John Bidlake’s reasons for desiring to marry yet again were unromantic. Travelling in Provence he had caught typhoid. (‘That’s what comes of drinking water,’ he used to say afterwards. ‘If only I’d stuck to Burgundy and cognac!’) After a month in hospital at Avignon he returned to England, a thin and tottering convalescent. Three weeks later influenza, followed by pneumonia, brought him again to death’s door. He recovered slowly. The doctor congratulated him on having recovered at all.’do you call this recovering? ‘ grumbled John Bidlake. ‘I feel as though about three-quarters of me were dead and buried.’ Accustomed to being well, he was terrified of illness. He saw himself living miserably, a lonely invalid. Marriage would be an alleviation. He decided to marry. The girl must be good-looking—that went without saying. But serious, not flighty; devoted, a stay-at-home.
In Janet Paston he found all that he had been looking for. She had a face like a saint’s; she was serious almost to excess; her adoration for himself was flattering.
They were married, and ifJohn Bidlake had remained the invalid he had imagined himself doomed to be, the marriage might have been a success. Her devotion would have made up for her incompetence as a nurse; his helplessness would have rendered her indispensable to his happiness. But health returned. Six months after his marriage John Bidlake was entirely his old self. The old self began to behave in the old way. Mrs. Bidlake took refuge from unhappiness in an endless imaginative meditation, which even her two children were hardly able to interrupt.
It had lasted now for a quarter of a century. A tall imposing lady of fifty all in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, she stood among the tulips, her eyes shut, thinking of Pinturicchio and the Middle Ages, and time flowing and flowing, and God immobile on the eternal bank.
A shrill barking precipitated her out of her high eternity. She opened her eyes, reluctantly, and looked round. The small and silky parody of an extreme-oriental monster, her little Pekingese was barking at the kitchen cat. Frisking this way and that round the circumference of a circle whose radius was proportionate to his terror of the arched and spitting tabby, he yapped hysterically. His tail waved like a plume in the wind, his eyes goggled out of his black face.
‘T’ang!’ Mrs. Bidlake called. ‘T’ang!’ All her Pekingese for the last thirty years had had dynastic names. T’ang the First had flourished before her children were born. It was with T’ang the Second that she and Walter had visited the dying Wetherington. The kitchen cat was now spitting at T’ang the Third. In the intervals, little Mings and Sungs had lived, grown decrepit and, in the lethal chamber, gone the way of all pets. ‘T’ang, come here.’ Even in this emergency Mrs. Bidlake was careful to pronounce the apostrophe. Or rather she was not careful to pronounce it; she pronounced it by cultured instinct, because, being what nature and education had made her, she simply could not pronounce the word without the apostrophe even when the fur was threatening to fly.
The little dog obeyed at last. The cat ceased to spit, its fur lay down on its back, it walked away majestically. Mrs. Bidlake went on with her weeding and her vague, unending meditation among the flowers. God, Pinturicchio, dandelions, eternity, the sky, the clouds, the early Venetians, dandelions….
Upstairs in the schoolroom lessons were over. At least they were over as far as little Phil was concerned; for he was doing what he liked best in the world, drawing. Miss Fulkes, it is true, called the process ‘Art’ and ‘Imagination Training,’ and allotted half an hour to it every morning, from twelve to halfpast. But for little Phil it was just fun. He sat bent over his paper, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his face intent and serious, drawing, drawing with a kind of inspired violence. Wielding a pencil that seemed disproportionately large, his little brown hand indefatigably laboured. At once rigid and wavering, the lines of the childish composition traced themselves out on the paper.
Miss Fulkes sat by the window, looking out at the sunny garden, but not consciously seeing it. What she saw was behind the eyes, in a fanciful universe. She saw herself—herself in that lovely Lanvin frock that had been illustrated last month in Vogue, with pearls, dancing at Ciro’s, which looked (for she had never been at Ciro’s) curiously like the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where she had been. ‘How lovely she looks!’ all the people were saying. She walked swayingly, like that actress she had seen at the London Pavilion—what was her name?
She held out her white hand; it was young Lord Wonersh who kissed it, Lord Wonersh, who looked like Shelley and lived like Byron and owned half Oxford Street and had come to the house last February with old Mr. Bidlake and had perhaps spoken to her twice. And then, all at once, she saw herself riding in the Park. And a couple of seconds later she was on a yacht in the Mediterranean. And then in a motor car. Lord Wonersh had just taken his seat beside her, when the noise of T’ang’s shrill barking startlingly roused her to consciousness of the lawn, the gay tulips, the Wellingtonia and, on the other side, the schoolroom. Miss Fulkes felt guilty, she had been neglecting her charge.
