Arrested at the door of his father's room by the sounds from within, Philip listened. His face took on an expression of anxiety, even of alarm. That voice? And his father, he had been told, was alone. Talking to himself? Was he as bad as all that? Bracing himself, Philip opened the door and was immediately reassured to find that what he had taken for insanity was only dictation to the dictaphone. Propped up on pillows, Mr. Quarles was half-sitting, half-lying in his bed. His face, his very scalp were flushed and shining, and his pink silk pyjamas were like an intensified continuation of the same fever. The dictaphone stood on the table by his bed; Mr. Quarles was talking into the mouthpiece of its flexible speaking-tube. 'True greatness,' he was saying sonorously, 'is inversely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you are! he cried, looking round as the door opened. He stopped the clockwork of the machine, hung up the speaking-tube and stretched out a welcoming hand. Simple gestures. But there was something, it seemed to Philip, extravagant about all his movements. It was as though he were on the stage. The eyes which he turned on Philip were unnaturally bright. 'I'm so glad you've come. So glad, dyah boy.' He patted Philip's hand; the loud voice suddenly trembled.
Unused to such demonstrations, Philip was embarrassed. 'Well, how are you feeling?' he asked with an assumption of cheeriness.
Mr. Quarles shook his head and pressed his son's hand without speaking. Philip was more than ever embarrassed at seeing that the tears had come into his eyes. How could one go on hating and being angry?
'But you'll be all right,' he said, trying to be reassuring. 'It's just a question of resting for a bit.' Mr. Quarles tightened the clasp of his hand. 'Don't tell your mother,' he said. 'But I feel that the end's nyah.'
'But that's nonsense, father. You mustn't talk like that.'
'Nyah,' Mr. Quarles repeated, obstinately nodding, 'very nyah. That's why I'm so glad you're hyah. I should have been unhappah to die when you were at the other end of the wahld. But with you hyah, I feel I can go'--his voice trembled again--'quite contentedlah.' Once more he squeezed Philip's hand. He was convinced that he had always been a devoted father, living for nothing but his children. And so he had been, every now and then. 'Yes, quite contentedlah.' He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and while he was doing so surreptitiously wiped his eyes.
'But you're not going to die.'
'Yes, yes,' Mr. Quarles insisted. 'I can feel it.' He genuinely did feel it; he believed he was going to die, because there was at least a part of his mind that desired to die. These complications of the last weeks had been too much for him; and the future promised to be worse, if that were possible. To fade out, painlessly--that would be the best solution of all his problems. He wished, he believed; and, believing in his approaching death, he pitied himself as a victim and at the same time admired himself for the resigned nobility with which he supported his fate.
'But you're not going to die,' Philip dully insisted, not knowing what consolation, beyond mere denial, to offer. He had no gift for dealing extempore with the emotional situations of practical life. 'There's nothing...' He was going to say, 'There's nothing the matter with you'; but checked himself, reflecting, before it was too late, that his father might be offended.
'Let's say no more about it.' Mr. Quarles spoke tartly; there was a look of annoyance in his eye. Philip remembered what his mother had said about humouring him. He kept silence. 'One can't quarrel with Destinah,' Mr. Quarles went on in another tone. 'Destinah,' he repeated with a sigh. 'You've been fortunate, dyah boy; you discovered your vocation from the farst. Fate has treated you well.'
Philip nodded. He had often thought so himself, with a certain apprehension even. He had an obscure belief in nemesis.
'Whereas in my case...' Mr. Quarles did not finish the sentence, but raised his hand and let it fall again, hopelessly, on to the coverlet. 'I wasted yahs of my life on false scents. Yahs and yahs before I discovered my ryahl bent. A philosopher's wasted on practical affairs. He's even absard. Like what's-his-name's albatross. You know.'
Philip was puzzled. 'Do you mean the one in The Ancient Mariner?'
