Spandrell had protested. Men must have absolutes, must steer by fixed external marks. 'Music exists,' he concluded, 'even though you personally happen to be unmusical. You must admit its existence, absolutely, apart from your own capacity for listening and enjoying.
'Speculatively, theoretically, yes. Admit it as much as you like. But don't allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life. In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don't therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don't feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic musicsnobs one meets at Lady Edward Tantamount's. Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It's exactly the same with God. The world's full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren't really alive, who've never done any vital act, who aren't in any living relation with anything; people who haven't the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs. They're as grotesque and contemptible as the musicsnobs at Lady Edward's. But nobody has the sense to say so. The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian. When they're merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.'
Spandrell thought of the conversation now, as he addressed his postcard to Illidge. God was not there, the devil was not there; only the memory of a piece of squalid knockabout among the dust-bins, a piece of dirty dung-beetle's scavengering. A God-snob--that's what Rampion would call him. Dung-beetling in search of a non-existent God. But no, but no, God was there, outside, absolute. Else how account for the efficacy of prayer--for it was efficacious; how explain providence and destiny? God was there, but hiding. Deliberately hiding. It was a question of forcing him to come out of his lair, his abstract absolute lair, and compelling him to incarnate himself as a felt experienced quality of personal actions. It was a matter of violently dragging him from outsideness and aboveness to insideness. But God was a joker. Spandrell had conjured him with violence to appear; and out of the bloody steam of the magically compelling sacrifice had emerged only a dust-bin. But the very failure of the incantation had been a proof that God was there, outside. Nothing happens to a man except that which is like himself. Dust-bin to dust-bin, dung to dung. He had not succeeded in compelling God to pass from outsideness to insideness But the appearance of the dust-bin confirmed the reality of God as a providence, God as a destiny, God as the giver or withholder of grace, God as the predestinating saviour or destroyer. Dust-bins had been his predestined lot. In giving him dust-bins yet again, the providential joker was merely being consistent.
One day, in the London Library, he met Philip Quarles.
'I was very sorry to hear about your little boy,' he said.
Philip mumbled something and looked rather uncomfortable, like a man who finds himself involved in an embarrassing situation. He could not bear to let anyone come near his misery. It was private, secret, sacred. It hurt him to expose it, it made him feel ashamed.
'It was a peculiarly gratuitous horror,' he said, to bring the conversation away from the particular and personal to the general.
'All horrors are gratuitous,' said Spandrell. 'How's Elinor standing it?'
The question was direct, had to be answered. 'Badly.' He shook his head. 'It's quite broken her down.' Why did his voice, he wondered, sound so strangely unreal and, as it were, empty?
'What are you going to do now?'
'We shall go abroad in a few days, if Elinor feels up to the journey. To Siena, I'd thought. And then perhaps to the seaside somewhere in the Maremma.' It was a comfort to be able to go into these geographical details.
'No more English domesticity then,' said Spandrell after a little pause.
'The reason of it has been taken away.'
Spandrell nodded slowly. 'Do you remember that conversation we had at the Club, with Illidge and Walter Bidlake? Nothing ever happens to a man except what's like him. Settling down in the country in England wasn't at all like you. It didn't happen. It's been prevented. Ruthlessly, by God! But providence uses foul means as well as fair. Travelling about, being unfixed, being a spectator--that was like you. You're being compelled to do what's like you.' There was a silence. 'And living in a kind of dustheap,' Spandrell added, 'that's like me. Whatever I do, however hard I try to escape, I remain on the dustheap. I suppose I always shall.' Yes always, he went on thinking. He had played the last card and lost. No, not the last card; for there was one other. The last but one. Would he also lose with the last?
CHAPTER XXXVII
Spandrell was very insistent that they should come without delay. The heilige Dankgesang eines genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart simply must be heard.
'You can't understand anything until you have heard it,' he declared. 'It proves all kinds of things--God, the soul, goodness--unescapably. It's the only real proof that exists; the only one, because Beethoven was the only man who could get his knowledge over into expression. You must come.'
'Most willingly,' said Rampion, 'But...'
Spandrell interrupted him. 'I heard quite by accident yesterday that the A minor quartet had been recorded for the gramophone. I rushed out and bought a machine and the records specially for you.'
'For me? But why this generosity?'
'No generosity,' Spandrell answered laughing. 'Pure selfishness. I want you to hear and confirm my opinion.'
'But why?'
'Because I believe in you and, if you confirm, I shall believe in myself.'
'What a man!' mocked Rampion. 'Ought to join the Church of Rome and have a confessor.'
'But you must come.' He spoke earnestly.
'But not now,' said Mary.
'Not to-day,' her husband echoed, wondering as he spoke why the man was so strangely insistent. What was the matter with him? The way he moved and spoke, the look in his eyes.... So excited. 'I have innumerable things to do this afternoon.'
'Then to-morrow.'
As though he were drunk, Rampion was reflecting. 'Why not the day after?' he said aloud. 'It would be much easier for me. And the machine won't fly away in the interval.'
