‘What does, then?’ I asked.
Tilney shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing does, once you’ve gone off the normal instinctive rails.’
‘I wonder if they really exist, those rails?’
‘So do I, sometimes,’ he confessed. ‘But I piously believe.’
‘Rousseau and Shelley piously believed too. But has anybody ever seen a Natural Man? Those Noble Savages . . . Read Malinowsky about them; read Frazer; read . . .’
‘Oh, I have, I have. And of course the savage isn’t noble. Primitives are horrible. I know. But then the Natural Man isn’t Primitive Man. He isn’t the raw material of humanity; he’s the finished product. The Natural Man is a manufactured article—no, not manufactured; rather, a work of art. What’s wrong with people like Chawdron is that they’re such bad works of art. Unnatural because inartistic. Ary Scheffer instead of Manet. But with this difference.
An Ary Scheffer is statically bad; it doesn’t get worse with the passage of time. Whereas an inartistic human being degenerates, dynamically. Once he’s started badly, he becomes more and more inartistic. It needs a moral earthquake to arrest the process. Mere fleabites, like experience or knowledge, are quite unavailing. Experientia doesn’t. If it did, I should never have succumbed as I did, never have got into financial straits, and therefore never have written Chawdron’s autobiography, never have had an opportunity for collecting the intimate and discreditable materials for the biography that, alas, I shall never write. No, no; experience didn’t save me from falling a victim yet once more. And to such a ruinously expensive specimen. Not that she was mercenary,’ he put in parenthetically. ‘She was too well off to need to be.
So well off, however, that the mere cost of feeding and amusing her in the style she was accustomed to being fed and amused in was utterly beyond my means. Of course she never realized it. People who are born with more than five thousand a year can’t be expected to realize. She’d have been terribly upset if she had; for she had a heart of gold—like all the rest of us.’ He laughed mournfully. ‘Poor Sybil! I expect you remember her.’
The name evoked for me a pale-eyed, pale-haired ghost. ‘What an astonishingly lovely creature she was!’
‘Was, was,’ he echoed. ‘Fuit. Lovely and fatal. The agonies she made me suffer! But she was as fatal to herself as to other people. Poor Sybil! I could cry when I think of that inevitable course of hers, that predestined trajectory.’ With a stretched forefinger he traced in the air a curve that rose and fell away again. ‘She had just passed the crest when I knew her. The descending branch of the curve was horribly steep. What depths awaited her! That horrible little East-Side Jew she even went to the trouble of marrying! And after the Jew, the Mexican Indian. And meanwhile a little champagne had become rather a lot of champagne, rather a lot of brandy; and the occasional Good Times came to be incessant, a necessity, but so boring, such a dismal routine, so terribly exhausting. I didn’t see her for four years after our final quarrel; and then (you’ve no idea how painful it was) I suddenly found myself shaking hands with a Memento Mori. So worn and ill and tired, so terribly old. Old at thirty-four.
And the last time I’d seen her, she’d been radiant. Eighteen months later she was dead; but not before the Indian had given place to a Chinaman and the brandy to cocaine. It was all inevitable, of course, all perfectly foreseeable. Nemesis had functioned with exemplary regularity. Which only made it worse. Nemesis is all right for strangers and casual acquaintances. But for oneself, for the people one likes—ah, no! We ought to be allowed to sow without reaping. But we mayn’t. I sowed books and reaped Sybil. Sybil sowed me (not to mention the others) and reaped Mexicans, cocaine, death. Inevitable, but an outrage, an insulting denial of one’s uniqueness and difference. Whereas when people like Chawdron sow New Guinea Oil and reap kittenish Charlottes, one’s delighted; the punctuality of fate seems admirable.’
‘I never knew that Charlotte had been reaped by Chawdron,’ I put in. ‘The harvesting must have been done with extraordinary discretion. Charlotte’s usually so fond of publicity, even in these matters. I should never have expected her . . .’
‘But the reaping was very brief and partial,’ Tilney explained.
That surprised me even more. ‘Charlotte who’s always so determined and clinging! And with Chawdron’s millions to cling to. . . .’
‘Oh, it wasn’t her fault that it went no further. She had every intention of being reaped and permanently garnered. But she had arranged to go to America for two months on a concert tour. It would have been troublesome to break the contract; Chawdron seemed thoroughly infatuated; two months are soon passed. So she went. Full of confidence. But when she came back, Chawdron was otherwise occupied.’
