriet Ellis’s weak, vain, trivial, basely snobbish side. Not to be repudiated now. Not to be only repudiated. To be seized with everything else and pressed like the olives into oil, into an essence. Humbly. With devotion and patience.
She felt a thin pure happiness.
Chapter Eight
The Board of Trustees met at Rutley House a week later, on Saturday morning. The heat wave had not yet broken, and outside the closed windows the sun built up a wall of solid light, of an unreal intensity: deformed by it as by the oily opacity of deep water, the buses rippled like scarlet fish against the silhouettes of trees drawn up in a rigid metallic pattern without colour or depth. There was none the less something exhilarating in the heat, so little familiar in the island, a feverish lightness of nerves, of muscles, of bones stroked by the sun.
Sunlight came into the large room in oblique rays which failed to reach as far as the semicircle of five persons who sat facing Gregory. Since this was the last time he would sit here as Director, he felt something of the excitement of his first meeting with these eminent men. He was relieved and sorry that Emily Grosmont was absent, abroad, on one of her visits to an embassy where she had a brother and a cousin: it made the occasion easier for him, yet he regretted her absence. That loyalty of hers, feminine in its single-mindedness, might — just possibly — have survived even the truth. Not that he had any intention of telling the truth. Looking at them, he was suddenly and violently tempted to empty it over them. What faces they would pull, he thought, amused. What faces they have now! His brother-in-law’s, long, equine, heartlessly calm, and (he saw it now) essentially weak. Pulmer, sitting boyishly straight, eyes alert behind deep lids as heavily smooth as if they had been beeswaxed, the benevolence of the priest struggling against the subsidised serenity of the bureaucrat. Of the other three — he had always felt more liking for the Master, old Reed, wi
th his hard captious androgynous face, his every ambition satisfied, so that there was as little malice as blood in him, than for his two fellow-writers on the Board: today more than ever he was startled by the arrogance clawing its way through the polished surface of the great (great in his generation) poet; as for the other, how did so notorious a male sensitivity come to inhabit the same body with a feline old maid?
Lambert was sitting on the left of Gregory at the desk, portentously grave, turning his long nose from side to side to catch the sweet scent of power given off by the five mandarins.
‘Shall we begin?’ Gregory said.
He described in detail the arrangements, all but complete now, for the Conference in September. When he had finished Reed said,
‘Admirable, admirable — if you can persuade the Italian chaps not to make speeches about Croce the whole time. They do, y’know. Very lowering.’
‘I think,’ Pulmer said, with a smile too puny for his face, ’that we ought to congratulate our Director. Most impressive — theme, aims, decor, splendid collection of names. Brilliant.’
Eminent hands clapped faintly and rustled papers. Gregory said in a neutral voice,
‘The credit, almost all of it, is due to the Deputy-Director. Mr. Corry has done the hard work. Without him, there would not be a Conference.’
‘What we owe Mr. Corry we all know,’ Arthur Blount said languidly. He tapped a yawn with two fingers. ‘This awful heat.’
Gregory had a moment of extreme tension, during which he found it painful to breathe: there was a weight on his chest and throat. He had not expected that it would be difficult to say what he had to say. More lies, he thought coldly. The last? No, of course not.
‘Two members of this Board already know what I have to say now. With very great regret… I have to resign my post as Director of the Institute. Reasons of health. My doctor’s orders are very firm, and I can only do as he says. At once…. You’ll all realise what a grief this is to me.’
There was a very short silence, then confused protests from three of his hearers. ’… your plans… the importance of the Conference… surely, after a long rest, with care…?’ Again he was furiously tempted to tell them the truth: they would scatter under it like cats under a bucketful of cold water. Looking at his brother-in-law he said,
‘You can be sure that only the very strongest reasons… As far as the Conference is concerned, it is quite safe in Mr. Corry’s hands. He has worked through every detail of agenda and entertainments with me, he knows all about the delegates, their relative importance — who must always sit at the top table — their eccentricities, honours, works, and the rest. There will be no trouble that he can foresee.’
‘With foreigners, you can’t foresee very far,’ Reed said. ‘Especially the French. Especially Italians. The last time I attended a conference with Italians one of them challenged me to a duel.’
‘What did you do, sir?’
‘Told him I’d left my 1914 sword at home. Didn’t tell him my wife uses it as a poker.’
The more highly-decorated of the two writers (O.M., runner-up for the Nobel) coughed. ‘Is it quite certain that — after a rest — you can’t carry on? I regard your going as a disaster.’
‘Good of you,’ Gregory said.
‘If you were given more help?’
‘Ought we,’ drawled Arthur Blount, ’to ask our friend — who is after all a writer as well as the brilliant head of this Institute — to risk his health? I feel…’
‘Oh, if there is any risk…’
Gregory thought: Is he beginning to hope that I’ll remove a competitor from his board by dying? He said coolly, ‘You’re very kind, but it’s no use, I’m afraid. I do assure you… Mr. Corry’s exceptional knowledge and efficiency…’
‘Oh, none of us has any doubts on that score.’
‘We are all thankful,’ Pulmer said, ’that the Conference has reached a stage where it can go forward under his hand.’
