‘Because strikes are stupid.’
‘He’s against democracy.’
‘Because it allows such awful people to get power. He wants the best to rule.’
‘Himself, for example,’ said Polly sarcastically.
‘Well, why not? If you knew what a wonderful chap he was.’ Hugo became enthusiastic. He had been acting as one of Webley’s aides-de-camp for the last three months. ‘I never met anyone like him,’ he said.
Polly listened to his outpourings with a smile. She felt old and superior. At school she herself had felt and talked like that about the domestic economy mistress. All the same, she liked him for being so loyal.
CHAPTER V
A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers—it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake’s imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance. The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas—yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.
The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, towards the floor. But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night. He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky.
Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cockatoos, up through the perennial mist of London, into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke. He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise. That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left-it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon. And all these voices (what were they saying? ‘… made an excellent speech…’; ‘… no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you’ve tried them…’; ‘… such a bore…’; ‘… eloped with the chauffeur…’), all these voices—how exquisite and tiny they’d be up there! But meanwhile down here, in the jungle… Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous.
Looking over the heads of the people who surrounded him, he saw Frank Illidge, alone, leaning against a pillar. His attitude, his smile were Byronic, at once world-weary and contemptuous; he glanced about him with a languid amusement, as though he were watching the drolleries of a group of monkeys. Unfortunately, Walter reflected, as he made his way through the crowd towards him, poor Illidge hadn’t the right physique for being Byronically superior. Satirical romantics should be long, slow-moving, graceful and handsome. Illidge was small, alert and jerky. And what a comic face! Like a street Arab’s, with its upturned nose and wide slit of a mouth; a very intelligent, sharp-witted street Arab’s face, but not exactly one to be languidly contemptuous with. Besides, who can be superior with freckles? Illidge’s complexion was sandy with them. Protectively coloured, the sandy-brown eyes, the sandyorange eyebrows and lashes disappeared, at a little distance, into the skin, as a lion dissolves into the desert. From across a room his face seemed featureless and unregarding, like the face of a statue carved out of a block of sandstone. Poor Illidge! The Byronic part made him look rather ridiculous.
‘Hullo,’ said Walter, as he got within speaking distance. The two young men shook hands. ‘How’s science?’ What a silly question! thought Walter as he pronounced the words.
Illidge shrugged his shoulders. ‘Less fashionable than the arts, to judge by this party.’ He looked round him. ‘I’ve seen half the writing and painting section of Who’s Who this evening. The place fairly stinks of art.’
‘Isn’t that rather a comfort for science?’ said Walter. ‘The arts don’t enjoy being fashionable.’
‘Oh, don’t they! Why are you here, then?’
‘Why indeed?’ Walter parried the question with a laugh. He looked round, wondering where Lucy could have gone. He had not caught sight of her since the music stopped.
‘You’ve come to do your tricks and have your head patted,’ said Illidge, trying to get a little of his own back; the memory of that slip on the stairs, of Lady Edward’s lack of interest in newts, of the military gentlemen’s insolence, still rankled. ‘Just look at that girl there with the frizzy dark hair, in cloth of silver. The one like a little white negress. What about her, for example? It’d be pleasant to have one’s head patted by that sort of thing—eh?’
‘Well, would it?’
Illidge laughed. ‘You take the high philosophical line, do you? But, my dear chap, admit it’s all humbug I take it myself, so I ought to know. To tell you the honest truth, I envy you art-mongers your success. It makes me really furious when I see some silly, halfwitted little writer…’
‘Like me, for example.’
‘No, you’re a cut above most of them,’ conceded Illidge. ‘But when I see some wretched little scribbler with a tenth of my intelligence, making money and being cooed over, while I’m disregarded, I do get furious sometimes.’
‘You ought to regard it as a compliment. If they coo over us, it’s because they can understand, more or less, what we’re after. They can’t understand you; you’re above them. Their neglect is a compliment to your mind.’
‘Perhaps; but it’s a damned insult to my body.’ Illidge was painfully conscious of his appearance. He knew that he was ugly and looked undistinguished. And knowing, he liked to remind himself of the unpleasant fact, like a man with an aching tooth, who is for ever fingering the source of his pain, just to make sure it is still painful. ‘If I looked like that enormous lout, Webley, they wouldn’t neglect me, even if my mind were like Newton’s. The fact is,’ he said, giving the aching tooth a good tug this time, ‘ I look like an anarchist. You’re lucky, you know. You look like a gentleman, or at least like an artist. You’ve no idea what a nuisance it is to look like an intellectual of the lower classes.’ The tooth was responding excruciatingly; he pulled at it the harder. ‘It’s not merely that the women neglect you—these women, at any rate. That’s bad enough. But the police refuse to neglect you; they take a horrid inquisitive interest. Would you believe it, I’ve been twice arrested, simply because I look like the sort of man who makes infernal machines.’
‘It’s a good story,’ said Walter sceptically.
‘But true, I swear. Once it was in this country. Near Chesterfield. They were having a coal strike. I happened to be looking on at a fight between strikers and blacklegs. The police didn’t like my face and grabbed me. It took me hours to get out of their clutches. The other time was in Italy. Somebody had just been trying to blow up Mussolini, I believe. Anyhow, a gang of black-shirted bravoes made me get out of the train at Genoa and searched me from top to toe. Intolerable! Simply because of my subversive face.’
‘Which corresponds, after all, to your ideas.’
‘Yes, but a face isn’t evidence, a face isn’t a crime. Well yes,’ he added parenthetically,’ perhaps some faces are crimes. Do you know General Knoyle? ‘ Walter nodded. ‘His is a capital offence. Nothing short of hanging would do for a man like that. God! how I’d like to kill them all!’ Had he not slipped on the stairs and been snubbed by a stupid man-butcher?’How I loathe the rich! Loathe them! Don’t you think they’re horrible?’
‘More horrible than the poor?’ The recollection of Wetherington’s sickroom made him almost at once feel rather ashamed of the question.
‘Yes, yes. There’s something peculiarly base and ignoble and diseased about the rich. Money breeds a kind of gangrened insensitiveness. It’s inevitable. Jesus understood. That bit about the camel and the needle’s eye is a mere statement of fact. And remember that other bit about loving your neighbours. You’ll be thinking I’m a Christian at this rate,’ he added with parenthetic apology. ‘But honour where honour is due. The man had sense; he saw what was what. Neighbourliness is the touchstone that shows up the rich. The rich haven’t got any neighbours.’
‘But, damn it, they’re not anchorites.’
‘But they have no neighbours in the sense that the poor have neighbours. When my mother had to go out, Mrs. Cradock from next door on the right kept an eye on us children. And my mother did the same for Mrs. Cradock when it was her turn to go out. And when somebody had broken a leg, or lost his job, people helped with money and food. And how well I remember, as a little boy, being sent running round the village after the nurse, because young Mrs. Foster from next door on the left had suddenly been taken with birth pains before she expected! When you live on less than four pounds a week, you’ve damned well got to behave like a Christian and love your neighbour. To begin with, you can’t get away from him; he’s practically in your back-yard. There can be no refined and philosophical ignoring of his existence. You must either hate or love; and on the whole you’d better make a shift to love, because you may need his help in emergencies and he may need yours—so urgently, very often, that there can be no question of
