‘But I am,’ retorted Spandrell; ‘so I don’t apologize. But if you prefer it, I can give you examples of his practical inconsistencies. I discovered not long ago, quite accidentally, that Illidge has the most touching sense of family loyalty. He keeps his mother, he pays for his younger brother’s education, he gave his sister fifty pounds when she married.’
‘What’s wrong in that?’
‘Wrong? But it’s disgustingly bourgeois! Theoretically he sees no distinction between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized society, she’d be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he sends her I don’t know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he’d been caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. “One of these days,” I threatened, “I’ll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party.” And what’s more, I will.’
‘Unless you just go on chattering, like everybody else.’
‘Unless,’ Spandrell agreed, ‘ I just go on chattering.’
‘Let me know if you ever stop chattering and do something. It might be lively.’
‘Deathly, if anything.’
‘But the deathly sort of liveliness is the most lively, really.’ Lucy frowned. ‘I’m so sick of the ordinary conventional kinds of liveliness. Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm. You know. It’s silly, it’s monotonous. Energy seems to have so few ways of manifesting itself nowadays. It was different in the past, I believe.’
‘There was violence as well as love-making. Is that what you mean?’
‘That’s it.’ She nodded. ‘The liveliness wasn’t so exclusively…so exclusively bitchy, to put it bluntly.’
‘They broke the sixth commandment too. There are too many policemen nowadays.’
‘Many too many. They don’t allow you to stir an eyelid. One ought to have had all the experiences.’
‘But if none of them are either right or wrong—which is what you seem to feel—what’s the point?’
‘The point? But they might be amusing, they might be exciting.’
‘They could never be very exciting if you didn’t feel they were wrong.’ Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city. ‘Some people,’ he went on meditatively, trying to formulate the vague obscurities of his own feelings,’some people can only realize goodness by offending against it.’ But when the old offences have ceased to be felt as offences, what then? The argument pursued itself internally. The only solution seemed to be to commit new and progressively more serious offences, to have all the experiences, as Lucy would say in her jargon. ‘One way of knowing God,’ he concluded slowly, ‘is to deny Him.’
‘My good Maurice!’ Lucy protested.
‘I ‘1 stop.’ He laughed. ‘But really, if it’s a case of “my good Maurice”’ (he imitated her tone), ‘if you’re equally unaware of goodness and offence against goodness, what is the point of having the sort of experiences the police interfere with?’
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Curiosity. One’s bored.’
‘Alas, one is.’ He laughed again. ‘All the same, I do think the cobbler should stick to his last.’
‘But what is my last?’
Spandrell grinned. ‘Modesty,’ he began, ‘forbids…’
CHAPTER XIII
Walter travelled down to Fleet Street feeling not exactly happy, but at least calm—calm with the knowledge that everything was now settled. Yes, everything had been settled; everything—for in the course of last night’s emotional upheaval, everything had come to the surface. To begin with, he was never going to see Lucy again; that was definitely decided and promised, for his own good as well as for Marjorie’s. Next he was going to spend all his evenings with Marorie. And finally he was going to ask Burlap for more money. Everything was settled. The very weather seemed to know it. It was a day of white insistent mist, so intrinsically calm that all the noises of London seemed an irrelevance. The traffic roared and hurried, but somehow without touching the essential stillness and silence of the day. Everything was settled; the world was starting afresh—not very exultantly, perhaps, not at all brilliantly, but with resignation, with a determined calm that nothing could disturb.
Remembering the incident of the previous evening, Walter had expected to be coldly received at the office. But on the contrary, Burlap was in one of his most genial moods. He too remembered last night and was anxious that Walter should forget it. He called Walter ‘old man’ and squeezed his arm affectionately, looking up at him from his chair with those eyes that expressed nothing, but were just holes into the darkness inside his skull. His mouth, meanwhile, charmingly and subtly smiled. Walter returned the ‘old man’ and the smile, but with a painful consciousness of insincerity. Burlap always had that effect on him; in his presence, Walter never felt quite honest or genuine. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. With Burlap he was always, in some obscure fashion, a liar and a comedian. And at the same time all that he said, even when he was speaking his innermost convictions, became a sort of falsehood.
