‘A-always?’ Brian questioned.
‘Why not?’
‘Too m-much of a l-luxury.’
‘On the contrary. It’s a case of scorning delights and living laborious days.’
‘Which are thems-selves del-lightful.’
‘Of course. But mayn’t one take pleasure in one’s work?’
Brian nodded. ‘It’s not exactly th-that,’ he said. ‘One doesn’t w-want to exp-ploit one’s p-privileges.’
‘Mine’s only a little one,’ said Anthony. ‘About six pounds a week,’ he added, specifying the income that had come to him from his mother.
‘P-plus all the r-rest.’
‘Which rest?’
‘The l-luck that you happen to l-like this sort of thing.’ He reached out and touched the folio Bayles. ‘And all your g-gifts.’
‘But I can’t artificially make myself stupid,’ Anthony objected. ‘Nor can you.’
‘N-no, but we can use what we’ve g-got for s-something else.’
‘Something we’re not suited for,’ the other suggested sarcastically.
Ignoring the mockery, ‘As a k-kind of th-thank-offering,’ Brian went on with a still intenser passion of earnestness.
‘For what?’
‘For all that we’ve been g-given. M-money, to start with. And then kn-knowledge, t-taste, the power to c-c . . .’ He wanted to say ‘create,’ but had to be content with ‘to do things.’ ‘B-being a scholar or an artist – it’s I-like purs-suing your p-personal salvation. But there’s also the k-kingdom of G-god. W-waiting to be realized.’
‘By the Fabians?’ asked Anthony in a tone of pretended ingenuousness.
‘Am-among others.’ There was a long half-minute of silence. ‘Shall I say it?’ Brian was wondering. ‘Shall I tell him?’ And suddenly, as though a dam had burst, his irresolution was swept away. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said aloud, and the feeling with which he spoke the words was so strong that it lifted him, almost without his knowledge, to his feet and sent him striding restlessly about the room, ‘I’ve decided that I shall g-go on with ph-philosophy and l-literature and h-history till I’m thirty. Then it’ll be t-time to do something else. S-something more dir-rect.’
‘Direct?’ Anthony repeated. ‘In what way?’
‘In getting at p-people. In r-realizing the k-kingdom of G-god . . .’ The very intensity of his desire to communicate what he was feeling reduced him to dumbness.
Listening to Brian’s words, looking up into the serious and ardent face, Anthony felt himself touched, profoundly, to the quick of his being . . . felt himself touched, and, for that very reason, came at once under a kind of compulsion, as though in self-defence, to react to his own emotion, and his friend’s, with a piece of derision. ‘Washing the feet of the poor, for example,’ he suggested. ‘And drying them on your hair. It’ll be awkward if you go prematurely bald.’
Afterwards, when Brian had gone, he felt ashamed of his ignoble ribaldry – humiliated, at the same time, by the unreflecting automatism with which he had brought it out. Like those pithed frogs that twitch when you apply a drop of acid to their skin. A brainless response.
‘Damn!’ he said aloud, then picked up his book.
He was deep once more in The Way of Perfection, when there was a thump at the door and a voice, deliberately harshened so as to be like the voice of a drill-sergeant on parade, shouted his name.
‘These bloody stairs of yours!’ said Gerry Watchett as he came in. ‘Why the devil do you live in such a filthy hole?’
Gerry Watchett was fair-skinned, with small, unemphatic features and wavy golden-brown hair. A good-looking young man, but good-looking, in spite of his height and powerful build, almost to girlish prettiness. For the casual observer, there was an air about him of Arcadian freshness and innocence, strangely belied, however, upon a closer examination, by the hard insolence in his blue eyes, by the faint smile of derision and contempt that kept returning to his face, by the startling coarseness of those thick-fingered, short-nailed hands.
Anthony pointed to a chair. But the other shook his head. ‘No, I’m in a hurry. Just rushed in to say you’ve got to come to dinner tonight.’
‘But I can’t.’
Gerry frowned. ‘Why not?’
‘I’ve got a meeting of the Fabians.’
‘And you call that a reason for not coming to dine with me?’
‘Seeing I’ve promised to . . .’
‘Then I can expect you at eight?’
‘But really . . .’
‘Don’t be a fool! What does it matter? A mothers’ meeting?’
‘But what excuse shall I give?’
‘Any bloody thing you like. Tell them you’ve just had twins.’
