Point Counter Point

  Walter was not touched. The sight of her heaving shoulders just exasperated and bored him. He looked at her with a cold and weary anger.

  'Go away,' she cried through her tears, 'go away.' She did not want him to be there, triumphing over her, while she cried. 'Go away.'

  'Do you really want me to go?' he asked with the same cool, aggravating politeness.

  'Yes, go, go.'

  'Very well,' he said and opening the door, he went.

  At Camden Town he took a cab and was at Bruton Street just in time to find Lucy on the point of going out to dinner.

  'You're coming out with me,' he announced very calmly.

  'Alas!'

  'Yes, you are.'

  She looked at him curiously and he looked back at her, with steady eyes, smiling, with a queer look of amused triumph and invincible obstinate power, which she had never seen on his face before. 'All right,' she said at last and, ringing for the maid, 'Telephone to Lady Sturlett, will you,' she ordered, 'and say I'm sorry, but I've got a very bad headache and can't come to-night.' The maid retired. 'Well, are you grateful now?'

  'I'm beginning to be,' he answered.

  'Beginning?' She assumed indignation. 'I like your damned impertinence.'

  'I know you do,' said Walter, laughing. And she did. That night Lucy became his mistress.

  It was between three and four in the afternoon. Spandrell had only just got out of bed. He was still unshaved; over his pyjamas he wore a dressing-gown of rough brown cloth, like a monk's cassock. (The monastic note was studied; he liked to remind himself of the ascetics. He liked, rather childishly, to play the part of the anchorite of diabolism.) He had filled the kettle and was waiting for it to boil on the gas ring. It seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time about it. His mouth was dry and haunted by a taste like the fumes of heated brass. The brandy was having its usual effects.

  'Like as the hart desireth the water brooks,' he said to himself,'so longeth my soul...With a morningafter thirst. If only Grace could be bottled like Perrier water.'

  He walked to the window. Outside a radius of fifty yards everything in the universe had been abolished by the white mist. But how insistently that lamp-post thrust itself up in front of the next house on the right, how significantly! The world had been destroyed and only the lamp-post, like Noah, preserved from the universal cataclysm. And he had never even noticed there was a lamp-post there; it simply hadn't existed until this moment. And now it was the only thing that existed. Spandrell looked at it with a fixed and breathless attention. This lamp-post alone in the mist--hadn't he seen something like it before? This queer sensation of being with the sole survivor of the Deluge was somehow familiar. Staring at the lamp-post, he tried to remember. Or rather he breathlessly didn't try; he held back his will and his conscious thoughts, as a policeman might hold back the crowd round a woman who had fainted in the street; he held back his consciousness to give the stunned memory a place to stretch itself, to breathe, to come to life. Staring at the lamp-post, Spandrell waited, agonized and patient, like a man who feels he is just going to sneeze, tremulously awaiting the anticipated paroxysm; waited for the long-dead memory to revive. And suddenly it sprang up, broad awake, out of its catalepsy and, with a sense of enormous relief, Spandrell saw himself walking up the steep hard-trodden snow of the road leading from Cortina towards the pass of Falzarego. A cold white cloud had descended on to the valley. There were no more mountains. The fantastic coral pinnacles of the Dolomites had been abolished. There were no more heights and depths. The world was only fifty paces wide, white snow on the ground, white cloud around and above. And every now and then, against the whiteness appeared some dark shape of house or telegraph pole, of tree or man or sledge, portentous in its isolation and uniqueness, each one a solitary survivor from the general wreck. It was uncanny, but how thrillingly new and how beautiful in a strange way! The walk was an adventure; he felt excited and a kind of anxiety intensified his happiness till he could hardly bear it.

  'But look at that little chalet on the left,' he cried to his mother. 'That wasn't here when I came up last. I swear it wasn't here.'

  He knew the road perfectly, he had been up and down it a hundred times and never seen that little chalet. And now it loomed up almost appallingly, the only dark and definite thing in a vague world of whiteness.

  'Yes, I've never noticed it, either,' said his mother. 'Which only shows,' she added with that note of tenderness which always came into her voice when she mentioned her dead husband, ' how right your father was. Mistrust all evidence, he used to say, even your own.'