Spandrell uttered his noiseless laugh. 'No, but I may,' he said. 'I shall probably be gone by the day after to-morrow.'
'You hadn't told us you were going away,' said Mary. 'Where?'
'Who knows?' Spandrell answered, laughing once more. 'All I know is that I shan't be here any more.'
'All right,' said Rampion, who had been watching him curiously, ' I'll make it to-morrow.' Why is he so melodramatic? he wondered.
Spandrell took his leave.
'What was wrong with him?' said Rampion, when he was gone.
'I didn't notice anything particularly wrong with him,' Mary answered.
Rampion made a gesture of impatience. 'You wouldn't notice the Last Judgment,' he said.'didn't you see that he was holding down his excitement. Like the lid of a saucepan on the boil--holding it down. And that melodramatic way of laughing. Like the conscious villain in the play....'
'But was he acting?' said Mary, 'was he playing the fool for our benefit?'
'No, no. He was genuine all right. But when you're genuinely in the position of the conscious villain in the melodrama, you inevitably begin to behave like the conscious villain. You act in spite of yourself.'
'But what's he being a conscious villain about?'
'How on earth should I know?' said Rampion impatiently. Mary always expected him, by some mysterious and magical intuition, to know everything. Her faith sometimes amused and sometimes pleased, but sometimes also annoyed him.'do you take me for Spandrell's father confessor.'
'There's nothing to fly in a rage about.'
'On the contrary,' said Rampion, 'there's practically nothing not to
fly in a rage about. If one keeps one's temper, it's because one lives most of the time with one's eyes shut, half asleep. If one were always awake, my God! There wouldn't be much crockery unsmashed.' He stalked off to his studio.
Spandrell walked slowly eastwards from Chelsea along the river whistling to himself over and over again the opening phrases of the Lydian melody from the heilige Dankgesang. Over and over again. The river stretched away into the hot haze. The music was like water in a parched land. After so many years of drought, a spring, a fountain. A watering-cart rumbled past trailing its artificial shower. The wetted dust was fragrant. That music was a proof, as he had said to Rampion. In the gutter a little torrent was hurrying a crumpled cigarette packet and a piece of orange peel towards the drain. He stopped whistling. The essential horror. Like carting garbage; that was what it had been. Just nasty and unpleasant, like cleaning a latrine. Not terrible so much as stupid, indescribably stupid. The music was a proof; God existed. But only so long as the violins were playing. When the bows were lifted from the strings, what then? Garbage and stupidity, the pitiless drought.
In the Vauxhall Bridge Road he bought a shilling packet of writing-paper and envelopes. For the price of a cup of coffee and a bun he hired a table in a tea-shop. With a stump of pencil he wrote. 'To the Secretary General, Brotherhood of British Freemen. Sir, Tomorrow, Wednesday, at five p.m., the murderer of Everard Webley will be at 37 Catskill Street, S.W .7. The flat is on the second floor. The man will probably answer.the bell in person. He is armed and desperate.'
He read it through and was reminded of those communications (written in red ink, to imitate blood, and under the influence of the serial stories in Chums and the B.O.P.) with which he and Pokinghorne Minor had hoped, at nine years old, to startle and terrify Miss Veal, the matron of their preparatory school. They had been discovered and reported to the head master. Old Nosey had given them three cuts apiece over the buttocks. 'He is armed and desperate.' That was pure Pokinghorne. But if he didn't say it, they wouldn't carry revolvers. And then, why, then it wouldn't happen. Nothing would happen. Let it go. He folded the paper and put it into the envelope. There was an essential silliness, as well as an essential nastiness and stupidity. He scribbled the address.
'Well, here we are,' said Rampion, when Spandrell opened his door to them the next afternoon. 'Where's Beethoven? Where's the famous proof of God's existence and the superiority of Jesus's morality?'
'In here.' Spandrell led the way into his sittingroom. The gramophone stood on the table. Four or five records lay scattered near it. 'Here's the beginning of the slow movement,' Spandrell went on, picking up one of them. 'I won't bother you with the rest of the quartet. It's lovely. But the heilige Dankgesang is the crucial part.' He wound up the clockwork; the disc revolved; he lowered the needle of the sound-box on to its grooved surface. A single violin gave out a long note, then another a sixth above, dropped to the fifth (while the second violin began where the first had started), then leapt to the octave, and hung there suspended through two long beats. More than a hundred years before, Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later, four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven's scribbles that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves and through a faint scratching and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven's own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven's convictions and emotions quivered out into the air. Slowly, slowly, the melody unfolded itself. The archaic Lydian harmonies hung on the air. It was an unimpassioned music, transparent, pure and crystalline, like a tropical sea, an Alpine lake. Water on water, calm sliding over calm; the according of level horizons and waveless expanses, a counterpoint of serenities. And everything clear and bright; no mists, no vague twilights. It was the calm of still and rapturous contemplation, not of drowsiness or sleep. It was the serenity of the convalescent who wakes from fever and finds himself born again into a realm of beauty. But the fever was 'the fever called living' and the rebirth was not into this world; the beauty was unearthly, the convalescent serenity was the peace of God. The interweaving of Lydian melodies was heaven.
