Beatrice’s methods of criticism were simple; she tried in every case to say what she imagined Burlap would say. In practice what happened was that she praised all books in which Life and its problems were taken, as she thought, seriously, and condemned all those in which they were not. She would have ranked Bailey’s Festus higher than Candide, unless of course Burlap or some other authoritative person had previously told her that it was her duty to prefer Candide. As she was never permitted to criticize anything but Tripe, her lack of all critical insight was of little importance.
They worked, they went out to lunch, they returned and set to work again. Eleven new books had arrived in the interval.
‘I feel,’ said Walter, ‘as the Bombay vultures must feel when there’s been an epidemic among the Parsees.’ Bombay and the Parsees reminded him of his sister Elinor. She and Philip would be sailing to-day. He was glad they were coming home. They were almost the only people he could talk to intimately about his affairs. He would be able to discuss his problems with them. It would be a comfort, an alleviation of his responsibility. And then suddenly he remembered that everything was settled, that there were no more problems. No more. And then the telephone bell rang. He lifted the receiver, he hallooed into the mouthpiece
‘Is that you, Walter darling?’ The voice was Lucy’s.
His heart sank; he knew what was going to happen.
‘I’ve just woken up,’ she explained. ‘I’m all alone.’
She wanted him to come to tea. He refused. After tea, then.
‘I can’t,’ he persisted.
‘Nonsense! Of course you can.’
‘Impossible.’
‘But why? ‘
‘Work.’
‘But not after six. I insist.’
After all, he thought, perhaps it would be better to see her and explain what he had decided.
‘I’ll never forgive you if you don’t come.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll make an effort. I’ll come if I possibly can.’
‘What a flirt you are!’ Beatrice mocked, as he hung up the receiver. ‘Saying no for the fun of being persuaded!’
And when, at a few minutes after five, he left the office on the pretext that he must get to the London Library before closing time, she sent ironical good wishes after him. ‘Bon amusement!’ were her last words.
In the editorial room. Burlap was dictating letters to his secretary. ‘Yours etcetera,’ he concluded and picked up another batch of papers. ‘Dear Miss Saville,’ he began, after glancing at them for a moment. ‘No,’ he corrected himself.’dear Miss Romola Saville. Thank you for your note and for the enclosed manuscripts.’ He paused and, leaning back in his chair, closed his eyes in brief reflection. ‘It is not my custom,’ he went on at last in a soft remote voice, ‘it is not my custom to write personal letters to unknown contributors.’ He reopened his eyes, to meet the dark bright glance of his secretary from across the table. The expression in Miss Cobbett’s eyes was sarcastic; the faintest little smile almost imperceptibly twitched the corners of her mouth. Burlap was annoyed; but he concealed his feelings and continued to stare straight in front of him as though Miss Cobbett were not there at all and he were looking absentmindedly at a piece of furniture. Miss Cobbett looked back at her notebook.
‘How contemptible!’ she said to herself. ‘How unspeakably vulgar!’
Miss Cobbett was a small woman, black-haired, darkly downy at the corners of her upper lip, with brown eyes disproportionately large for her thin, rather sickly little face. Sombre and passionate eyes in which there was, almost permanently, an expression of reproach that could flash up into sudden anger or, as at this moment, derision. She had a right to look reproachfully on the world. Fate had treated her badly. Very badly indeed. Born and brought up in the midst of a reasonable prosperity, her father’s death had left her, from one day to another, desperately poor. She got engaged to Harry Markham. Life promised to begin again. Then came the War. Harry joined up and was killed.
His death condemned her to shorthand and typing for the rest of her natural existence. Harry was the only man who had ever loved her, who had been prepared to take the risk of loving her. Other men found her too disquietingly violent and impassioned and serious. She took things terribly seriously. Young men felt uncomfortable and silly in her company. They revenged themselves by laughing at her for having no’sense of humour,’ for being a pedant and, as time went on, for being an old maid who was longing for a man. They said she looked like a witch. She had often been in love, passionately, with a hopeless violence. The men had either not noticed; or, if they noticed, had fled precipitately, or had mocked, or, what was almost worse, had been patronizingly kind as though to a poor misguided creature who might be a nuisance but who ought, none the less, to be treated with charity. Ethel Cobbett had every right to look reproachful.
She had met Burlap because, as a girl, in the prosperous days, she had been at school with Susan Paley, who had afterwards become Burlap’s wife. When Susan died and Burlap exploited the grief he felt, or at any rate loudly said he felt, in a more than usually painful series of these always painfully personal articles which were the secret of his success as a journalist (for the great public has a chronic and cannibalistic appetite for personalities), Ethel wrote him a letter of condolence, accompanying it with a long account of Susan as a girl. A moved and moving answer came back by return of post. ‘Thank you, thank you for your memories of what I have always felt to be the realest Susan, the little girl who survived so beautifully and purely in the woman, to the very end; the lovely child that in spite of chronology she always was, underneath and parallel with the physical Susan living in time.
In her heart of hearts, I am sure, she never quite believed in her chronological adult self; she could never quite get it out of her head that she was a little girl playing at being grown up.’ And so it went on—pages of a rather hysterical lyricism about the dead child-woman. He incorporated a good deal of the substance of the letter in his next week’s article. ‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’ was its title. A day or two later he travelled down to Birmingham to have a personal interview with this woman who had known the realest Susan when she was chronologically as well as spiritually a child. The impression each made upon the other was favourable.
For Ethel, living bitterly and reproachfully between her dismal lodgings and the hateful insurance office where she was a clerk, the arrival first of his letter and now of Burlap himself had been great and wonderful events. A real writer, a man with a mind and a soul. In the state into which he had then worked himself Burlap would have liked any woman who could talk to him about Susan’s childhood and into whose warm maternal compassion, a child himself, he could luxuriously sink as into a feather bed. Ethel Cobbett was not only sympathetic and a friend of Susan’s; she had intelligence, was earnestly cultured and an admirer. The first impressions were good.
Burlap wept and was abject. He agonized himself with the thought that he could never, never ask Susan’s forgiveness for all the unkindness he had ever done her, for all the cruel words he had spoken. He confessed in an agony of contrition that he had once been unfaithful to her. He recounted their quarrels. And now she was dead; he would never be able to ask her pardon. Never, never. Ethel was moved. Nobody, she reflected, would care like that when she was dead. But being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.
These agonies which Burlap, by a process of intense concentration on the idea of his loss and grief, had succeeded in churning up within himself were in no way proportionate or even related to his feelings for the living Susan. For every Jesuit novice Loyola prescribed a course of solitary meditation on the passion of Christ; a few days of this exercise, accompanied by fasting, were generally enough to produce in the novice’s mind a vivid, mystical and personal realization of the Saviour’s real existence and sufferings. Burlap employed the same process; but instead of thinking about Jesus, or even about Susan, he thought of himself, his own agonies, his own loneliness, his own remorses.
And duly, at the end of some few days of incessant spiritual masturbation, he had been rewarded by a mystical realization of his own unique and incomparable piteousness. He
