‘Poor kids!’ Anthony said to her when they arrived. But in spite of the compassion he was doing his level best to feel, in spite of his determined goodwill, he was secretly afraid of these stunted yet horribly mature little boys with whom he had offered to play, he feared and therefore disliked them. They seemed immeasurably foreign. Their patched, stained clothes, their shapeless boots, were like a differently coloured skin; their cockney might have been Chinese. The mere appearance of them made him feel guiltily self-conscious.
And then there was the way they looked at him; with a derisive hatred of his new suit and his alien manners; there was the way the bolder of them whispered together and laughed. When they laughed at Brian for his stammer, he laughed with them; and in a little while they laughed no more or laughed only in a friendly and almost sympathetic way. Anthony, on the contrary, pretended not to notice their mockery. A gentleman, he had always been taught explicitly as well as by constant implication and the example of his elders, a gentleman doesn’t pay any attention to that kind of thing. It is beneath his dignity. He behaved as though their laughter were non-existent. They went on laughing.
He hated that morning of rounders and hide-and-seek. But worse was to follow at lunch-time. He had offered to help in the serving of the table. The work in itself was unobjectionable enough. But the smell of poverty when the twenty children were assembled in the dining-room was so insidiously disgusting – like Lollingdon church, only much worse – that he had to slip out two or three times in the course of the meal to spit in the lavatory basin. ‘Reeking with germs!’ he heard his mother’s angrily frightened voice repeating. ‘Reeking with germs!’ And when Mrs Foxe asked him a question, he could only nod and make an inarticulate noise with his mouth shut; if he spoke, he would have to swallow. Swallow what? It was revolting only to think of it.
‘Poor kids!’ he said once more, as he stood with Mrs Foxe and Brian watching their departure. ‘Poor kids!’ and felt all the more ashamed of his hypocrisy when Mrs Foxe thanked him for having worked so hard to entertain them.
And when Anthony had gone up to the school-room, ‘Thank you too, my darling,’ she said, turning to Brian. ‘You were really splendid.’
Flushing with pleasure, Brian shook his head. ‘It was all y-you,’ he said; and suddenly, because he loved her so much, because she was so good, so wonderful, he found his eyes full of tears.
Together they walked out into the garden. Her hand was on his shoulder. She smelt faintly of eau-de-Cologne, and all at once (and this also, it seemed, was part of her wonderfulness) the sun came out from behind a cloud.
‘Look at those heavenly daffodils!’ she cried, in that voice that made everything she said seem, to Brian, truer, in some strange way, than the truth itself. ‘“And now my heart with pleasure fills . . .” Do you remember, Brian?’
Flushed and with bright eyes, he nodded. ‘“And d-dances . . .”’
‘“Dances with the daffodils.”’ She pressed him closer to her. He was filled with an unspeakable happiness. They walked on in silence. Her skirts rustled at every step – like the sea, Brian thought; the sea at Ventnor, that time last year, when he couldn’t sleep at night because of the waves on the beach. Lying there in the darkness, listening to the distant breathing of the sea, he had felt afraid, and above all sad, terribly sad. But, associated with his mother, the memories of that fear, that profound and causeless sadness, became beautiful; and at the same time, in some obscure way, they seemed to reflect their new beauty back on to her, making her seem yet more wonderful in his eyes. Rustling back and forth across the sunny lawn, she took on some of the mysterious significance of the windy darkness, the tirelessly returning waves.
‘Poor little Anthony!’ said Mrs Foxe, breaking the long silence. ‘It’s hard, it’s terribly hard.’ Hard also for poor Maisie, she was thinking. That graceful creature, with her languors, her silences, her dreamy abstractions, and then her sudden bursts of laughing activity – what had such a one to do with death? Or with birth, for that matter? Maisie with a child to bring up – it hardly made more sense than Maisie dead.