'No, no,' said Mr. Quarles impatiently. 'That Frenchman.'
'Oh, of course.' Philip had caught the reference. 'Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees. Baudelaire, you mean.'
'Baudelaire, of course.'
'Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees,
Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher,'
Philip quoted, glad to be able to divert the conversation if only for a moment from personalities to literature.
His father was delighted. 'Exactlah!' he cried triumphantly. 'It's the same with philosophers. Their wings prevent them from walking. For tharty yahs I tried to be a walker--in politics, in business. I didn't ryahlize that my place was in the air, not on the ground. In the air!' he repeated, raising his arm. 'I had wings.' He agitated his hand in a rapid tremolo. 'Wings, and didn't know it.' His voice had grown louder, his eyes brighter, his face pinker and more shiny. His whole person expressed such an excitement, such restlessness and exaltation, that Philip was seriously disquieted.
'Hadn't you better rest a little?' he anxiously suggested.
Mr. Quarles disregarded the interruption. 'Wings, wings,' he cried. 'I had wings and if I'd ryahlized it as a young man, what heights I might have flown to! But I tried to walk. In the mud. For tharty yahs. Only after tharty yahs did I discover that I was meant to be flying. And now I must give up almost before I've begun.' He sighed and, leaning back against his pillows, he shot the words almost perpendicularly up into the air. 'My work unfinished. My dreams unryahlized. Fate's been hard.'
'But you'll have all the time you need to finish your work.'
'No, no,' Mr. Quarles insisted, shaking his head. He wanted to be one of fate's martyrs, to be able to point to himself and say: There, but for the malignity of providence, goes Aristotle. Destiny's unkindness justified everything--his failure in sugar, in politics, in farming, the coldness with which his first book had been received, the indefinite delay in the appearance of the second; it even justified in some not easily explicable fashion his having put Gladys in a family way. To be a seducer of servants, secretaries, peasant girls was part of his unhappy destiny. And now that, to crown the edifice of his misfortune, he was about to die (prematurely but stoically, like the noblest Roman of them all), how trivial, how wretchedly insignificant was this matter of lost virginities and impending babies! And how unseemly, at the philosophic death-bed, was all the outcry! But he could only ignore it on condition that this was. genuinely his death-bed and that destiny was universally admitted to have been cruel. A martyred philosopher on the point of death was justified in refusing to be bothered with Gladys and her baby. That was why (though the reason was felt and not formulated) Mr. Quarles repudiated, so vigorously and even with annoyance, his son's consoling assurances of long life; that was why he arraigned malignant providence and magnified with even more than his ordinary self-complaisance the talents which providence had prevented him from using.
'No, no, dyah boy,' he repeated. 'I shall never finish. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to have a talk with you.'
Philip looked at him with a certain apprehension. What was coming next? he wondered. There was a little silence.
'One doesn't want to shuffle off entirely unrecorded,' said Mr. Quarles in a voice made husky by a recrudescence of self-pity
'Shyahr extinction--it's difficult to face.' Before his mind's eye the void expanded, lampless and abysmal. Death. It might be the end of his troubles; but it was none the less appalling. 'You understand the feeling?' he asked.
'Perfectly,' said Philip, 'perfectly. But in your case, father...' Mr. Quarles who had been blowing his nose again raised a protesting hand. 'No, no.' He had made up his mind that he was going to die; it was useless for anyone to attempt to dissuade him. 'But if you understand my feeling, that's all that matters. I can depart in peace with the knowledge that you won't allow all memory of me to di
sappyah completely. Dyah boy, you shall be my literary executor. There are some fragments of my writing....'
'The book on democracy?' asked Philip, who saw himself being called upon to complete the largest work on the subject yet projected. His father's answer took a load off his mind.
