‘Infinitely more!’
‘He may handle his limited subject-matter very well. Bidlake, I grant you, does. Extraordinarily well. He has all the sheer ability of the most consummate artists. Or had, at any rate.’
‘Had,’ Mrs. Betterton sighed. ‘When I first knew him.’ The implication was that it was her influence that had made him paint so well.
‘But he’s always applied his powers to something small. What he synthesizes in his art was limited, comparatively unimportant.’
‘That’s what I always told him,’ said Mrs. Betterton, reinterpreting those youthful arguments about Pre-Raphaelitism in a new and, for her own reputation, favourable light. ‘Consider Burne-Jones, I used to say.’ The memory of John Bidlake’s huge and Rabelaisian laughter reverberated in her ears
‘Not that Burne-Jones was a particularly good painter,’ she hastened to add. (‘He painted,’ John Bidlake had said—and how shocked she had been, how deeply offended!—’as though he had never seen a pair of buttocks in the whole of his life.’) ‘But his subjects were noble. If you had his dreams, I used to tell John Bidlake, if you had his ideals, you’d be a really great artist.’
Burlap nodded, smiling his agreement. Yes, she’s On the side of the angels, he was thinking; she needs encouraging. One has a responsibility. The demon winked. There was something in his smile, Mrs. Betterton reflected, that reminded one of a Leonardo or a Sodoma—something mysterious, subtle, inward.
‘Though, mind you,’ he said regurgitating his article slowly, phrase by phrase, ‘the subject doesn’t make the work of art. Whittier and Longfellow were fairly stuffed with Great Thoughts. But what they wrote was very small poetry.’
‘How true!’
‘The only generalization one can risk is that the greatest works of art have had great subjects; and that works with small subjects, however accomplished, are never so good as…’
‘There’s Walter,’ said Mrs. Betterton, interrupting him. ‘Wandering like an unlaid ghost. Walter!’
At the sound of his name, Walter turned. The Betterton—good Lord! And Burlap! He assumed a smile. But Mrs. Be and his colleague on the Literary World were among the last people he wanted at this moment to see.
‘We were just discussing greatness in art,’ Mrs. Betterton explained. ‘Mr. Burlap was saying such profound things.’
She began to reproduce the profundities for Walter’s benefit.
He meanwhile was wondering why Burlap’s manner towards him had been so cold, so distant, shut, even hostile. That was the trouble with Burlap. You never knew where you stood with him. Either he loved you, or he hated. Life with him was a series of scenes—scenes of hostility or, even more trying in Walter’s estimation, scenes of affection. One way or the other, the emotion was always flowing. There were hardly any intervals of comfortably slack water. The tide was always running. Why was it running now towards hostility?
Mrs. Betterton went on with her exposition of the profundities. To Walter they sounded curiously like certain paragraphs in that article of Burlap’s, the proof of which he had only that morning been correcting for the printers. Reproduced—explosion after enthusiastic explosion—from Burlap’s spoken reproduction, the article did sound rather ridiculous. A light dawned. Could that be the reason? He looked at Burlap. His face was stony.
‘I’m afraid I must go,’ said Burlap abruptly, when Mrs. Betterton paused.
‘But no,’ she protested. ‘But why?’
He made an effort and smiled his Sodoma smile. ‘The world is too much with us,’ he quoted mysteriously. He liked saying mysterious things, dropping them surprisingly into the middle of the conversation.
‘But you’re not enough with us,’ flattered Mrs. Betterton.
‘It’s the crowd,’ he explained. ‘After a time, I get into a panic. I feel they’re crushing my soul to death. I should begin to scream if I stayed.’ He took his leave.
‘Such a wonderful man!’ Mrs. Betterton exclaimed before he was well out of earshot. ‘It must be wonderful for you to work with him.’
‘He’s a very good editor,’ said Walter.
‘But I was thinking of his personality. How shall I say? The spiritual quality of the man.’
Walter nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ rather vaguely. The spiritual quality of Burlap was just the thing he wasn’t very enthusiastic about.
‘In an age like ours,’ Mrs. Betterton continued, ‘he’s an oasis in the desert of stupid frivolity and cynicism.’