  He took her hand and they walked on together in silence, pulling their sledges after them.

  Spandrell turned away from the window. The kettle was boiling. He filled the tea-pot, poured himself out a cup and drank. Symbolically enough, his thirst remained unassuaged. He went on sipping, meditatively, remembering and analysing those quite incredible felicities of his boyhood. Winters among the Dolomites. Springs in Tuscany or Provence or Bavaria, summers by the Mediterranean or in Savoy. After his father's death and before he went to school, they lived almost continuously abroad--it was cheaper. And almost all his holidays from school were spent out of England. From seven to fifteen, he had moved from one European beauty spot to another, appreciating their beauty, what was more--genuinely, a precocious Childe Harold. England seemed a little tame afterwards. He thought of another day in winter. Not misty, this time, but brilliant; the sun hot in a cloudless sky; the coral precipices of the Dolomites shining pink and orange and white above the woods and the snow slopes. They were sliding down on skis through the bare larchwoods. Streaked with tree-shadows, the snow was like an immense white and blue tiger-skin beneath their feet. The sunlight was orange among the leafless twigs, sea-green in the hanging beards of moss. The powdery snow sizzled under their skis, the air was at once warm and eager. And when he emerged from the woods the great rolling slopes lay before him like the contours of a wonderful body, and the virgin snow was a smooth skin, delicately grained in the low afternoon sunlight, and twinkling with diamonds and spangles. He had gone ahead. At the outskirts of the wood he halted to wait for his mother. Looking back he watched her coming through the trees. A strong tall figure, still young and agile, the young face puckered into a smile. Down she came towards him, and she was the most beautiful and at the same time the most homely and comforting and familiar of beings. 'Well!' she said, laughing, as she drew up beside him

  'Well!' He looked at her and then at the snow and the tree-shadows and the great bare rocks and the blue sky, then back again at his mother. And all at once he was filled with an intense, inexplicable happiness.

  'I shall never be so happy as this again,' he said to himself, when they set off once more. 'Never again, even though I live to be a hundred.' He was only fifteen at the time, but that was how he felt and thought.

  And his words had been prophetic. That was the last of his happinesses. Afterwards...No, no. He preferred not to think of afterwards. Not at the moment. He poured himself out another cup of tea.

  A bell rang startlingly. He went to the door of the flat and opened it. It was his mother.

  'You?' Then he suddenly remembered that Lucy had said something.

  'Didn't you get my message?' Mrs. Knoyle asked anxiously.

  'Yes. But I'd clean forgotten.'

  'But I thought you needed...' she began. She was afraid she might have intruded; his face was so unwelcoming.

  The corners of his mouth ironically twitched. 'I do need,' he said. He was chronically penniless.

  They passed into the other room. The windows, Mrs. Knoyle observed at a glance, were foggy with grime. On shelf and mantel the dust lay thick. Sooty cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. She had tried to get Maurice's permission to send a woman to clean up two or three times a week. But, 'None of your slumming,' he had said. 'I prefer to wallow. Filth's my natural element. Besides, I haven't a distinguished military position to keep up.' He laughed, noiselessly, sh
owing his big strong teeth. That was for her. She never dared to repeat her offer. But the room really did need cleaning.

  'Would you like some tea? ' he asked. 'It's ready. I'm just having breakfast,' he added, purposely drawing attention to the irregularity of his way of life.

  She refused, without venturing any comment on the unusual breakfast hour. Spandrell was rather disappointed that he had not succeeded in drawing her. There was a long silence.