Arthur Blount sat up in his chair, uncrossing his legs, crossing fingers as white and delicate as a girl’s, and leaned forward. As he had meant it to, this pantomime fixed all eyes. ‘I think we have no right to weary and embarrass Mr. Mott by asking him more questions, or by pressing him to make any promises of which his doctors would disapprove.’ His voice trembled lightly, as though he had difficulty in controlling the emotion that filled his lean body. ‘We are suffering a loss none of us is likely to minimise. I shall have something to say about this later. But now, with profound regret, we should accept his resignation, for his sake — with gratitude, with sincere pain. We can all — all, I say — hope that what the Institute is losing the world will gain. That the writer will console us for the loss of the Director. If the moment has come for Gregory Mott to choose between the administration of an important institution and his own writing, no one can doubt where his highest conceivable duty lies. Nor that ours is to thank him and let him go.’
Gregory had an impulse to applaud. It was trodden under by a savage fatigue, and the feeling that another minute of this farce would be the one that broke him. He would laugh or groan or say something really unseemly. He pressed his hands on the table to help him stand up. Pulmer rose at the same moment. The others rose. Gregory looked at them, disconcerted in spite of himself by this funeral gesture.
‘I must thank you,’ he said coldly, ‘for the help you have given me in the ten years I have worked here. And say goodbye.’ He hesitated. ‘I suppose I should close the meeting, but you may perhaps wish to talk a little more, in my absence. I‘sll remove myself.’
He pushed his chair back, and walked out.
Lambert, after a moment’s uncertainty, had risen with the others. He seated himself again slowly, with relief. He was beginning to feel a confused impatience, shot through with excitement. Did none of these exalted fools know that they ought formally to confirm him in his position as acting head of the Institute? How can I bring them to their senses? he asked himself. What ought I to say?… He caught the beginnings and ends of sentences, the high-pitched spinsterish voice of one of the writers, Reed’s cracked growl, the smooth flow, honey dripping from a spoon, of Pulmer’s urbane authoritative phrases.
‘Can it have been so sudden…?’
‘… I suppose, heart.’
‘… after all, he’s how old, fifty? A young man.’
‘Tch, a lesson to us. The modern disease…’
‘Modern bilge and bunkum,’ Reed said. ‘Probably doesn’t drink enough.’
Arthur Blount had been lying back in his chair, eyes closed, as though overborne by emotion, heat, fatigue. He opened his eyes and said in an extenuated voice,
‘Gentlemen…’ They were silent. ‘We should ask our Deputy-Director to act as Director of the Institute until such time as we can take further decisions. At least until the Conference is over.’
‘Yes, of course, of course….’
‘Would you, Mr. Corry, feel able to do this for us?’
Lambert cleared his throat. He could not and did not expect anything more, at this point, but… he felt a light shock of disillusion. Anti-climax. He steadied himself, sharply. One step at a time. ‘Certainly.’
‘Thank you. We are all very much obliged to you.’
Has he any idea how patronising he is? Lambert thought, with something like hatred. He sat back and watched the meeting break up. The two writers shook hands with him, murmuring brief polite phrases, before going off together, a pair of elderly eagles, wing-tip to dusty wing-tip. Reed marched past him with a grunt and a bored glance. At this moment Bonnifet, the only member of the staff ordered on duty this morning, came in, and told Arthur Blount that there was a telephone call from his housekeeper — a message she refused to give except to Blount.
‘Where can I take it?’
‘In my room, sir,’ said Bonnifet in his off-hand voice.
Blount followed him out of the room, and Pulmer asked, ‘Who is that?’
‘That? One of the clerks,’ L
ambert said curtly. ‘He’s no good. We shall have to get rid of him.’
‘It’s in your hands,’ said Pulmer. An expression of curiosity and regret crossed his face. ‘I wonder if we’ve done the right thing. Oh, not with regard to you, my dear fellow. About that I’m in no doubt. But — after all, a great writer, a precious influence.’
Lambert was silent.
‘True — his influence rests on what he seems to be in his books rather than on what — with all due respect to him — he may be in his personal life. Dear me. Nor have I had any experience of working with him. Tell me, was he — as his friends and admirers we can speak frankly — was he a good administrator?’
Lambert passed his tongue over his lips. ‘Frankly, no.’
‘Ah, I wondered.’
‘After all,’ said Lambert in an easy tone, ’he had other things to do than organise the Institute. He had his writing. Why should we be surprised that he felt entitled to take days or even weeks off — over and above his three months’ vacation in the year, I mean — to finish a chapter or an essay? I was here. I — to my regret — am not a writer.’
Pulmer smiled. ‘We benefit,’ he said.
Smiling back at him, with deference and a flicker of malice, Lambert said, ‘I shall do my best.’
‘Poor Gregory,’ Pulmer sighed.
‘He is our greatest novelist,’ Lambert said. ‘A genius.’
He was, as he said it, wholly sincere. With great coolness he reflected that none of the faults he had exposed in his Mott mis à nu destroyed the fact that Gregory had imposed himself on several countries as a novelist too large to be snubbed by the jealous dead, themselves at the mercy of the market, the so mysterious market, ruled subterraneously by God knows what demon — the goods marked up today, down tomorrow: Proust, Gide, both down now, Henry James up…. He felt a great many things, fleetingly, about his old friend — regret, contempt, benevolence, pity. They met at the same point of discreet satisfaction: as a power in the world, Gregory was finished. This meeting had seen the end of him.
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