'But why should I have him, if I don't want to?'
'Why indeed? Meanwhile, however, keeping him dangling's mere torture.'
'But I like him,' said Lucy. 'He's such good company. Too young, of course; but really rather perfect. And I assure you, I don't torment him. He torments himself.'
Spandrell delayed his laughter long enough to whistle for the taxi he had seen at the end of the street. The cab wheeled round and came to a halt in front of them. He was still silently laughing when they climbed in. 'Still, he only gets what's due to him,' Spandrell went on from his dark corner. 'He's the real type of murderee.'
'Murderee?'
'It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cutthroats are born to be hanged. You can see it in their faces. There's a victim type as well as a criminal type. Walter's the obvious victim; he fairly invites maltreatment.'
'Poor Walter!'
'And it's one's duty,' Spandrell went on, 'to see that he gets it.'
'Why not to see that he doesn't get it, poor lamb?'
'One should always be on the side of destiny. Walter's manifestly born to catch it. It's one's duty to give his fate a helping hand. Which I'm glad to see you're already doing.'
'But I tell you, I'm not. Have you a light?' Spandrell struck a match. The cigarette between her thin lips, she leaned forward to drink the flame. He had seen her leaning like this, with the same swift, graceful and ravenous movement, leaning towards him to drink his kisses. And the face that approached him now was focussed and intent on the flame, as he had seen it focussed and intent upon the inner illumination of approaching pleasure. There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half a dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings. She drew back; Spandrell threw the match out of the window. The red cigarette end brightened and faded in the darkness.
'Do you remember that curious time of ours in Paris?' he asked, still thinking of her intent and eager face. Once, three years before, he had been her lover for perhaps a month.
Lucy nodded. 'I remember it as rather perfect, while it lasted. But you were horribly fickle.'
'In other words I didn't make as much of an outcry as you hoped I would, when you went off with Tom Trivet.'
'That's a lie!' Lucy was indignant. 'You'd begun to fade away long before I even dreamt of Tom.'
'Well, have it your own way. As a matter of fact you weren't enough of a murderee for my taste.' There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman. She could pursue her pleasure as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved. Spandrell didn't like to be used and exploited for someone else's entertainment. He wanted to be the user. But with Lucy there was no possibility of slave-holding. 'I'm like you,' he added. 'I need victims.'
'The implication being that I'm one of the criminals?'
'I thought we'd agreed to that long ago, my dear Lucy.'
'I've never agreed to anything in my life,' she protested,' and never will. Not for more than half an hour at a time, at any rate.'
'It was in Paris, do you remember? At the Chaumiere. There was a young man painting his lips at the next table.'
'Wearing a platinum and diamond bracelet.' She nodded, smiling. 'And you called me an angel, or something.'
'A bad angel,' he qualified, 'a born bad angel.'
'For an intelligent man, Maurice, you talk a lot of drivel. Do you genuinely believe that some things are right and some wrong?'
Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. 'Dear Lucy,' he said, 'you're magnificent. And you must never bury your talents. Well done, thou good and faithful succubus!' He kissed her hand again. 'Go on doing your duty as you've already done it. That's all heaven asks of you.'
'I merely try to amuse myself.' The cab drew up in front of her little house in Bruton Street. 'God knows,' she added as she stepped out, 'without much success. Here, I've got money.' She handed the driver a ten-shilling note. Lucy insisted, when she was with men, on doing as much of the paying as possible. Paying, she was independent, she could call her own tune. 'And nobody gives me much help,' she went on, as she fumbled with her latchkey. 'You're all so astonishingly dull.'
In the dining-room a rich still-life of bottles, fruits and sandwiches was awaiting them. Round the polished flanks of the vacuum flask their reflections walked fantastically in a non-Euclidean universe. Professor Dewar had liquefied hydrogen in order that Lucy's soup might be kept hot for her into the small hours. Over the sideboard hung one of John Bidlake's paintings of the theatre. A curve of the gallery, a slope of faces, a corner of the bright proscenium.
'How good that is!' said Spandrell shading his eyes to see it more clearly.
Lucy made no comment. She was looking at herself in an old grey-glassed mirror.
'What shall I do when I'm old?' she suddenly asked.
'Why not die?' suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.
'I think I'll take to science, like the Old Man. Isn't there such a thing as human zoology? I'd get a bit tired of frogs. Talking of frogs,' she added, 'I rather liked that little carroty man--what's his name?--Illidge. How he does hate us for being rich!'
'Don't lump me in with the rich. If you knew...' Spandrell shook his head. 'Let's hope she'll bring some cash when she comes to-morrow,' he was thinking, remembering the message Lucy had brought from his mother. He had written that the case was urgent.
'I like people who can hate,' Lucy went on.
'Illidge knows how to. He's fairly stuffed with theories and bile and envy. He longs to blow you all up.'
'Then why doesn't he? Why don't you? Isn't that what your club's there for?'