  From time to time Mrs. Knoyle glanced almost surreptitiously at her son. He was staring fixedly into the empty fireplace. He looked old, she thought, and rather ill and dreadfully uncared for. She tried to recognize the child, the big schoolboy he had been in those far-off times when they were happy, just the two of them together. She remembered how distressed he used to be when she didn't wear what he thought were the right clothes, when she wasn't smart or failed to look her best. He was as jealously proud of her as she was of him. But the responsibility of his upbringing weighed on her heavily. The future had always frightened her; she had always been afraid of taking decisions; she had no trust in her own powers. Besides, after her husband's death, there wasn't much money; and she had no head for affairs, no talent for management. How to afford to send him to the university, how to get him started in life? The questions tormented her. She lay awake at night, wondering what she 6ught to do. Life terrified her. She had a child's capacity for happiness, but also a child's fears, a child's inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified. And to make matters worse, after Maurice went to school she was very lonely. He was with her only in the holidays. For nine months out of the twelve she was alone, with nobody to love but her old dachshund. And at last even he failed her-fell ill, poor old beast, and had to be put out of his misery. It was shortly after poor old Fritz's death that she first met Major Knoyle, as he then was.

  'You say you brought that money?' Spandrell asked, breaking the long silence.

  Mrs. Knoyle flushed. 'Yes, it's here,' she said and opened her bag. The moment to speak had come. It was her duty to admonish, and the wad of bank notes gave her the right, the power. But the duty was odious and she had no wish to use her power. She raised her eyes and looked at him imploringly. 'Maurice,' she begged, 'why can't you be reasonable? It's such a madness, such a folly.'

  Spandrell raised his eyebrows. 'What's a madness?' he asked, pretending not to know what she was talking about.

  Embarrassed at being thus compelled to specify her vague reproaches, Mrs. Knoyle blushed. 'You know what I mean,' she said. 'This way of living. It's bad and stupid. And such a waste, such a suicide. Besides, you're not happy; I can see that.'

  'Mayn't I even be unhappy, if I want to?' he asked ironically.

  'But do you want to make me unhappy too? ' she asked. 'Because if you do, you succeed, Maurice; you succeed. You make me terribly unhappy.' The tears came into her eyes. She felt in her bag for a handkerchief.

  Spandrell got up from his chair and began to walk up and down the room. 'You didn't think much of my happiness in the past,' he said.

  His mother did not answer, but went on noiselessly crying.

  'When you married that man,' he went on, 'did you think of my happiness?'

  'You know I thought it would be for the best,' she answered brokenly. She had explained it so often; she couldn't begin again. 'You know it,' she repeated.

  'I only know what I felt and said at the time,' he answered. 'You didn't listen to me, and now you tell me you wanted to make me happy.'

  'But you were so unreasonable,' she protested. 'If you had given me any reasons...'

  'Reasons,' he repeated slowly. 'Did you honestly expect a boy of fifteen to tell his mother the reasons why he didn't want her to share her bed with a stranger?'

  He was thinking of that book which had circulated surreptitiously among the boys of his house at school. Disgusted and ashamed, but irresistibly fascinated, he had read it at night, by the light of an electric torch, under the bedclothes. A Girls' School in Paris it was called, innocuously enough; but the contents were pure pornography. The sexual exploits of the military were pindarically exalted. A little later his mother wrote to him that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. 'It's no good, mother, he said aloud. 'Hadn't we better talk about something else?'

  Mrs. Knoyle drew her breath sharply and with determination, gave her eyes a final wipe and put away the handkerchief. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It was stupid of me. Perhaps I'd better go.'

  Secretly she hoped that he would protest, would beg her to stay. But he said nothing.

  'Here's the money,' she added.

  He took the folded bank-notes and stuffed them into the pocket of his dressing-gown. 'I'm sorry I had to ask you for it,' he said. 'I was in a hole. I'll try not to get into it again.'

  He looked at her for a moment, smiling, and suddenly, through the worn mask, she seemed to see him as he was in boyhood. Tenderness like a soft warmth expanded within her, soft but irresistible. It would not be contained. She laid her hands on his shoulders.

  'Goodbye, my darling boy,' she said, and Spandrell recognized in her voice that note which used to come into it when she talked to him of his dead father. She leaned forward to kiss him. Averting his face, he passively suffered her lips to touch his cheek.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Miss Fulkes rotated the terrestrial globe until the crimson triangle of India was opposite their eyes. 'That's Bombay,' she said, pointing with her pencil. 'That's where Daddy and Mummy took the ship. Bombay is a big town in India,' she went on instructively. 'All this is India.'

