Point Counter Point

  'No, I'm not like that, not like that,' she protested in answer to his whispered adorations. She could not accept such love on false pretences. But his soft lips, brushing her skin, his lightly drawn finger tips were soothing and caressing her into tenderness, were magically transforming her into the gentle, loving, warmhearted object of his adoration, were electrically charging her with all those qualities his whispers had attributed to her and the possession of which she had denied.

  She drew his head on to her breast, she ran her fingers through his hair. 'Darling Walter,' she whispered,'darling Walter.' There was a long silence, a warm still happiness. And then suddenly, just because this silent happiness was so deep and perfect and therefore, in her eyes, intrinsically rather absurd and even rather dangerous in its flawless impersonality, rather menacing to her conscious will, 'Have you gone to sleep, Walter?' she asked and tweaked his ear.

  In the days that followed Walter desperately did his best to credit her with the emotions he himself experienced. But Lucy did not make it easy for him. She did not want to feel that deep tenderness which is a surrender of the will, a breaking down of personal separateness. She wanted to be herself, Lucy Tantamount, in full command of the situation, enjoying herself consciously to the last limit, ruthlessly having her fun; free, not only financially and legally, but emotionally too--emotionally free to have him or not to have him. To drop him as she had taken him, at any moment, whenever she liked. She had no wish to surrender herself. And that tenderness of his--why, it was touching, no doubt, and flattering and rather charming in itself, but a little absurd and, in its anxious demand for a response from her side, really rather tiresome. She would let herself go a little way towards surrender, would suffer herself to be charged by his caresses with some of his tenderness; only to suddenly draw herself back from him into a teasing, provocative detachment. And Walter would be woken from his dream of love into a reality of what Lucy called 'fun,' into the cold daylight of sharply conscious, laughingly deliberate sensuality. She left him unjustified, his guiltiness unpalliated.

  'Do you love me? ' he asked her one night. He knew she didn't. But perversely he wanted to have his knowledge confirmed, made explicit.

  'I think you're a darling,' said Lucy. She smiled up at him. But Walter's eyes remained unansweringly sombre and despairing.

  'But do you love me?' he insisted. Propped on his elbow, he hung over her almost menacingly. Lucy was lying on her back, her hands clasped under her head, her flat breasts lifted by the pull of the stretched muscles. He looked down at her; under his fingers was the curved elastic warmth of the body he had so completely and utterly possessed. But the owner of the body smiled up at him through half-closed eyelids, remote and unattained. 'Do you love me?'

  'You're enchanting.' Something like mockery shone between the dark lashes.

  'But that isn't an answer to my question. Do you love me?'

  Lucy shrugged up her shoulders and made a little grimace

  'Love?' she repeated. 'It's rather a big word, isn't it?' Disengaging one of her hands from under her head she raised it to give a little tug to the lock of brown hair that had fallen across Walter's forehead. 'Your hair's too long,' she said.

  'Then why did you have me?' Walter insisted.

  'If you knew how absurd you looked with your solemn face and your hair in your eyes!' She laughed. 'Like a constipated sheep dog.'

  Walter brushed back the drooping lock. 'I want to be answered,' he went on obstinately. 'Why did you have me?'

  'Why? Because it amused me. Because I wanted to. Isn't that fairly obvious?'

  'Without loving?'

  'Why must you always bring in love?' she asked impatiently.

  'Why?' he repeated. 'But how can you leave it out?'

  'But if I can have what I want without it, why should I put it in? And besides, one doesn't put it in. It happens to one. How rarely! Or perhaps it never happens; I don't know. Anyhow, what's one to do in the intervals?' She took him again by the forelock and pulled his face down towards her own. 'In the intervals, Walter darling, there's you.'

  His mouth was within an inch or two of hers. He stiffened his neck and would not let himself be pulled down any further. 'Not to mention all the others,' he said.

  Lucy tugged harder at his hair. 'Idiot!' she said, frowning. 'Instead of being grateful for what you've got.'

  'But what have I got?' Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes

  'What have I got?' Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes. 'What have I got?'

  Lucy still frowned. 'Why don't you kiss me?' she demanded, as though she were delivering an ultimatum. Walter did not answer, did not stir. 'Oh, very well.' She pushed him away. 'Two can play at that game.'

