Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because I’m committed to it. Because in some way it’s my destiny. Because that’s what life finally is—hateful and boring; that’s what human beings are, when they’re left to themselves—hateful and boring again. Because, once one’s damned, one ought to damn oneself doubly. Because…yes, because I really like hating and being bored.’
He liked it.
The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone. The concert season was in full swing, there was opera at Covent Garden, all the theatres were open; but Spandrell only read the advertisements—the Eroica at the Queen’s Hall, Schnabel playing Op. 106 at the Wigmore, Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Little Tich at the Alhambra, Othello at the Old Vic, Charlie Chaplin at Marble Arch—read them very carefully and stayed at home.
There was a pile of music on the piano, his shelves were full of books, all the London Library was at his disposal; Spandrell read nothing but magazines and the illustrated weeklies and the morning and evening papers. The rain went sliding incessantly down the dirty glass of the windows; Spandrell turned the enormous crackling pages of the Times. ‘The Duke of York,’ he read, having eaten his way, like a dung beetle’s maggot in its native element, through Births, Deaths and the Agony Column, through Servants and Real Estate, through Legal Reports, through Imperial and Foreign News, through Parliament, through the morning’s history, through the five leading articles, through Letters to the Editor, as far as Court and Personal and the little clerical essay on The Bible in Bad Weather,’ the Duke of York will be presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers Company on Monday next.
His Royal Highness will take luncheon with the Master and Wardens of the Company after the presentation.’ Pascal and Blake were within reach, on the bookshelf. But ‘Lady Augusta Crippen has left England on the Berengaria. She will travel across America to visit her brother-in-law and sister, the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Spandrell laughed, and the laughter was a liberation, was a source of energy. He got up; he put on his mackintosh and went out. ‘The Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Still smiling, he turned into the public-house round the comer. It was early; there was only one other drinker in the bar.
‘But why should two people stay together and be unhappy?’ the barmaid was saying. ‘Why? When they can get a divorce and be happy?’
‘Because marriage is a sacrament,’ replied the stranger.
‘Sacrament yourself!’ the barmaid retorted contemptuously. Catching sight of Spandrell, she nodded and smiled. He was a regular customer.
‘Double brandy,’ he ordered, and leaning against the bar examined the stranger. He had a face like a choirboy’s—but a choirboy suddenly overwhelmed by middle age; chubby, prettily doll-like, but withered. The mouth was horribly small, a little slit in a rosebud. The cherub’s cheeks had begun to sag and were grey, like the chin, with a day’s beard.
‘Because,’ the stranger went on—and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of selfconsciousness, ‘because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. One flesh,’ he repeated and accompanied the wdrds by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter. He caught Spandrell’s eye, blushed, and to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.
‘What do you think, Mr. Spandrell?’ asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.
‘Of what? Of being one flesh?’ The barmaid nodded. ‘H’m. As a matter of fact, I was just envying the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter for being so unequivocally two fleshes. If you were called the Governor-General of South Melanesia,’ he went on, addressing himself to the withered choirboy,’ and your wife was Lady Ethelberta Todhunter, do you imagine you’d be one flesh? ‘ The stranger wriggled like a worm on a hook. ‘Obviously not. It would be shocking if you were.’
The stranger ordered another whiskey. ‘But joking apart,’ he said, ‘the sacrament of marriage…’
‘But why should two people be unhappy? ‘ persisted the barmaid. ‘When it isn’t necessary?’
‘Why shouldn’t they be unhappy?’ Spandrell enquired. ‘Perhaps it’s what they’re here for. How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?’
A positivist, the barmaid laughed. ‘What rot!’
‘But the Anglicans don’t regard it as a sacrament,’ Spandrell continued.
The choirboy writhed indignantly. ‘Do you take me for an Anglican?’
The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation. Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously. In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalents of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy, of poetry and a week-end with Cleopatra, of big-game hunting and music. The choirboy ordered another drink.
‘What an age we live in!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Barbarous. Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.’
‘Not to mention hygienic truths,’ said Spandrell. ‘These damp clothes! And not a window.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.
The choirboy shuddered and held up his hands. ‘But what a handkerchief!’ he exclaimed, ‘what a horror!’
Spandrell held it out for inspection. ‘It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,’ he said. It was a silk bandana, red with bold patterns in black and pink. ‘Extremely expensive, I may add.’
‘But the colour, my dear sir. The colour!’
‘I like it.’
‘But not at this. season of the year. Not between Easter and Whitsun. Impossible! The liturgical colour is white.’ He pulled out his own handkerchief. It was snowy. ‘And my socks.’ He lifted a foot.
‘I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.’
‘White, white,’ said the choirboy. ‘It’s prescribed. Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white. Not to mention the fact that to-day’s the feast of St. Natalia the Virgin. And white’s the colour for all virgins who aren’t also martyrs.’
‘I should have thought they were all martyrs,’ said Spandrell. ‘That is, if they’ve been virgins long enough.’
The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. Outside was loneliness and the damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact. The choirboy began to talk of little St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin-miners. He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.
‘Another wet Derby,’ prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company and with fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls. The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever,—a steam of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening. Into Spandrell’s face the withered choirboy breathed alcohol and poetry.
‘To and fro, to and fro,
Piran of Perranzabuloe,’
he intoned. Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacing. He had lost his selfconsciousness. The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep. A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.
‘Walked weightless,’
he continued,
‘Walked weightless on the heaving seas
Among the Cassiterides.’
‘That was Piran’s chief miracle,’ he explained; ‘walking from Land’s End to the Scilly Islands.’
‘Pretty nearly the world’s record, I should think,’ said Spandrell.
The other shook his head. ‘There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales. But I can’t remember his name. Miss!’ he called. ‘Here! Another whiskey, please.’
‘I must say,’ said Spandrell, ‘you seem to make the best of both worlds. Six whiskeys…
‘Only five,’ the choirboy protested. ‘This is only the fifth.’
‘Five whiskeys, then, and the liturgical colours. Not to mention St. Piran of Perranzabuloe. Do you really believe in that walk to the Scillies?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And here’s for young Sacramento,’ said the barmaid, pushing his glass across the counter.
The choirboy shook his head as he paid. ‘Blasphemies all round,’ he said. ‘Every word another wound in the Sacred Heart.’ He drank. ‘Another bleeding, agonizing wound.’
‘What fun you have with your Sacred Heart!’
‘Fun?’ said the choirboy indignantly.
‘Staggering from the bar to the altar rails. And from the confessional to the bawdy house. It’s the ideal life. Never a dull moment. I envy you.’
‘Mock on, mock on!’ He spoke like a dying martyr. ‘And if you knew what a tragedy my life has been, you wouldn’t say you envied me.’
The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. God-thirsty from the spiritual deserts of the workshop and the office, men came, as to a temple. Bottled and barrelled by Clyde and Liffey, by Thames, Douro and Trent, the mysterious divinity revealed itself to them.
For the Brahmins who pressed and drank the soma, its name was Indra; for the hemp-eating yogis, Siva. The gods of Mexico inhabited the peyotl. The Persian Sufis discovered Allah in