'No, not that,' Mr. Quarles hastily replied. 'Only the bare matyahrials of that book exist. And to a great extent not on paper. Only in my mind. In fact,' he went on, 'I was just going to tell you that I wanted all my notes for the big book destroyed. Without being looked at. They're myah jottings. Meaningless except to me.' Mr. Quarles was not anxious that the emptiness of his files and the prevailing blankness of the cards in his cardindex should be posthumously discovered and commented on. 'They must all be destroyed, do you understand?'
Philip made no protest.
'What I wanted to entrust to you dyah boy,' Mr. Quarles went on, 'was a collection of more intimate fragments. Reflections on life, records of pahsonal expyahriences. Things like that.'
Philip nodded. 'I see.'
'I've been jotting them down for a long time past,' said Mr. Quarles. 'Memories and Reflections of Fifty Yahs--that might be a good title. There's a lot in my notebooks. And these last days I've been recording on this.' He tapped the dictaphone. 'When one's ill, you know, one thinks a lot.' He sighed. 'Syahriously.'
'Of course,' Philip agreed.
'If you'd care to listen...' he indicated the dictaphone.
Philip nodded. Mr. Quarles prepared the machine. 'It'll give you an idyah of the kind of thing. Thoughts and memories. Hyah.' He pushed the machine across the table and, pushing, sent a piece of paper fluttering to the ground. It lay there on the carpet, chequered, a puzzle. 'This is where you listen.'
Philip listened. After a moment of scratchy roaring, the Punch and Judy parody of his father's voice said, 'The key to the problem of sex:--passion is sacred, a manifestation of the divinitah.' And then, without stop or transition, but in a slightly different tone: 'The wahrst thing about politics is the frivolitah of politicians. Meeting Asquith one evening at dinner, I forget now where, I took the opportunitah of ahrging on him the necessitah of abolishing capital punishment. One of the most syahrious questions of modern life. But he myahrly suggested that we should go and play bridge. Unit of measure seven letters long: Verchok. Fastidious men do not live in pigsties, nor can they long remain in politics or business. There are nature's Greeks and nature's Mrs. Grundies. I never shared the mob's high opinion of Lloyd George. Every man is born with a natural right to be happy; but what ferocious repression when anybody tried to claim his right! Brazilian stork, six letters: jabiru. True greatness is invarsely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you...!' The scratchy roar supervened.
'Yes, I see the style of the thing,' said Philip, looking up. 'How does one stop this affair? Ah, that's it.' He stopped it.
'So many thoughts occur to me as I lie hyah,' said Mr. Quarles, aimed upwards, as though speaking against aircraft. 'Such a wealth! I could never record them all but for the machine. It's wonderful. Ryahly wonderful! '
CHAPTER XXXIII
Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for her at the station. 'How is he?' she asked the chauffeur. But Paxton was vague, didn't rightly know. Privately, he thought it was one of these ridiculous fusses about nothing, such as the rich are always making, particularly where their children are concerned. They drove up to Gattenden and the landscape of the Chilterns in the ripe evening light was so serenely beautiful, that Elinor began to feel less anxious and even half wished that she had stayed till the last train. She would have been able in that case to see Webley. But hadn't she decided that she was really almost glad not to be seeing him? One can be glad and sorry at the same time. Passing the north entrance to the Park, she had a glimpse through the bars of Lord Gattenden's bath-chair standing just inside the gate. The ass had stopped and was eating grass at the side of the road, the reins hung loose and the marquess was too deeply absorbed in a thick red morocco quarto to be able to think of driving. The car hurried on; but that second's glimpse of the old man sitting with his book behind the grey donkey, as she had so often seen him sitting and reading; that brief revelation of life living itself regularly, unvaryingly in the same old familiar way, was as reassuring as the calm loveliness of beech-trees and bracken, of greengolden foreground and violet distances.