‘It must be t-t-t . . .’ but ‘terrible’ wouldn’t come, ‘it must be d-dreadful,’ said Brian, laboriously circumventing the obstacle, while his emotion ran on ahead in an imaginary outburst of unuttered and unutterable words, ‘n-not to have a m-mother.’
Mrs Foxe smiled tenderly, and, bending down, laid her cheek for a moment against his hair. ‘Dreadful also not to have a son,’ she said, and realized, as she did so, that the words were even truer than she had intended them to be – that they were true on a plane of deeper, more essential existence than that on which she was now moving. She had spoken for the present; but if it would be terrible not to have him now, how incomparably more terrible it would have been then, after her father had had his stroke and during the years of her husband’s illness! In that time of pain and utter spiritual deprivation her love for Brian had been her only remaining possession. Ah, terrible, terrible indeed, then, to have no son!
CHAPTER X
June 16th 1912
BOOKS. THE TABLE in Anthony’s room was covered with them. The five folio volumes of Bayle, in the English edition of 1738. Rickaby’s translation of the Summa contra Gentiles. De Gourmont’s Problème du Style. The Way of Perfection. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Three volumes of Byron’s Letters. The works of St John of the Cross in Spanish. The plays of Wycherley. Lee’s History of the Sacerdotal Celibacy.
If only, Anthony thought as he came in from his walk, if only one had two sets of eyes! Janus would be able to read Candide and the Imitation simultaneously. Life was so short, and books so countlessly many. He pored voluptuously over the table, opening at random now one volume, now another. ‘He would not lie down,’ he read; ‘then his neck was too large for the aperture, and the priest was obliged to drown his exclamations by still louder exhortations. The head was off before the eye could trace the blow; but from an attempt to draw back the head, notwithstanding it was held forward by the hair, the first head was cut off close to the ears; the other two were taken off more cleanly. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera glass . . .’ ‘Happiness being the peculiar good of an intelligent nature, must attach to the intelligent nature on the side of something that is peculiar to it. But appetite is not peculiar to intelligent nature, but is found in all things, though diversely in diverse beings.
The will, as being an appetite, is not a peculiar appurtenance of an intelligent nature, except so far as it is dependent on the intelligence; but intelligence in itself is peculiar to an intelligent nature. Happiness therefore consists in an act of the intellect substantially and principally rather than in an act of the will . . .’ ‘Even in my most secret soul I have never been able to think of love as anything but a struggle, which begins with hatred and ends with moral subjection . . .’ ‘“I will not be a cuckold, I say; there will be a danger in making me a cuckold.” “Why, wert thou well cured of thy last clap?” . . .’ ‘La primera noche o purgación es amarga y terrible para el sentido, como ahora diremos. La segunda no tiene comparación, porque es horrenda y espantable para el espíritu . . .’ ‘I think I have read somewhere that the preciseness has been carried so far that ladies would not say, J’ai mangé des confitures, but des fitures. At this rate, above one half of the words of the Dictionary of the French Academy should be struck out . . .’
In the end, Anthony settled down to The Way of Perfection of St Teresa When Brian came in, an hour later, he had got as far as the Prayer of Quiet.
‘B-busy?’ Brian asked.
Anthony shook his head.
The other sat down. ‘I c-came to s-see if there was anything more to s-settle about to-m-morrow.’ Mrs Foxe and Joan Thursley, Mr and Mrs Beavis were coming down to Oxford for the day. Brian and Anthony had agreed to entertain them together.
Hock or Sauterne cup? Lobster mayonnaise or cold salmon? And if it rained, what would be the best thing to do in the afternoon?
‘Are you c-coming to the F-fabians this evening?’ Brian asked, when the discussion of the next day’s plans was at an end.
‘Of course,’ said Anthony. There was to be voting, that evening, for next term’s president. ‘It’ll be a close fight between you and Mark Staithes. You’ll need all the votes you can . . .’
Interrupting him, ‘I’ve st-stood down,’ said Brian.
‘Stood down? But why?’
‘V-various reasons.’
Anthony looked
