'The lizards died of having too much body and too little head,' said Rampion in explanation.'so at least the scientists are never tired of telling us. Physical size is a handicap after a certain point. But what about mental size? These fools seem to forget that they're just as top-heavy and clumsy and disproportioned as any diplodocus. Sacrificing physical life and affective life to mental life. What do they imagine's going to happen?'
Burlap nodded his agreement. 'That's what I've always asked. Man can't live without a heart.'
'Not to mention bowels and skin and bones and flesh,' said Rampion. 'They're just marching towards extinction. And a damned good thing too. Only the trouble is that they're marching the rest of the world along with them. Blast their eyes! I must say, I resent being condemned to extinction because these imbeciles of scientists and moralists and spiritualists and technicians and literary and political uplifters and all the rest of them haven't the sense to see that man must live as a man, not as a monster of conscious braininess and soulfulness. Grr! I'd like to kill the lot of them.' He put the drawing back into the portfolio and extracted another. 'Here are two Outlines of History, the one on the left according to H. G. Wells, the one on the right according to me....'
Burlap looked, smiled, laughed outright. 'Excellent!' he said. The drawing on the left was composed on the lines of a simple crescendo. A very small monkey was succeeded by a very slightly larger pithecanthropus, which was succeeded in its turn by a slightly larger Neanderthal man. Paleolithic man, neolithic man, bronze-age Egyptian and Babylonian man, iron-age Greek and Roman man--the figures slowly increased in size. By the time Galileo and Newton had appeared on the scene, humanity had grown to quite respectable dimensions. The crescendo continued' uninterrupted through Watt and Stephenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker, to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr. H. G. Wells himself and Sir Alfred Mond. Nor was the future neglected. Through the radiant mist of prophecy the forms of Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound away in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, towards Utopian infinity The drawing on the right had a less optimistic composition of peaks and declines. The small monkey very soon blossomed into a good-sized bronze-age man, who gave place to a very large Greek and a scarcely smaller Etruscan. The Romans grew smaller again. The monks of the Thebaid were hardly distinguishable from the primeval little monkeys. There followed a number of good-sized Florentines, English, French. They were succeeded by revolting monsters labelled Calvin and Knox, Baxter and Wesley. The stature of the representative men declined. The Victorians had begun to be dwarfish and misshapen. Their twentieth-century successors were abortions. Through the mists of the future one could see a diminishing company of little gargoyles and foetuses with heads too large for their squelchy bodies, the tails of apes and the faces of our most eminent contemporaries, all biting and scratching and disembowelling one another with that methodical and systematic energy which belongs only to the very highly civilized.
'I'd like to have one or two of these for the World,' said Burlap, when they had looked through the contents of the portfolio. 'We don't generally reproduce drawings. We're frankly missionaries, not an art for art concern. But these things of yours are parables as well as pictures. I must say,' he added, 'I envy you your power of saying things so immediately and economically. It would take me hundreds and thousands of words to say the same things less vividly in an essay.'
Rampion nodded. 'That's why I've almost given up writing for the moment. Writing's not much good for saying what I find I want to say now. And what a comfort to escape from words! Words, words, words, they shut one off from the universe. Three-quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. And often not even with those--only with some poet's damned metaphorical rigmarole about a thing. "Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough," for example. Or "every fall soothing the raven wing of darkness till it smiled." Or even" then will I visit with a roving kiss the vale of lilies and the bower of bliss."' He looked at Burlap with a grin. 'Even the bower of bliss is turned into a metaphorical abstraction. Vale of lilies, indeed! Oh, these words! I'm thankful to have escaped from them. It's like getting out of a prison--oh, a very elegant fantastic sort of prison, full of frescoes and tapestries and what not. But one prefers the genuine country outside. Painting, I find, puts you in real touch with it. I can say what I want to say.'
'Well, all I can do,' said Burlap, 'is to provide an audience to listen to what you've got to say.'
'Poor devils!' laughed Rampion. 'But I think they ought to listen. One has a responsibility. That's why I'd like to publish some of your drawings in the World. I feel it's really a duty.'
'Oh, if it's a question of the categorical imperative,' Rampion laughed again, 'why then of course you must. Take what you like. The more shocking the drawings you publish, the better I shall be pleased.'
Burlap shook his head. 'We must begin mildly,' he said. He didn't believe in Life to the point of taking any risks with the circulation.
'Mildly, mildly,' the other mockingly repeated. 'You're all the same, all you newspaper men. No jolts. Safety first. Painless literature. No prejudices extracted or ideas hammered in except under ail anaesthetic. Readers kept permanently in a state of twilight sleep. You're hopeless, all of you.'
