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 younggirlishly 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 fantastic 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 role 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 b
anged the table.
Rampion frowned. He felt Cuthbert's approbation as a personal insult.
'I'm a counter-revolutionary,' said Spandrell. 'Put 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 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 i8oo. 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 ditour d'un sentier une charogne infame,"' 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 a cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!
Alors, o ma beaute, dites a la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers..."'
'My dear Spandrell!' Lucy held up her hand protestingly.
'Really too necrophilous!' said Willie Weaver.
'Always the same hatred of life,' Rampion was thinking. 'Different kinds of death--the only alternatives.' He looked observantly into Spandrell's face.
'And when you come to think of it,' Illidge was saying, 'the time it took to form the coal measures divided by the length of a human life isn't so hugely different from the life of a sequoia divided by a generation of decay bacteria.'
Cuthbert looked at his watch. 'But good God!' he shouted. 'It's twentyfive to one.' He jumped up. 'And I promised we'd put in an appearance at Widdicombe's party. Peter, Willie! Quick march.'
'But you can't go,' protested Lucy. 'Not so absurdly early.'
'The call of duty,' Willie Weaver explained. 'Stern Daughter of the Voice of God.' He uttered his little cough of self-approbation.
'But it's ridiculous, it's not permissible.' She looked from one to another with a kind of angry anxiety. The dread of solitude was chronic with her. And it was always possible, if one sat up another five minutes, that something really amusing might happen. Besides, it was insufferable that people should do things she didn't want them to do.
'And we too, I'm afraid,' said Mary Rampion rising.
Thank heaven, thought Walter. He hoped that Spandrell would follow the general example.
'But this is impossible!' cried Lucy. 'Rampion, I simply cannot allow it.'
Mark Rampion only laughed. These professional sirens! he thought. She left him entirely cold, she repelled him. In desperation Lucy even appealed to the woman of the party.
'Mrs. Rampion, you must stay. Five minutes more. Only five minutes,' she coaxed.
In vain. The waiter opened the side door. Furtively they slipped out into the darkness.
'Why will they insist on going?' asked Lucy, plaintively.
'Why will we insist on staying?' echoed Spandrell. Walter's heart sank; that meant the man didn't intend to go. 'Surely, that's much more incomprehensible.'
Utterly incomprehensible! On Walter the heat and alcohol were having their usual effects. He was feeling ill as well as miserable. What was the point of sitting on, hopelessly, in this poisonous air? Why not go home at once. Marjorie would be pleased.
'You, at least, are faithful, Walter.' Lucy gave him a smile. He decided to postpone his departure. There was a silence.
Cuthbert and his companions had taken a cab. Refusing all invitations, the Rampions had preferred to walk.
'Thank heaven!' said Mary as the taxi drove away. 'That dreadful Arkwright!'
'Ah, but that woman's worse,' said Rampion.'she gives me the creeps. That poor silly little Bidlake boy. Like a rabbit in front of a weasel.'
'That's male trade unionism. I rather like her for making you men squirm a bit. Serves you right.'
'You might as well like cobras.' Rampion's zoology was wholly symbolical.
'But if it's a matter of creeps, what about Spandrell? He's like a gargoyle, a demon.'
'He's like a silly schoolboy,' said Rampion emphatically. 'He's never grown up. Can't you see that? He's a permanent adolescent. Bothering his head about all the things that preoccupy adolescents. Not being able to live, because he's too busy thinking about death and God and truth and mysticism and all the rest of it; too busy thinking about sins and trying to commit them and being disappointed because he's not succeeding. It's deplorable. The man's a sort of Peter Pan--much worse even than Barrie's disgusting little abortion, because he's got stuck at a sillier age. He's Peter Pan a la Dostoevsky-cum-de Musset-cum-the-Nineties-cum-Bunyan-cum-Byron and the Marquis de Sade. Really deplorable. The more so as he's potentially a very decent human being.'
Mary laughed. 'I suppose I shall have to take your word for it.'
'By the way,' said Lucy, turning to Spandrell. 'I had a message from your mother.' She gave it. Spandrell nodded, but made no comment.
'And the General?' he enquired as soon as she had finished speaking. He wanted no more said about his mother.
'Oh, the General!' Lucy made a grimace. 'I had at least half an hour of Military Intelligence this evening. Really, he oughtn't to be allowed. What about a Society for the Prevention of Generals?'
'I'm an honorary and original member.' r />
'Or why not for the Prevention of the Old, while one was about it?' Lucy went on. 'The old really aren't possible. Except your father, Walter. He's perfect. Really perfect. The only possible old man.'
'One of the few completely impossible, if you only knew.' Among the Bidlakes of Walter's generation the impossibility of old John was almost axiomatic. 'You wouldn't find him quite so perfect if you'd been his wife or his daughter.' As he uttered the words, Walter suddenly remembered Marjorie. The blood rushed to his cheeks.
'Oh, of course, if you will go and choose him as a husband or a father,' said Lucy, ' what can you expect? He's a possible old man just because he's been such an impossible husband and father. Most old people have had the life crushed out of them by their responsibilities. Your father never allowed himself to be squashed. He's had wives and children and all the rest. But he's always lived as though he were a boy on the spree. Not very pleasant for the wives and children, I grant. But how delightful for the rest of us!'
'I suppose so,' said Walter. He had always thought of himself as so utterly unlike his father. But he was acting just as his father had acted.
'Think of him unfilially.'
'I'll try.' How should he think of himself?'
Do, and you'll see that I'm right. One of the few possible old men. Compare him with the others.' She shook her head. 'It's no good; you can't have any dealings with them.'
Spandrell laughed. 'You speak of the old as though they were Kaffirs or Eskimos.'
'Well, isn't that just about what they are? Hearts of gold, and all that. And wonderfully intelligent--in their way, and all things considered. But they don't happen to belong to our civilization. They're aliens. I shall always remember the time I went to tea with some Arab ladies in Tunis. So kind they were, so hospitable. But they would make me eat such uneatable cakes, and they talked French so badly, and there was nothing whatever to say to them, and they were so horrified by my short skirts and my lack of children. Old people always remind me of an Arab tea party. Do you suppose we shall be an Arab tea party when we're old?'