  Repelled, Walter anxiously bent down to kiss her. Her voice had been hard with menace; he was terrified of losing her. 'I'm a fool,' he said.

  'You are.' Lucy averted her face.

  'I'm sorry.'

  But she would not make peace. 'No, no,' she said, and when, with a hand under her cheek, he tried to turn her face back towards his kisses, she made a quick fierce movement and bit him in the ball of the thumb. Full of hatred and desire, he took her by force.

  'Still bothering about love?' she asked at last, breaking the silence of that languid convalescence which succeeds the fever of accomplished desires.

  Reluctantly, almost with pain, Walter roused himself to answer. Her question in that deep silence was like the spurt of a match in the darkness of the night. The night is limitless, enormous, pricked with stars. The match is struck and all the stars are instantly abolished; there are no more distances and profundities. The universe is reduced to a little luminous cave scooped out of the solid blackness, crowded with brightly lit faces, with hands and bodies and the near familiar objects of common life. In that deep night of silence Walter had been happy. Convalescent after the fever, he held her in his arms, hating no more, but filled with a drowsy tenderness. His spirit seemed to float in the warm serenity between being and annihilation. She stirred within his arms, she spoke, and that marvellous unearthly serenity wavered and broke like a smooth reflecting surface of water suddenly disturbed.

  'I wasn't bothering about anything.' He opened his eyes to find her looking at him, amused and curious. Walter frowned. 'Why do you stare at me? ' he asked.

  'I didn't know it was prohibited.'

  'Have you been looking at me like that all this time?' The idea was strangely unpleasant to him.

  'For hours,' Lucy answered. 'But admiringly, I assure you. I thought you looked really charming. Quite a sleeping beauty.' She was smiling, mockingly; but she spoke the truth. Aesthetically, with a connoisseur's appreciation, she had really been admiring him as he lay there, pale, with closed eyes and as though dead, at her side.

  Walter was not mollified by the flattery. 'I don't like you to exult over me,' he said, still frowning.

  'Exult?'

  'As though you'd killed me.'

  'What an incorrigible romantic!' She laughed. But it was true, all the same. He had looked dead; and death, in these circumstances, had something slightly ridiculous and humiliating about it. Herself alive, wakefully and consciously alive, she had studied his beautiful deadness. Admiringly, but with amused detachment, she had looked at this pale exquisite creature which she had used for her delight and which was now dead. 'What a fool!' she had thought. And 'why do people make themselves miserable, instead of taking the fun that comes to them? ' She had expressed her thoughts in the mocking question which recalled Walter from his eternity. Bothering about love--what a fool!

  'All the same,' insisted Walter, 'you were exulting.'

  'Romantic, romantic!' she jeered. 'You think in such an absurdly unmodern way about everything. Killing and exulting over corpses and love and all the rest of it. It's absurd. You might as well walk about in a stock and a swallow-tail coat. Try to be a little more up to
date.'

  'I prefer to be human.'

  'Living modernly's living quickly,' she went on. 'You can't cart a waggon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days. When you travel by aeroplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind. The good old-fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly. But it's too ponderous nowadays. There's no room for it in the aeroplane.'

  'Not even for a heart?' asked Walter. 'I don't so much care about the soul.' He had cared a great deal about the soul once. But now that his life no more consisted in reading the philosophers, he was somehow less interested in it. 'But the heart,' he added, the heart...'

  Lucy shook her head. 'Perhaps it's a pity,' she admitted. 'But you can't get something for nothing. If you like speed, if you want to cover the ground, you can't have luggage. The thing is to know what you want and to be ready to pay for it. I know exactly what I want; so I sacrifice the luggage. If you choose to travel in a furniture van, you may. But don't expect me to come along with you, my sweet Walter. And don't expect me to take your grand piano in my two-seater monoplane.'

  There was a long silence. Walter shut his eyes. He wished he were dead. The touch of Lucy's hand on his face made him start. He felt her taking his lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. She pinched it gently. 'You have the most delicious mouth,' she said.

  CHAPTER XVI

  The Rampions lived in Chelsea. Their house consisted of one large studio with three or four little rooms tacked on to it. A very nice little place, in its rather ramshackle way, Burlap reflected, as he rang the bell that Saturday afternoon. And Rampion had bought it for nothing, literally for nothing, just before the War. No post-War rents for him. A sheer gift of a hundred and fifty a year. Lucky devil, thought Burlap, forgetting for the moment that he himself was living rent-free at Beatrice's, and only remembering that he had just spent twentyfour and ninepence on a luncheon for himself and Molly d'Exergillod.