'Hopeless,' repeated Burlap penitently, 'I know. But, alas, one simply must compromise a little with the world, the flesh and the devil.'
'I don't mind your doing that,' Rampion answered. 'What I resent is the disgusting way you compromise with heaven, respectability and Jehovah. Still, I suppose in the circumstances you can't help it. Take what you want.'
Burlap made his selection. 'I'll take these,' he said at last, holding up three of the least polemical and scandalous of the drawings. 'Is that all right?'
Rampion glanced at them. 'If you'd waited another week,' he grumbled, 'I'd have had that copy of Ary Scheffer ready for you.'
'I'm afraid,' said Burlap with that wistfully spiritual expression which always came over his face when he began to speak about money, 'I'm afraid I shan't be able to pay much for them.'
'Ah, well. I'm used to it,' Rampion shrugged his shoulders. Burlap was glad he took it like that. And after all, he reflected, it was true. Rampion wasn't used to being paid much. And with his way of living he did not need much. No car, no servants...
'One wishes one could,' he said aloud, drifting away into impersonality. 'But the paper...' He shook his head. 'Trying to persuade people to love the highest when they see it doesn't pay. One might manage four guineas a drawing.'
Rampion laughed. 'Not exactly princely. But take them. Take them for nothing if you like.'
'No, no,' protested Burlap. 'I wouldn't do that. The World doesn't live on charity. It pays for what it uses--not much, alas, but something, it pays something. I make a point of that,' he went on, wagging his head, 'even if I have to pay out of my own pocket. It's a question of principle. Absolutely of principle,' he insisted, contemplating with a thrill of justifiable satisfaction the upright and selfsacrificing Denis Burlap who paid contributors out of his own pocket and in whose existence he was beginning, as he talked, almost genuinely to believe. He talked on, and with every word the outlines of this beautifully poor but honest Burlap became clearer before his inward eyes; and at the same time the World crept closer and closer to the brink of insolvency, while the bill for lunch grew momently larger and larger, and his income correspondingly decreased. Rampion eyed him curiously. What the devil is he lashing himself up into a fury about this time? he wondered. A possible explanation suddenly occurred to him. When Burlap next paused for breath, he nodded sympathetically.
'What you need is a capitalist,' he said. 'If I had a few hundreds or thousands to spare, I'd put them into the World. But alas, I haven't. Not sixpence,' he concluded, almost triumphantly, and the sympathetic expression turned suddenly into a grin.
That even
ing Burlap addressed himself to the question of Franciscan poverty. 'Barefooted through the Umbrian hills she goes, the Lady Poverty.' It was thus that he began his chapter. His prose, in moments of exaltation, was apt to turn into blank verse.... 'Her feet are set on the white dusty roads that seem, to one who gazes from the walls of the little cities, taut stretched white ribbons in the plain below...'
There followed references to the gnarled olive trees, the vineyards, the terraced fields,' the great white oxen with their curving horns,' the little asses patiently carrying their burdens up the stony paths, the blue mountains, the hill towns in the distance, each like a little New Jerusalem in a picture book, the classical waters of Clitumnus and the yet more classical waters of Trasimene. 'That was a land,' continued Burlap, 'and that a time when poverty was a practical, workable ideal. The land supplied all the needs of those who lived on it; there was little functional specialization; every peasant was, to a great extent, his own manufacturer as well as his own butcher, baker, green-grocer and vintner. It was a society in which money was still comparatively unimportant. The majority lived in an almost moneyless condition. They dealt directly in things--household stuff of their own making and the kindly fruits of the earth--and so had no need of the precious metals which buy things. St. Francis's ideal of poverty was practicable then, because it held up for admiration a way of life not so enormously unlike the actual way of his humbler contemporaries. He was inviting the leisured and the functionally specialized members of society--those who were living mainly in terms of money--to live as their inferiors were living, in terms of things. How different is the state of things to-day!' Burlap relapsed once more into blank verse, moved this time by indignation, not by lyrical tenderness. 'We are all specialists, living in terms only of money, not of real things, inhabiting remote abstractions, not the actual world of growth and making.' He rumbled on a little about 'the great machines that having been man's slaves are now his masters,' about standardization, about industrial and commercial life and its withering effect on the human soul (for which last he borrowed a few of Rampion's favourite phrases). Money, he concluded, was the root of the whole evil: the fatal necessity under which man now labours of living in terms of money, not of real things. 'To modern eyes St. Francis's ideal appears fantastic, utterly insane. The Lady Poverty has been degraded by modern circumstances into the semblance of a sackaproned, leaky-booted charwoman...No one in his senses would dream of following her. To idealize so repulsive a Dulcinea one would have to be madder than Don Quixote himself. Within our modern society the Franciscanideal is unworkable. We have made poverty detestable. But this does not mean that we can just neglect St. Francis as a dreamer of mad dreams. No, on the contrary, the insanity is ours, not his. He is the doctor in the asylum. To the lunatics the doctor seems the only madman. When we recover our senses, we shall see that the doctor has been all the time the only healthy man. As things are at present the Franciscan ideal is unworkable. The moral of that is that things must be altered, radically. Our aim must be to create a new society in which Lady Poverty shall be, not a draggled charwoman, but a lovely form of light and graciousness and beauty. Oh Poverty, Poverty, beautiful Lady Poverty!...'