‘Some of his ideas are first rate,’ Walter cautiously agreed.
He wondered how soon he could decently make his escape.
‘There’s Walter,’ said Lady Edward.
‘Walter who?’ asked Bidlake. Borne by the social currents, they had drifted together again.
‘Your Walter.’
‘Oh, mine.’ He was not much interested, but he followed the direction of her glance. ‘What a weed!’ he said. He disliked his children for growing up; growing, they pushed him backwards, year after year, backwards towards the gulf and the darkness. There was Walter; it was only yesterday he was born. And yet the fellow must be five-and-twenty, if he was a day.
‘Poor Walter; he doesn’t look at all well.’
‘Looks as though he had worms,’ said Bidlake ferociously.
‘How’s that deplorable affair of his going?’ she asked.
Bidlake shrugged his shoulders. ‘As usual, I suppose.’
‘I never met the woman.’
‘I did. She’s awful.’
‘What, vulgar? ‘
‘No, no. I wish she were,’ protested Bidlake. ‘She’s refined, terribly refined. And she speaks like this.’ He spoke into a drawling falsetto that was meant to be an imitation of Marjorie’s voice. ‘Like a sweet little innocent girlie. And so serious, such a highbrow. He interrupted the imitation with his own deep laugh,’Do you know what she said to me once? I may mention that she always talks to me about Art. Art with a capital A. She said’: (his voice went up again to the babyish falsetto) ‘“I think there’s a place for Fra Angelico and Rubens.”’ He laughed again, homerically. ‘What an imbecile! And she has a nose that’s at least three inches too long.’
Marjorie had opened the box in which she kept her private papers. All Walter’s letters. She untied the ribbon and looked them over one by one. ‘Dear Mrs. Carling, I enclose under separate cover that volume of Keats’s Letters I mentioned to-day. Please do not trouble to return it. I have another copy, which I shall re-read for the pleasure of accompanying you, even at a distance, through the same spiritual adventure.’
That was the first of them. She read it through and recaptured in memory something of the pleased surprise which that passage about the spiritual adventure had originally evoked in her. In conversation he had always seemed to shrink from the direct and personal approach, he was painfully shy. She hadn’t expected him to write like that. Later, when he had written to her often, she became accustomed to his peculiarities. She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face. All his love—all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent—was in his letters.
The arrangement suited Marorie perfectly. She would have liked to go on indefinitely making cultured and verbally burning love by post. She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination. A correspondence course of passion was, for her, the perfect and ideal relationship with a man. Better still were personal relationships with women; for women had all the good qualities of men at a distance, with the added advantage of being actually there. They could be in the room with you and yet demand no more than a man at the other end of a system of post-offices. With his face-to-face shyness and his postal freedom and ardour, Walter had seemed in Marjorie’s eyes to combine the best points of both sexes. And then he was so deeply, so flatteringly interested in everything she did and thought and felt. Poor Marjorie was not much used to having people interested in her.
‘Sphinx,’ she read in the third of his letters. (He had called her that because of her enigmatic silences. Carling, for the same reason, had called her Turnip or Dumb-Bell.) ‘Shinx, why do you hide yourself inside such a shell of silence? One would think you were ashamed of your goodness and sweetness and intelligence. But they pop their heads out all the same and in spite of you.’
The tears came into her eyes. He had been so kind to her, so tender and gentle. And now…
‘Love,’ she read dimly, through the tears, in the next letter, ‘love can transform physical into spiritual desire; it has the magic power to turn the body into pure soul….’
Yes, he had had those desires too. Even he. All men had, she supposed. Rather dreadful. She shuddered, remembering Carling, remembering even Walter with something of the same horror. Yes, even Walter, though he had been so gentle and considerate. Walter had understood what she felt. That made it all the more extraordinary that he should be behaving as he was behaving now. It was as though he had suddenly become somebody else, become a kind of wild animal, with the animal’s cruelty as well as the animal’s lusts.
‘How can he be so cruel? ‘ she wondered.
‘How can he, deliberately? Walter?’ Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good. It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having ‘those’ desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live together. She had loved even the weak
