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