‘All right, then,’ Anthony agreed at last. ‘I’ll come.’
‘Thank you very kindly,’ said Gerry, with mock politeness. ‘I’d have broken your neck if you hadn’t. Well, so long.’ At the door he halted. ‘I’m having Bimbo Abinger, and Ted, and Willie Monmouth, and Scroope. I wanted to get old Gorchakov too: but the fool’s gone and got ill at the last moment. That’s why I had to ask you,’ he added with a quiet matter-of-factness that was far more offensive than any emphasis could have been; then turned, and was gone.
‘Do you I-like him?’ Brian had asked one day when Gerry’s name came up between them. And because the question evoked an uneasy echo in his own consciousness, Anthony had answered, with a quite unnecessary sharpness, that of course he liked Gerry. ‘Why else do you suppose I go about with him?’ he had concluded, looking at Brian with irritable suspicion. Brian made no reply; and the question had returned like a boomerang upon the asker. Yes, why did he go about with Gerry? For of course he didn’t like the man; Gerry had hurt and humiliated him again on the slightest provocation.
Or rather without any provocation at all – just for fun, because it amused him to humiliate people, because he had a natural talent for inflicting pain. So why, why?
Mere snobbery, as Anthony was forced to admit to himself, was part of the discreditable secret. It was absurd and ridiculous; but the fact remained, nevertheless, that it pleased him to associate with Gerry and his friends. To be the intimate of these young aristocrats and plutocrats, and at the same time to know himself their superior in intelligence, taste, judgment, in all the things that really mattered, was satisfying to his vanity.
Admitting his intellectual superiority, the young barbarians expected him to pay for their admiration by amusing them. He was their intimate, yes; but as Voltaire was the intimate of Frederick the Great, as Diderot of the Empress Catherine. The resident philosopher is not easily distinguishable from the court fool.
With genuine appreciation, but at the same time patronizingly, offensively, ‘Good for the Professor!’ Gerry would say after one of his sallies. Or, ‘Another drink for the old Professor’ as though he were an Italian organ-grinder, playing for pennies.
The prick of remembered humiliation was sharp like an insect’s sting. With sudden violence Anthony heaved himself out of his chair and began to walk, frowning, up and down the room.
A middle-class snob tolerated because of his capacities as an entertainer. The thought was hateful, wounding. ‘Why do I stand it?’ he wondered. ‘Why am I such a damned fool? I shall write Gerry a note to say I can’t come.’ But time passed; the note remained unwritten. For, after all, he was thinking, there were also advantages, there were also satisfactions. An evening spent with Gerry and his friends was exhilarating, was educative. Exhilarating and educative, not because of anything they said or thought – for they were all stupid, all bottomlessly ignorant; but because of what they were, of what their circumstances had made them.
For, thanks to their money and their position, they were able actually to live in such freedom as Anthony had only imagined or read about. For them, the greater number of the restrictions which had always hedged him in did not even exist. They permitted themselves as a matter of course licences which he took only in theory, and which he felt constrained even then to justify with all the resources of a carefully perverted metaphysic, an ingeniously adulterated mystical theology. By the mere force of social and economic circumstances, these ignorant barbarians found themselves quite naturally behaving as he did not dare to behave even after reading all Nietzsche had said about the Superman, or Casanova about women.
Nor did they have to study Patanjali or Jacob Boehme in order to find excuses for the intoxications of wine and sensuality: they just got drunk and had their girls, like that, as though they were in the Garden of Eden. They faced life, not diffidently and apologetically, as Anthony faced it, not wistfully, from behind invisible bars, but with the serenely insolent assurance of those who know that God intended them to enjoy themselves and had decreed the unfailing acquiescence of their fellows in all their desires.
True, they also had their confining prejudices; they too on occasion were as ready as poor old Brian to lock themselves up in the prison of a code. But code and prejudices were of their own particular caste; therefore, so far as Anthony was concerned, without binding force. Their example delivered him from the chains that his upbringing had fastened upon him, but was powerless to bind him with those other chains in which they themselves walked through life.
In their company the compulsions of respectability, the paralysing fear of public opinion, the inhibitory maxims of middle-class prudence fell away from him; but when Bimbo Abinger indignantly refused even to listen to the suggestion that he should sell the monstrous old house that was eating up three-quarters of his income, when Scroope complained that he would have to go into Parliament, because in his family the eldest sons had always sat in the House of Commons before coming into the