Thirty slow bars had built up heaven, when the character of the music suddenly changed. From being remotely archaic, it became modern. The Lydian harmonies were replaced by those of the corresponding major key. The time quickened. A new melody leapt and bounded, but over earthly mountains, not among those of paradise.
'Neue Kraft fuehlend,' Spandrell quoted in a whisper from the score. 'He's feeling stronger; but it's not so heavenly.'
The new melody bounded on for another fifty bars and expired in scratchings. Spandrell lifted the needle and stopped the revolving of the disc.
'The Lydian part begins again on the other side,' he explained, as he wound up the machine. 'Then there's more of this lively stuff in A major. Then it's Lydian to the end, getting better and better all the time. Don't you think it's marvellous?' He turned to Rampion. 'Isn't it a proof?'
The other nodded. 'Marvellous. But the only thing it proves, so far as I can hear, is that sick men are apt to be very weak. It's the art of a man who's lost his body.'
'But discovered his soul.'
'Oh, I grant you,' said Rampion, 'sick men are very spiritual. But that's because they're not quite men. Eunuchs are very spiritual lovers for the same reason.'
'But Beethoven wasn't a eunuch.'
'I know. But why did he try to be one? Why did he make castration and bodilessness his ideal? What's this music? Just a hymn in praise of eunuchism. Very beautiful, I admit. But couldn't he have chosen something more human than castration to sing about?'
Spandrell sighed. 'To me it's the beatific vision, it's heaven.'
'Not earth. That's just what I've been complaining of.'
'But mayn't a man imagine heaven if he wants to?' asked Mary.
'Certainly, so long as he doesn't pretend that his imagination is the last word in truth, beauty, wisdom, virtue and all the rest. Spandrell wants us to accept this disembodied eunuchism as the last word. I won't. I simply won't.'
'Listen to the whole movement, before you judge.' Spandrell reversed the disc and lowered the needle. The bright heaven of Lydian music vibrated on the air.
'Lovely, lovely,' said Rampion, when the record was finished. 'You're quite right. It is heaven, it is the life of the soul. It's the most perfect spiritual abstraction from reality I've ever known. But why should he have wanted to make that abstraction? Why couldn't he be content to be a man and not an abstract soul? Why, why? ' He began walking up and down the room. 'This damned soul,' he went on, 'this damned abstract soul--it's like a kind of cancer, eating up the real, human, natural reality, spreading and spreading at its expense. Why can't he be content with reality, your stupid old Beethoven? Why should he find it necessary to replace the real, warm, natural thing by this abstract cancer of a soul? The cancer may have a beautiful shape; but, damn it all, the body's more beautiful. I don't want your spiritual cancer.'
'I won't argue with you,' said Spandrell He felt all at once extraordinarily tired and depressed. It had been a failure. Rampion had refused to be convinced. Was the proof, after all, no proof? Did the music refer to nothing outside itself and the idiosyncrasies of its inventor? He looked at his watch; it was almost five. 'Hear the end of the movement at any rate,' he said. 'It's the best part.' He wound up the gramophone. Even if it's meaningless, he thought, it's beautiful, so long as it lasts. And perhaps it isn't meaningless. After all, Rampion isn't infallible. 'Listen.'
The music began again. But something new and marvellous had happened in its Lydian heaven. The speed of the slow melody was doubled; its outlines became clearer and more definite; an inner part began to harp insistently on a throbbing phrase. It was as though heaven had sud
denly and impossibly become more heavenly, had passed from achieved perfection into perfection yet more deeper and more absolute. The ineffable peace persisted; but it was no longer the peace of convalescence and passivity. It quivered, it was alive, it seemed to grow and intensify itself, it became an active calm, an almost passionate serenity. The miraculous paradox of eternal life and eternal repose was musically realized.
They listened, almost holding their breaths. Spandrell looked exultantly at his guest. His own doubts had vanished. How could one fail to believe in something which was there, which manifestly existed? Mark Rampion nodded. 'Almost thou persuadest me,' he whispered. 'But it's too good.'
'How can anything be too good?'
'Not human. If it lasted, you'd cease to be a man. You'd die.'
They were silent again. The music played on, leading from heaven to heaven, from bliss to deeper bliss. Spandrell sighed and shut his eyes. His face was grave and serene, as though it had been smoothed by sleep or death. Yes, dead, thought Rampion as he looked at him. 'He refuses to be a man. Not a man--either a demon or a dead angel. Now he's dead.' A touch of discord in the Lydian harmonies gave an almost unbearable poignancy to the beatitude. Spandrell sighed again. There was a knocking at the door. He looked up. The lines of mockery came back into his face, the corners of the mouth became once more ironic.