‘I liked your article on Rimbaud,’ Burlap declared, still pressing Walter’s arm, still smiling up at him from his tilted swivel chair.
‘I’m glad,’ said Walter, feeling uncomfortably that the remark wasn’t really addressed to him, but to some part of Burlap’s own mind which had whispered, ‘You ought to say something nice about his article,’ and was having its demands duly satisfied by another part of Burlap’s mind.
‘What a man!’ exclaimed Burlap. ‘That was someone who believed in Life, if you like!’
Ever since Burlap had taken over the editorship, the leaders of the Literary World had almost weekly proclaimed the necessity of believing in Life. Burlap’s belief in Life was one of the things Walter found most disturbing. What did the words mean? Even now he hadn’t the faintest idea. Burlap had never explained. You had to understand intuitively; if you didn’t, you were as good as damned. Walter supposed that he was among the damned. He was never likely to forget his first interview with his future chief. ‘I hear you’re in want of an assistant editor,’ he had shyly begun. Burlap nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’ And after an enormous and horrible silence, he suddenly looked up with his blank eyes and asked: ‘Do you believe in Life?’ Walter blushed to the roots of his hair and said, Yes. It was the only possible answer. There was another desert of speechlessness and then Burlap looked up again. ‘Are you a virgin?’ he enquired. Walter blushed yet more violently, hesitated and at last shook his head. It was only later that he discovered, from one of Burlap’s own articles, that the man had been modelling his behaviour on that of Tolstoy—’ going straight to the great simple fundamental things,’ as Burlap himself described the old Salvationist’s soulful impertinences.
‘Yes, Rimbaud certainly believed in Life,’ Walter acquiesced feebly, feeling while he spoke the words as he felt when he had to write a formal letter of condolence. Talking about believing in Life was as bad as talking about grieving with you in your great bereavement.
‘He believed in it so much,’ Burlap went on, dropping his eyes (to Walter’s great relief) and nodding as he ruminatively pronounced the words,’so profoundly that he was prepared to give it up. That’s how I interpret his abandonment of literature—as a deliberate sacrifice.’ (He uses the big words too easily, thought Walter.) ‘He that would save his life must lose it.’ (Oh, oh!) ‘To be the finest poet of your generation and, knowing it, to give up poetry—that’s losing your life to save it. That’s really believing in life. His faith was so strong, that he was prepared to lose his life, in the certainty of gaining a new and better one.’ (Much too easily! Walter was filled with embarrassment.) ‘A life of mystical contemplation and intuition. Ah, if only one knew what he did and thought in Africa, if only one knew!’
‘He smuggled guns for the Emperor Menelik,’ Walter had the courage to reply. ‘And to judge from his letters, he seems to have thought chiefly about making enough money to settle down. He carried forty thousand francs in his belt. A stone and a half of gold round his loins.’ Talking of gold, he was thinking, I really ought to speak to him about my screw.
But at the mention of Menelik’s rifles and the forty thousand francs, Burlap smiled with an expression of Christian forgiveness. ‘But do you really imagine,’ he asked, ‘that gun-running and money were what occupied his mind in the desert? The author of Les Illuminations?’
Walter blushed, as though he had been guilty of some nasty solecism. ‘Those are the only facts we know,’ he said self-excusingly.
‘But there is an insight that sees deeper than the mere facts.’ ‘Deeper insight’ was Burlap’s pet name for his own opinion. ‘He was realizing the new life, he was gaining the Kingdom of Heaven.’
‘It’s a hypothesis,’ said Walter, wishing uncomfortably that Burlap had never read the New Testament.
‘For me,’ retorted Burlap, ‘it’s a certainty. An absolute certainty.’ He spoke very emphatically, he wagged his head with violence. ‘A complete and absolute certainty,’ he repeated, hypnotizing himself by the reiteration