And there at last was the Hall! The old house seemed to doze in the westering sun like a basking animal; you could almost fancy that it purred. And the lawn was like the most expensive green velvet; and in the windless air the huge Wellingtonia had all the dignified gravity of an old gentleman who sits down to meditate after an enormous meal. There could be nothing much wrong here. She jumped out of the car and ran straight upstairs to the nursery. Phil was lying in bed, quite still and with closed eyes. Miss Fulkes, who was sitting beside him, turned as she entered, rose and came to meet her. One glance at her face was enough to convince Elinor that the blue and golden tranquillity of the landscape, the dozing house, the marquess and his ass had been lying comforters. 'All's well,' they had seemed to say. 'Everything's going on as usual.' But Miss Fulkes looked pale and frightened, as though she had seen a ghost.
'What's the matter?' Elinor whispered with a sudden return of all her anxiety, and before Miss Fulkes had time to answer, 'Is he asleep?' she added. If he were asleep, she was thinking, it was a good sign; he looked as though he were asleep.
But Miss Fulkes shook her head. The gesture was superfluous. For the question was hardly out of Elinor's mouth, when the child made a sudden spasmodic movement under the sheets. His face contracted with pain. He uttered a little whimpering moan.
'His head hurts him so much,' said Miss Fulkes. There was a look of terror and misery in her eyes.
'Go and have a rest,' said Elinor.
Miss Fulkes hesitated, shook her head. 'I'd like to be useful...'
Elinor insisted. 'You'll be more useful when you've rested....' She saw Miss Fulkes's lips trembling, her eyes growing suddenly bright with tears.
'Go along,' she said and pressed her arm consolingly.
Miss Fulkes obeyed with a sudden alacrity. She was afraid that she might start crying before she got to her room.
Elinor sat down by the bed. She took the little hand that lay on the turned-back sheet, she passed her fingers through the child's pale hair caressingly, soothingly. 'Sleep,' she whispered, as her fingers caressed him, 'sleep, sleep.' But the child still stirred uneasily; and every now and then his face was distorted with sudden pain; he shook his head, as though trying to shake off the thing that was hurting him, he uttered his little whimpering moan. And bending over him, Elinor felt as though her heart were being crushed within her breast, as though a hand were at her throat, choking her.
'My darling,' she said beseechingly, imploring him not to suffer, 'my darling.'
And she pressed the small hand more tightly, she let her palm rest more heavily on his hot forehead, as if to stifle the pain or at least to steady the shuddering little body against its attacks. And all her will commanded the pain to cease under her fingers, to come out of him--out of him, through her fingers, into her own body. But still he fidgeted restlessly in his bed, turning his head from one side to the other, now drawing up his legs, now straightening them out with a sharp spasmodic kick under the sheets. And still the pain returned, stabbing; and the face made its grimace of agony, the parted lips gave utterance to the little whimpering cry, again and again. She stroked his lorehead, she whispered tender words. And that was all she could do. The sense of her helplessness suffocated her. At her throat and heart the invisible hands tightened their grip.
'How do you find him?' asked Mrs. Bidlake, when her daughter came down.
Elinor did not answer, but turned away her face. The question had brought the tears rushing into her eyes. Mrs. Bidlake put her arms round her and kissed her. Elinor hid her face against her mother's shoulder. 'You must b
e strong,' she kept saying to herself. 'You mustn't cry, mustn't break down. Be strong. To help him.' Her mother held her more closely. The physical contact comforted her, gave her the strength for which she was praying. She made an effort of will and with a deep intaken breath swallowed down the sobs in her throat. She looked up at her mother and gratefully smiled. Her lips still trembled a little; but the will had conquered.
'I'm stupid,' she said apologetically. 'I couldn't help it. It's so horrible to see him suffer. Helplessly. It's dreadful. Even if one knows that it'll be all right in the end.'
Mrs. Bidlake sighed. 'Dreadful,' she echoed,'dreadful,' and closed her eyes in a meditative perplexity. There was a silence. 'By the way,' she went on, opening them again to look at her daughter, 'I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don't know whether her influence is always entirely good.'