  Mary Rampion opened the door. 'Mark's expecting you in the studio,' she said when salutations had been exchanged. Though why on earth, she was inwardly wondering, why on earth he goes on being friendly with this creature passes all comprehension. She herself detested Burlap. 'He's a sort of vulture,' she had said to her husband after the journalist's previous visit. 'No, not a vulture, because vultures only eat carrion. He's a parasite that feeds on living hosts, and always the choicest he can find He has a nose for the choicest; I'll grant him that. A spiritual leech, that's what he is. Why do you let him suck your blood?'

  'Why shouldn't he suck?' retorted Mark. 'He doesn't do me any harm, and he amuses me.'

  'I believe he tickles your vanity,' said Mary. 'It's flattering to have parasites. It's a compliment to the quality of your blood.'

  'And besides,' Rampion went on, he has something in him.'

  'Of course he has something in him,' Mary answered. 'He has your blood in him, among other things. And the blood of all the other people he feeds on.'

  'Now, don't exaggerate, don't be romantic.' Rampion objected to all hyperboles that weren't his own.

  'Well, all I can say is that I don't like parasites.' Mary spoke with finality. 'And next time he comes I shall try sprinkling a little Keating's powder on him, just to see what happens. So there.'

  However, the next time had arrived, and here she was opening the door for him and telling him to find his own way to the studio, as if he were a welcome guest. Even in atavistic Mary the force of polite habit was stronger than her desire to sprinkle Keating's.

  Burlap's thoughts, as he found his own way to the studio, were still of financial matters. The memory of what he had paid for lunch continued to rankle.

  'Not only does Rampion pay no rent,' he was thinking; 'he has hardly any expenses. Living as they do with only one servant, doing most of the housework themselves, having no car, they really must spend ridiculously little. True, they have two children to educate.' But Burlap managed by a kind of mental conjuring trick, at which he was extremely adept, to make the two children disappear out of his field of consciousness. 'And yet Rampion must make quite a lot. He sells his pictures and drawings very decently. And he has a regular market for anything he chooses to write. What does he do with all his money? ' Burlap wondered rather resentfully, as he knocked at the studio door. 'Does he hoard it up? Or what?'

  'Come in,' called Rampion's voice from the other side of the door.

  Burlap adjusted his face to a smile and opened.

  'Ah, it's you,' said Rampion. 'Can't shake hands at the moment, I'm afraid.' He was cleaning his brushes. 'How are you?'

  Burlap shook his head and said that he needed a holiday but couldn't afford to take it. He walked round the studio looking reverentially at the paintings. St. Francis would hardly have approved of most of them. But what life, what energy, what imagination! Life, after all, was the'important thing. 'I believe in life.' That was the first article of one's creed.

  'What's the title of this?' he asked, coming to a halt in front of the canvas on the easel.

  Wiping his hands as he came, Rampion crossed the room and stood beside him. 'That?' he said. 'Well, "Love," I suppose, is what you'd call it.' He laughed; he had worked well that afternoon and was in the best of humours. 'But less refined and soulful people might prefer something less printable.' Grinning, he suggested a few of the less printable alternatives. Burlap's smile was rather sickly. 'I don't know if you can think of any others,' Rampion concluded maliciously. When Burlap was in the neighbourhood it amused him, and at the same time he felt it positively a duty, to be shocking.

  It was a smallish painting, in oils. Low down in the left-hand corner of the canvas, set in a kind of recess between a foreground of dark rocks and tree trunks and a background of precipitous crags, and arched over by a mass of foliage, two figures, a man and a woman, lay embraced. Two naked bodies, the woman's white, the man's a red brown. These two bodies were the source of the whole illumination of the picture. The rocks and tree trunks in the foreground were silhouetted against the light that issued from them. The precipice behind them was golden with the same light. It touched the lower surface of the leaves above, throwing shadows up into a thickening darkness of greenery. It streamed out of the recess in which they lay, diagonally into and across the picture, illuminating and, one felt, creating by its radiance an astounding flora of gigantic roses and zinnias and tulips, with horses and leopards and little antelopes coming and going between the huge flowers, and beyond, a green landscape deepening, plane after plane, into blue, with a glimpse of the sea between the hills and over it the shapes of huge, heroic clouds in the blue sky.