‘Well, Phil,’ she asked, turning round briskly to her pupil, ‘what are you drawing?’
‘Mr. Stokes and Albert pulling the mow-lawner,’ Phil answered, without looking up from his paper.
‘Lawn-mower,’ Miss Fulkes corrected.
‘Lawn-mower,’ Phil dutifully repeated.
‘You never get your compound words right,’ Miss Fulkes continued. ‘Mow-lawner, hopgrasser, crack-nutter—it’s a sort of mental defect, like mirror-writing, I suppose.’ Miss Fulkes had taken a course in educational psychology. ‘You must’really try to correct it, Phil,’ she added, earnestly. After so long and flagrant a dereliction of duty (at Ciro’s, on horseback, in the limousine with Lord Wonersh) Miss Fulkes felt it incumbent upon her to be particularly solicitous, scientifically so: she was a very conscientious young woman. ‘Will you try?’ she insisted.
‘Yes, Miss Fulkes,’ the child answered. He had no idea what she wanted him to try to do. But it would keep her quiet if he said yes. He was busy on a particularly difficult bit of his drawing.
Miss Fulkes sighed and looked out of the window again. This time she consciously perceived what her eyes saw. Mrs. Bidlake wandered among the tulips, dressed flowingly in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, a sort of Pre-Raphaelitic ghost. Every now and then she paused and looked at the sky. Old Mr. Stokes the gardener, passed carrying a rake; the tips of his white beard fluttered gently in the breeze. The village clock struck the half-hour. The garden, the trees, the fields, the wooded hills in the distance were always the same. Miss Fulkes felt all at once so hopelessly sad that she could have cried.
‘Do mow-lawners, I mean lawn-mowers, have wheels?’ asked little Phil, looking up with a frown of effort and perplexity wrinkling his forehead. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Yes. Or let me think…’ Miss Fulkes also frowned; ‘no. They have rollers.’
‘Rollers! ‘ cried Phil. ‘That’s it.’ He attacked his drawing again with fury.
Always the same. There seemed to be no escape, no prospect of freedom. ‘If I had a thousand pounds,’ thought Miss Eulkes, ‘a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds.’ The words were magical. ‘A thousand pounds.’
‘There!’ cried Phil. ‘Come and look.’ He held up his paper. Miss Fulkes got up and crossed to the table. ‘What a lovely drawing!’ she said.
‘That’s all the little bits of grass flying up,’ said Phil, pointing to a cloud of dots and dashes in the middle of his picture. He was particularly proud of the grass.
‘I see,’ said Miss Fulkes.
‘And look how hard Albert is pulling!’ It was true; Albert was pulling like mad. And old Mr. Stokes, recognizable by the four parallel pencil strokes issuing from his chin, pushed as energetically at the other end of the machine.
For a child of his age, little Phil had an observant eye, and a strange talent for rendering on paper what he had seen—not realistically, of course, but in terms of expressive symbols. Albert and Mr. Stokes were, for all their scratchy uncertainty of outline, violently alive.
‘Albert’s left leg is rather funny, isn’t it?’ said Miss Fulkes. ‘Rather long and thin and…’ She checked herself, remembering what old Mr. Bidlake had said. ‘On no account is the child to be taught how to draw, in the art-school sense of the word. On no account. I don’t want him to be ruined.’
Phil snatched the paper from her. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said angrily. His pride was hurt, he hated criticism, refused ever to be in the wrong.
‘Perhaps it isn’t really,’ Miss Fulkes made haste to be soothing. ‘Perhaps I made a mistake.’ Phil smiled again. ‘Though why a child,’ Miss Fulkes was thinking,’shouldn’t be told when he’s drawn a leg that’s impossibly long and thin and waggly, I really don’t understand.’ Still, old Mr. Bidlake ought to know. A man in his position, with his reputation, a great painter—she had often heard him called a great painter, read it in newspaper articles, even in books. Miss Fulkes had a profound respect for the Great. Shakespeare, Milton, Michelangelo…Yes, Mr. Bidlake, the Great John Bidlake, ought to know best. She had been wrong in mentioning that left leg.
‘It’s after halfpast twelve,’ she went on in a brisk efficient
