Afterwards she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity. And finally what was left of her died. But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts. What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too. Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost. Soon even he would have disappeared. And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny? Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers. And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.
‘It’s good,’ he said again, when he had finished his exposition, and his tons was mournful; his face as he looked at his picture was sad. ‘But after all,’ he added, after a little pause and with a sudden explosion of voluntary laughter,’ after all, everything I do is good; damn good even.’ It was a bidding of defiance to the stupid critics who had seen a falling off in his later paintings; it was a challenge to his own past, to time and old age, to the real John Bidlake who had painted real Jenny and kissed her into silence.
‘Of course it’s good,’ said Lucy, and wondered why the old man’s painting had fallen off so much of late. This last exhibition—it was deplorable. He himself, after all, had remained so young, comparatively speaking. Though of course, she reflected, as she looked at him, he had certainly aged a good deal during the last few months.
‘Of course,’ he repeated. ‘That’s the right spirit.’
‘Though I must confess,’ Lucy added, to change the subject, ‘I always find your bathers rather an insult.’
‘An insult?’
‘Speaking as a woman, I mean. Do you really find us so profoundly silly as you paint us?’
‘Yes, do you?’ another voice enquired. ‘Do you really?’ It was an intense, emphatic voice, and the words came out in gushes, explosively, as though they were being forced through a narrow aperture under emotional pressure.
Lucy and John Bidlake turned and saw Mrs. Betterton, massive in dove grey, with arms, old Bidlake reflected, like thighs, and hair that was, in relation to the fleshy cheeks and chins, ridiculously short, curly and auburn. Her nose, which had tilted up so charmingly in the days when he had ridden the black horse and she the bay, was now preposterous, an absurd irrelevance in the middleaged face. Real Bidlake had ridden with her, just before he had painted these bathers. She had talked about art with a naive, schoolgirlish earnestness which he had found laughable and charming. He had cured her, he remembered, of a passion for Burne-Jones, but never, alas, of her prejudice in favour of virtue.
It was with all the old earnestness and a certain significant sentimentality as of one who remembers old times and would like to exchange reminiscences as well as general ideas, that she now addressed him. Bidlake had to pretend that he was pleased to see her after all these years. It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her; he could not remember having spoken to her more than three or four times in all the quarter of a century which had turned Mary Betterton into a memento mori.
‘Dear Mrs. Betterton!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is delightful.’ But he disguised his repugnance very badly. And when she addressed him by his Christian name— ‘Now, John,’ she said, ‘you must give us an answer to our question,’ and she laid her hand on Lucy’s arm, so as to associate her in the demand—old Bidlake was positively indignant. Familiarity from a memento mori—it was intolerable. He’d give her a lesson. The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous. Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul.
Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure. Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables. True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing. Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive. It was the same with women. He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality. It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts. He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane. When one is in high spirits, memento mori’s cease to remind.
‘John, you’re incorrigible,’ said Mrs. Betterton, indulgently. She turned to Lucy, smiling. ‘But he doesn’t mean a word he says.’
‘I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,’ objected Lucy. ‘I’ve noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.’
Old Bidlake laughed.
‘Because they’re the ones who know women most intimately.’
‘Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.’
‘But I assure you,’ Mrs. Betterton insisted, ‘he doesn’t mean it. I knew him before you were born, my dear.’
The gaiety went out of John Bidlake’s face. The memento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton’s flabby mask.
‘Perhaps he was different then,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose. We’re dangerous company, Uncle John. You ought to be careful.’
She had started one of Mrs. Betterton’s favourite hares. That lady dashed off in serious pursuit. ‘It’s the upbringing,’ she explained. ‘Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays. No wonder they’re cynical.’ She proceeded eloquently. Children were given too much, too early. They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle. ‘I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen’ she declared, with pride.
‘My poor dear lady!’
‘I began going when I was six,’ said Lucy.
‘And dances,’ Mrs. Betterton continued. ‘The hunt ball—what an excitement! Because it only happened once a year.’ She quoted Shakespeare.
‘Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since seldom coming, in the long year set,
Like stones of worth they thinly placed….
‘They’re a row of pearls nowadays.’
‘And false ones at that,’ said Lucy.
Mrs. Betterton was triumphant. ‘False ones-you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t “blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure” by daily wear. Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age. A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.’
‘And what’s your remedy? ‘ enquired John Bidlake. ‘If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,’ he added ironically.
‘Naughty!’ cried Mrs. Betterton with an appalling playfulness. Then, becoming serious, ‘The remedy,’ she went on, ‘is fewer diversions.’
‘But I don’t want them fewer,’ objected John Bidlake. ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘they must be strongerprogressively.’
‘Progressively?’ Mrs. Betterton repeated. ‘But where would that sort of progress end?’
‘In bull fighting?’ suggested John Bidlake. ‘Or gladiatorial shows? Or public executions, perhaps? Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade? Where?’
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?’
Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.
‘I think it’s detestable,’ Polly was saying—and her face was flushed with anger, ‘to make war on the poor.’
‘But the Freemen don’t make war on the poor.’
‘They do.’
‘They don’t,’ said Hugo. ‘Read Webley’s speeches.’
‘I only read about his actions.’
‘But they’re in accordance with his words.’
‘They are not.’
‘They are. All he’s opposed to is dictatorship of a class.’
‘Of the poor class.’
‘Of any class,’ Hugo earnestly insisted. ‘That’s his whole point. The classes must be equally strong. A strong working class clamouring for high wages keeps the professional middle class active.’
‘Like fleas on a dog,’ suggested Polly and laughed with a return towards good humour. When a ludicrous thought occurred to her she could never prevent herself from giving utterance to it, even when she was supposed to be serious, or, as in this case, in a rage.
‘They’ve jolly well got to be inventive and progressive,’ Hugo continued, struggling with the difficulties of lucid exposition. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to pay the workers what they demand and make a profit for themselves. And at the same time a strong and intelligent middle class is good for the workers, because they get good leadership and good organization. Which means better wages and peace and happiness.’
‘Amen,’ said Polly.
‘So the dictatorship of one class is nonsense,’ continued Hugo. ‘Webley wants to keep all the classes and strengthen them. He wants them to live in a condition of tension, so that the state is balanced by each pulling as hard as it can its own way. Scientists say that the different organs of the body are like that. They live in a state—’ he hesitated, he blushed—’of hostile symbiosis.’
‘Golly!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo apologized.
‘All the same,’ said Polly, ‘he doesn’t want to allow men