  'It's fine,' said Burlap slowly, wagging his head over the picture.

  'But I can see you hate it.' Mark Rampion grinned with a kind of triumph.

  'But why do you say that?' the other protested with a martyred and gentle sadness.

  'Because it happens to be true. The thing's not gentle-Jesusish enough for you. Love, physical love, as the source of light and life and beauty--Oh, no, no, no! That's much too coarse and carnal; it's quite deplorably straightforward.'

  'But do you take me for Mrs. Grundy?'

  'Not Mrs. Grundy, no.' Rampion's high spirits bubbled over in mockery. 'Say St. Francis. By the way, how's your Life of him progressing? I hope you've got a good juicy description of his licking the lepers.' Burlap made a gesture of protest. Rampion grinned. 'As a matter of fact even St. Francis is a little too grown up for you. Children don't lick lepers. Only sexually perverted adolescents do that. St. Hugh of Lincoln, that's who you are, Burlap. He was a child, you know, a pure sweet chee-yild. Such a dear snuggly-wuggly, lovey-dovey little chap. So wide-eyed and reverent towards the women, as though they were all madonnas. Coming to be petted and have his pains kissed away and be told about poor Jesus--even to have a swig of milk if there happened to be any going.'

  'Really! ' Burlap protested.

  'Yes, really,' Rampion mimicked. He liked baiting the fellow, making him look like a forgiving Christian martyr. Serve
him right for coming in that beloveddisciple attitude and being so disgustingly reverential and admiring.

  'Toddling wide-eyed little St. Hugh. Toddling up to the women so reverently, as though they were all madonnas. But putting his dear little hand under their skirts all the same. Coming to pray, but staying to share madonnina's bed.' Rampion knew a good deal about Burlap's amorous affairs and had guessed more. 'Dear little St. Hugh! How prettily he toddles to the bedroom, and what a darling babyish way he has of snuggling down between the sheets! This sort of thing is much too gross and unspiritual for our little Hughie.' He threw back his head and laughed.

  'Go on, go on,' said Burlap. 'Don't mind me.' And at the sight of his martyred, spiritual smile, Rampion laughed yet louder.

  'Oh dear, oh dear!' he gasped. 'Next time you come, I'll have a copy of Ary Scheffer's "St. Monica and St. Augustine" for you. That ought to make you really happy. Would you like to see some of my drawings?' he asked in another tone. Burlap nodded. 'They're grotesques mostly. Caricatures. Rather ribald, I warn you. But if you will come to look at my work, you must expect what you get.'

  He opened a portfolio that was lying on the table.

  'Why do you imagine I don't like your work?' asked Burlap. 'After all, you're a believer in life and so am I. We have our differences; but on most matters our point of view's the same.'

  Rampion looked up at him. 'Oh, I'm sure it is, I know it is,' he said, and grinned.

  'Well, if you know it's the same,' said Burlap, whose averted eyes had not seen the grin on the other's face, 'why do you imagine I'll disapprove of your drawings?'

  'Why indeed? ' the other mocked.

  'Seeing that the point of view's the same...'

  'It's obvious that the people looking at the view from the same point must be identical.' Rampion grinned again. 'Q. E. D.' He turned away again to take out one of the drawings. 'This is what I call "Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Future."' He handed Burlap the drawing. It was in ink touched with coloured washes, extraordinarily brilliant and lively. Curving in a magnificently sweeping S, a grotesque procession of monsters marched diagonally down and across the paper. Dinosaurs, pterodactyls, titanotheriums, diplodocuses, ichthyosauruses walked, swam or flew at the tail of the procession; the van was composed of human monsters, huge-headed creatures, without limbs or bodies, creeping slug-like on vaguely slimy extensions of chin and neck. The faces were mostly those of eminent contemporaries. Among the crowd Burlap recognized J. J. Thomson and Lord Edward Tantamount, Bernard Shaw, attended by eunuchs and spinsters, and Sir Oliver Lodge, attended by a sheeted and turnipheaded ghost and a walking cathode tube, Sir, Alfred Mond and the head of John D. Rockefeller carried on a charger by a Baptist clergyman, Dr. Frank Crane and Mrs. Eddy wearing haloes, and many others.