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. 'There's a slight difference between theory and practice, you know. And when one's a militant communist and a scientific materialist and an admirer of the Russian Revolution, the theory's uncommonly queer. You should hear our young friend talking about murder! Political murder is what especially interests him, of course; but he doesn't make much distinction between the different branches of the profession. One kind, according to him, is as harmless and morally indifferent as another. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. And so on and so forth. Queer,' Spandrell commented parenthetically, 'how old-fashioned and even primitive the latest manifestations of art and politics generally are! Young Illidge talks like a mixture of Lord Tennyson in In Memoriam and a Mexican Indian, or a Malay trying to make up his mind to run amok. Justifying the most primitive, savage, animal indifference to life and individuality by means of obsolete scientific arguments. Very queer indeed.'
'But why should the science be obsolete?' asked Lucy
'Seeing that he's a scientist himself...'
'But also a communist. Which means he's committed to nineteenth-century materialism. You can't be a true communist without being a mechanist. You've got to believe that the only fundamental realities are space, time and mass, and that all the rest is nonsense, mere illusion and mostly bourgeois illusion at that. Poor Illidge! He's sadly worried by Einstein and Edington. And how he hates Henri Poincare! How furious he gets with old Mach! They're undermining his simple faith. They're telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention. The idea's as inexpressibly shocking and painful to him as the idea of the non-existence of Jesus would be to a Christian. He's a scientist, but his principles make him fight against any scientific theory that's less than fifty years old. It's exquisitely comic.'
'I'm sure it is,' said Lucy, yawning. 'That is, if you happen to be interested in theories, which I'm not.'
'But I am,' retorted Spandrell; 'so I don't apologize. But if you prefer it, I can give yo
u examples of his practical inconsistencies. I discovered not long ago, quite accidentally, that Illidge has the most touching sense of family loyalty. He keeps his mother, he pays for his younger brother's education, he gave his sister fifty pounds when she married.'
'What's wrong in that?'
'Wrong? But it's disgustingly bourgeois! Theoretically he sees no distinction between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized society, she'd be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he sends her I don't know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he'd been caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. "One of these days," I threatened, "I'll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party." And what's more, I will.'
'Unless you just go on chattering, like everybody else.'
'Unless,' Spandrell agreed, ' I just go on chattering.'
'Let me know if you ever stop chattering and do something. It might be lively.'
'Deathly, if anything.'
'But the deathly sort of liveliness is the most lively, really.' Lucy frowned. 'I'm so sick of the ordinary conventional kinds of liveliness. Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm. You know. It's silly, it's monotonous. Energy seems to have so few ways of manifesting itself nowadays. It was different in the past, I believe.'
'There was violence as well as love-making. Is that what you mean?'
'That's it.' She nodded. 'The liveliness wasn't so exclusively...so exclusively bitchy, to put it bluntly.'
'They broke the sixth commandment too. There are too many policemen nowadays.'
'Many too many. They don't allow you to stir an eyelid. One ought to have had all the experiences.'
'But if none of them are either right or wrong--which is what you seem to feel--what's the point?'
'The point? But they might be amusing, they might be exciting.'
'They could never be very exciting if you didn't feel they were wrong.' Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city. 'Some people,' he went on meditatively, trying to formulate the vague obscurities of his own feelings,'some people can only realize goodness by offending against it.' But when the old offences have ceased to be felt as offences, what then? The argument pursued itself internally. The only solution seemed to be to commit new and progressively more serious offences, to have all the experiences, as Lucy would say in her jargon. 'One way of knowing God,' he concluded slowly, 'is to deny Him.'
'My good Maurice!' Lucy protested.
'I '1 stop.' He laughed. 'But really, if it's a case of "my good Maurice"' (he imitated her tone), 'if you're equally unaware of goodness and offence against goodness, what is the point of having the sort of experiences the police interfere with?'
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. 'Curiosity. One's bored.'
'Alas, one is.' He laughed again. 'All the same, I do think the cobbler should stick to his last.'
'But what is my last?'
Spandrell grinned. 'Modesty,' he began, 'forbids...'
CHAPTER XIII
Walter travelled down to Fleet Street feeling not exactly happy, but at least calm--calm with the knowledge that everything was now settled. Yes, everything had been settled; everything--for in the course of last night's emotional upheaval, everything had come to the surface. To begin with, he was never going to see Lucy again; that was definitely decided and promised, for his own good as well as for Marjorie's. Next he was going to spend all his evenings with Marorie. And finally he was going to ask Burlap for more money. Everything was settled. The very weather seemed to know it. It was a day of white insistent mist, so intrinsically calm that all the noises of London seemed an irrelevance. The traffic roared and hurried, but somehow without touching the essential stillness and silence of the day. Everything was settled; the world was starting afresh--not very exultantly, perhaps, not at all brilliantly, but with resignation, with a determined calm that nothing could disturb.
Remembering the incident of the previous evening, Walter had expected to be coldly received at the office. But on the contrary, Burlap was in one of his most genial moods. He too remembered last night and was anxious that Walter should forget it. He called Walter 'old man' and squeezed his arm affectionately, looking up at him from his chair with those eyes that expressed nothing, but were just holes into the darkness inside his skull. His mouth, meanwhile, charmingly and subtly smiled. Walter returned the 'old man' and the smile, but with a painful consciousness of insincerity. Burlap always had that effect on him; in his presence, Walter never felt quite honest or genuine. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. With Burlap he was always, in some obscure fashion, a liar and a comedian. And at the same time all that he said, even when he was speaking his innermost convictions, became a sort of falsehood.