Beatrice came in to say that supper was on the table.
'Two eggs,' she commanded, rapping out her solicitude. 'Two, I insist. They were made especially for you.'
'You treat me like the prodigal son,' said Burlap. 'Or the fatted calf while it was being fattened.' He wagged his head, he smiled a Sodoma smile and helped himself to the second egg.
'I want to ask your advice about some gramophone shares I've got,' said Beatrice. 'They've been rising so violently.'
'Gramophones!' said Burlap. 'Ah...' He advised.
CHAPTER XVII
It had been raining for days. To Spandrell it seemed as though the fungi and the mildew were sprouting even in his soul. He lay in bed, or sat in his dismal room, or leaned against the counter in a public house, feeling the slimy growth within him, watching it with his inward eyes.
'But if only you'd do something,' his mother had so often implored. 'Anything.'
And all his friends had said the same thing, had gone on saying it for years.
But he was damned if he'd do anything. Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare--all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work's no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.'
'And what has your courage permitted you to find out about yourself? ' asked Philip Quarles.
Spandrell grinned rather melodramatically. 'It needed some courage,' he said, 'to go on looking at what I discovered. If I hadn't been such a brave man, I'd have taken to work or morphia long ago.'
Spandrell dramatized himself a little, made his conduct appear rather more rational and romantic than it really was. If he did nothing, it was out of habitual laziness as well as on perverse and topsy-turvy moral principle. The sloth, indeed, had preceded the principle and was its root. Spandrell would never have discovered that work was a pernicious opiate, if he had not had an invincible sloth to find a reason and a justification for. But that it did require some courage on his part to do nothing was true; for he was idle in spite of the ravages of a chronic boredom that could become, at moments like the present, almost unbearably acute. But the habit of idleness was so deeply ingrained that to break it would have demanded more courage than to bear the agonies of boredom to which it gave rise. Pride had reinforced his native laziness--the pride of an able man who is not quite able enough, of an admirer of great achievements who realizes that he lacks the talent to do original work and who will not humiliate himself by what he knows will be an unsuccessful attempt to create, or by stooping, however successfully, to some easier task.
'It's all very well you talking about work,' he had said to Philip. 'But you can do something, I can't. What do you want me to do? Bank clerking? Commercial travelling?'
'There are other professions,' said Philip. 'And since you've got some money, there's all scholarship, all natural history...
'Oh, you want me to be an ant collector, do you? Or a writer of theses on the use of soap among the Angevins. A dear old Uncle Toby with a hobby to ride. But I tell you, I don't want to be an Uncle Toby. If I'm no real good, I prefer to be just frankly no good. I don't want to disguise myself as a man of learning. I don't want to be the representative of a hobby. I want to be what nature made me--no good.'
Ever since his mother's second marriage Spandrell had always perversely made the worst of things, chosen the worst course, deliberately encouraged his own worst tendencies. It was with debauchery that he distracted his endless leisures. He was taking his revenge on her, on himself also for having been so foolishly happy and good. He was spiting her, spiting himself, spiting God. He hoped there was a hell for him to go to and regretted his inability to believe in its existence. Still, hell or no hell, it was
satisfactory, it was even exciting in those early days to know that one was doing something bad and wrong. But there is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal, that it is only the rarest beings, gifted with much less than the usual amount of intelligence and much more than the usual intensity of appetite, who can go on actively enjoying a regular course of vice or continue actively to believe in its wickedness. Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities. The man who has formed a habit of women or gin, of opium-smoking or flagellation, finds it as difficult to live without his vice as to live without bread and water, even though the actual practice of the vice may have become in itself as unexciting as eating a crust or drinking a glass from the kitchen tap. Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrongdoing as to active enjoyment. After a few years the converted or sceptical Jew, the Westernized Hindu, can eat their pork and beef with an equanimity which to their still believing brothers seems brutally cynical. It is the same with the habitual debauchee. Actions which at first seemed thrilling in their intrinsic wickedness become after a certain number of repetitions morally neutral. A little disgusting, perhaps; for the practice of most vices is followed by depressing physiological reactions; but no longer wicked, because so ordinary. It is difficult for a routine to seem wicked.