‘Another kitten?’
‘A kitten? Poor Charlotte was a grey-whiskered old tigress by comparison. She even came to me in her despair. No enigmatic subtleties this time; she’d forgotten she was the Sphinx. “I think you ought to warn Mr Chawdron against that woman,” she told me. “He ought to be made to realize that she’s exploiting him. It’s outrageous.” She was full of righteous indignation. Not unnaturally. Even got angry with me because I wouldn’t do anything. “But he wants to be exploited,” I told her. “It’s his only joy in life.” Which was perfectly true. But I couldn’t resist being a little malicious. “What makes you want to spoil his fun?” I asked. She got quite red in the face. “Because I think it’s disgusting.” ’ Tilney made his voice indignantly shrill. ‘ “It really shocks me to see a man like Mr Chawdron being made a fool of in that way.” Poor Charlotte! Her feelings did her credit. But they were quite unavailing. Chawdron went on being made a fool of, in spite of her moral indignation. Charlotte had to retreat. The enemy was impregnably entrenched.’
‘But who was she—the enemy?’
‘The unlikeliest femme fatale you ever saw. Little; rather ugly; sickly—yes, genuinely sickly, I think, though she did a good deal of pathetic malingering too; altogether too much the lady—refrained; you know the type. A governess; not the modern breezy, athletic sort of governess—the genteel, Jane Eyre, daughter-of-clergyman kind. Her only visible merit was that she was young. About twenty-five, I suppose.’
‘But how on earth did they meet? Millionaires and governesses.’
‘A pure miracle,’ said Tilney. ‘Chawdron himself detected the hand of Providence. That was the deep religious sense coming in. “If it hadn’t been for both my secretaries falling ill on the same day,” he said to me solemnly (and you’ve no idea how ridiculous he looked when he was being solemn—the saintly forger, the burglar in the pulpit), “if it hadn’t been for that—and after all, how unlikely it is that both one’s secretaries should fall ill at the same moment, what a fateful thing to happen!—I should never have got to know my little Fairy.” And you must imagine the last words pronounced with a reverent and beautiful smile—indescribably incongruous on that crook’s mug of his. “My little Fairy” (her real name, incidentally, was Maggie Spindell), “my little Fairy!” ’ Tilney seraphically smiled and rolled up his eyes. ‘You can’t imagine the expression. St Charles Borromeo in the act of breaking into the till.’
‘Painted by Carlo Dolci,’ I suggested.
‘With the assistance of Rowlandson. Do you begin to get it?’
I nodded. ‘But the secretaries?’ I was anxious to hear the story.
‘They had orders to deal summarily with all begging letters, all communications from madmen, inventors, misunderstood geniuses, and, finally, women. The job was a heavy one, I can tell you. You’ve no idea what a rich man’s post-bag is like. Fantastic. Well, as I say, Providence had given both private secretaries the ’flu. Chawdron happened to have nothing better to do that morning (Providence again); so he started opening his own correspondence. The third letter he opened was from the Fairy. It bowled him over.’
‘What was in it?’
Tilney shrugged his shoulders. ‘He never showed it me. But from what I gathered, she wrote about God and the Universe in general and her soul in particular, not to mention his soul. Having no taste, and being wholly without education, Chawdron was tremendously impressed by her philosophical rigmarole. It appealed to that deep religious sense! Indeed, he was so much impressed that he immediately wrote giving her an appointment. She came, saw, and conquered. “Providential, my dear boy, providential.” And of course he was right. Only I’d have dechristened the power and called it Nemesis. Miss Spindell was the instrument of Nemesis; she was Atè in the fancy dress that Chawdron’s way of life had caused him to find irresistible. She was the finally ripened fruit of sowings in New Guinea Oil and the like.’
‘But if your account’s correct,’ I put in, ‘delicious fruit—that is, for his taste. Being exploited by kittens was his only joy; you said it yourself. Nemesis was rewarding him for his offences, not punishing.’
Tilney paused in his striding up and down the room, meditatively knitted his brows and, taking his pipe out of his mouth, rubbed the side of his nose with the hot bowl. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘that’s an important point. I’ve had it vaguely in my head before now; but now you’ve put it clearly. From the point