'I liked your article on Rimbaud,' Burlap declared, still pressing Walter's arm, still smiling up at him from his tilted swivel chair.
'I'm glad,' said Walter, feeling uncomfortably that the remark wasn't really addressed to him, but to some part of Burlap's own mind which had whispered, 'You ought to say something nice about his article,' and was having its demands duly satisfied by another part of Burlap's mind.
'What a man!' exclaimed Burlap. 'That was someone who believed in Life, if you like!'
Ever since Burlap had taken over the editorship, the leaders of the Literary World had almost weekly proclaimed the necessity of believing in Life. Burlap's belief in Life was one of the things Walter found most disturbing. What did the words mean? Even now he hadn't the faintest idea. Burlap had never explained. You had to understand intuitively; if you didn't, you were as good as damned. Walter supposed that he was among the damned. He was never likely to forget his first interview with his future chief. 'I hear you're in want of an assistant editor,' he had shyly begun. Burlap nodded. 'Yes, I am.' And after an enormous and horrible silence, he suddenly looked up with his blank eyes and asked: 'Do you believe in Life?' Walter blushed to the roots of his hair and said, Yes. It was the only possible answer. There was another desert of speechlessness and then Burlap looked up again. 'Are you a virgin?' he enquired. Walter blushed yet more violently, hesitated and at last shook his head. It was only later that he discovered, from one of Burlap's own articles, that the man had been modelling his behaviour on that of Tolstoy--' going straight to the great simple fundamental things,' as Burlap himself described the old Salvationist's soulful impertinences.
'Yes, Rimbaud certainly believed in Life,' Walter acquiesced feebly, feeling while he spoke the words as he felt when he had to write a formal letter of condolence. Talking about believing in Life was as bad as talking about grieving with you in your great bereavement.
'He believed in it so much,' Burlap went on, dropping his eyes (to Walter's great relief) and nodding as he ruminatively pronounced the words,'so profoundly that he was prepared to give it up. That's how I interpret his abandonment of literature--as a deliberate sacrifice.' (He uses the big words too easily, thought Walter.) 'He that would save his life must lose it.' (Oh, oh!) 'To be the finest poet of your generation and, knowing it, to give up poetry--that's losing your life to save it. That's really believing in life. His faith was so strong, that he was prepared to lose his life, in the certainty of gaining a new and better one.' (Much too easily! Walter was filled with embarrassment.) 'A life of mystical contemplation and intuition. Ah, if only one knew what he did and thought in Africa, if only one knew!'
'He smuggled guns for the Emperor Menelik,' Walter had the courage to reply. 'And to judge from his letters, he seems to have thought chiefly about making enough money to settle down. He carr
ied forty thousand francs in his belt. A stone and a half of gold round his loins.' Talking of gold, he was thinking, I really ought to speak to him about my screw.
But at the mention of Menelik's rifles and the forty thousand francs, Burlap smiled with an expression of Christian forgiveness. 'But do you really imagine,' he asked, 'that gun-running and money were what occupied his mind in the desert? The author of Les Illuminations?'
Walter blushed, as though he had been guilty of some nasty solecism. 'Those are the only facts we know,' he said self-excusingly.
'But there is an insight that sees deeper than the mere facts.' 'Deeper insight' was Burlap's pet name for his own opinion. 'He was realizing the new life, he was gaining the Kingdom of Heaven.'
'It's a hypothesis,' said Walter, wishing uncomfortably that Burlap had never read the New Testament.
'For me,' retorted Burlap, 'it's a certainty. An absolute certainty.' He spoke very emphatically, he wagged his head with violence. 'A complete and absolute certainty,' he repeated, hypnotizing himself by the reiteration of the phrase into a fictitious passion of conviction. 'Complete and absolute.' He was silent; but within, he continued to lash himself into mystical fury. He thought of Rimbaud until he himself was Rimbaud. And then suddenly his devil popped out its grinning face and whispered, 'A stone and a half of gold round his loins.' Burlap exorcised the creature by changing the subject. 'Have you seen the new books for review?' he said, pointing to a double pile of volumes on the corner of the table. 'Yards of contemporary literature.' He became humorously exasperated. 'Why can't authors stop? It's a disease. It's a bloody flux, like what the poor lady suffered from in the Bible, if you remember.'
What Walter chiefly remembered was the fact that the joke was Philip Quarles's.
Burlap got up and began to look through the books. 'Pity the poor reviewer!' he said with a sigh.
The poor reviewer--wasn't that the cue for his little speech about salary? Walter nerved himself, focussed his will. 'I was wondering,' he began.
But Burlap had almost simultaneously begun on his own account. 'I'll get Beatrice to come in,' he said and pressed the bell-push three times. 'Sorry. What were you saying?'