  'Why is India red?' asked little Phil.

  'I told you before. Try to remember.'

  'Because it's English?' Phil remembered, of course; but the explanation had seemed inadequate. He had hoped for a better one this time.

  'There, you see, you can remember if you try,' said Miss Fulkes, scoring a small triumph.'

  'But why should English things be red?'

  'Because red is England's colour. Look, here's little England.' She spun the globe. 'Red too.'

  'We live in England, don't we?' Phil looked out of the window. The lawn with its Wellingtonia, the clotpolled elms looked back at him.

  'Yes, we live just about here,' and Miss Fulkes poked the red island in the stomach.

  'But it's green, where we live,' said Phil. 'Not red.'

  Miss Fulkes tried to explain, as she had done so many times before, just precisely what a map was.

  In the garden Mrs. Bidlake walked among her flowers, weeding and meditating. Her walking-stick had a little pronged spud at the end of it; she could weed without bending. The weeds in the flower-beds were young and fragile; they yielded without a struggle to the spud. But the dandelions and plantains on the lawn were more formidable enemies. The dandelions' roots were like long tapering white serpents. The plantains, when she tried to pull them up, desperately clawed the earth.

  It was the season of tulips. Duc van Thol and Keizers Kroon, Proserpine and Thomas Moore stood at attention in all the beds, glossy in the light. Atoms in the sun vibrated and their trembling filled all space. Eyes felt the pulses as light; the tulip atoms absorbed or reverberated the accorded movements, creating colours for whose sake the burgesses of seventeenth-century Haarlem were prepared to part with hoarded guilders. Red tulips and yellow, white and parti-coloured, smooth or feathery--Mrs. Bidlake looked at them, happily. They were like those gay and brilliant young men, she reflected, in Pinturicchio's frescoes at Siena. She halted so as to be able to shut her eyes and think more thoroughly of Pinturicchio. Mrs. Bidlake could only think really well when she had her eyes shut. Her face tilted a little upwards towards the sky, her heavy, wax-white eyelids closed against the light, she stood remembering, confusedly thinking. Pinturicchio, Siena, the solemn huge cathedral--the Tuscan Middle Ages marched past her in a rich and confused pageant....She had been brought up
on Ruskin. Watts had painted her portrait as a child. Rebelling against the Pre-Raphaelites, she had thrilled with an admiration that was quickened, at first, by a sense of sacrilege, over the Impressionists. It was because she loved art that she had married John Bidlake. Liking his pictures, she had imagined, when the painter of 'The Haymakers' had paid his court to her, that she adored the man. He was twenty years her senior; his reputation as a husband was bad; her family objected strenuously. She did not care. John Bidlake was embodied Art. His was a sacred function and through his function he appealed to all her vague, but ardent, idealism.

  John Bidlake's reasons for desiring to marry yet again were unromantic. Travelling in Provence he had caught typhoid. ('That's what comes of drinking water,' he used to say afterwards. 'If only I'd stuck to Burgundy and cognac!') After a month in hospital at Avignon he returned to England, a thin and tottering convalescent. Three weeks later influenza, followed by pneumonia, brought him again to death's door. He recovered slowly. The doctor congratulated him on having recovered at all.'do you call this recovering? ' grumbled John Bidlake. 'I feel as though about three-quarters of me were dead and buried.' Accustomed to being well, he was terrified of illness. He saw himself living miserably, a lonely invalid. Marriage would be an alleviation. He decided to marry. The girl must be good-looking--that went without saying. But serious, not flighty; devoted, a stay-at-home.

  In Janet Paston he found all that he had been looking for. She had a face like a saint's; she was serious almost to excess; her adoration for himself was flattering.

  They were married, and ifJohn Bidlake had remained the invalid he had imagined himself doomed to be, the marriage might have been a success. Her devotion would have made up for her incompetence as a nurse; his helplessness would have rendered her indispensable to his happiness. But health returned. Six months after his marriage John Bidlake was entirely his old self. The old self began to behave in the old way. Mrs. Bidlake took refuge from unhappiness in an endless imaginative meditation, which even her two children were hardly able to interrupt.