‘Another whiskey, Miss,’ said the choirboy, and turning back to Spandrell almost wept over his misfortunes. He had loved, he had married—sacramentally; he insisted on that. He had been happy. They had both been happy.
Spandrell raised his eyebrows.’did she like the smell of whiskey?’
The other shook his head sadly. ‘I had my faults,’ he admitted. ‘I was weak. This accursed drink! Accursed!’ And in a sudden enthusiasm for temperance he poured his whiskey on the floor. ‘There!’ he said triumphantly.
‘Very noble!’ said Spandrell. He beckoned to the barmaid
‘Another whiskey for this gentleman.’
The choirboy protested, but without much warmth. He sighed. ‘It was always my besetting sin,’ he said. ‘But I was always sorry afterwards. Genuinely repentant.’
‘I’m sure you were. Never a dull moment.’
‘If she’d stood by me, I might have cured myself.’
‘A pure woman’s help, what?’ said Spandrell.
‘Exactly,’ the other nodded. ‘That’s exactly it. But she left me. Ran off. Or rather, not ran. She was lured. She wouldn’t have done it on her own. It was that horrible little snake in the grass. That little…’ He ran through the sergeant-major’s brief vocabulary. ‘I’d wring his neck if he were here,’ the choirboy went on. The Lord of Battles had been in his fifth whiskey. ‘Dirty little swine!’ He banged the counter. ‘You know the man who painted those pictures in the Tate; Bidlake? Well, it was that chap’s son. Walter Bidlake.’
Spandrell raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. The choirboy talked on.
At Sbisa’s, Walter was dining with Lucy Tantamount.
‘Why don’t you come to Paris too? ‘ Lucy was saying.
Walter shook his head. ‘I’ve got to work.’
‘I find it’s really impossible to stay in one place more than a couple of months at a time. One gets so stale and wilted, so unutterably bored. The moment I step into the aeroplane at Croydon I feel as though I had been born again—like the Salvation Army.’
‘And how long does the new life last?’
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘As long as the old one. But fortunately there’s an almost unlimited supply of aeroplanes. I’m all for Progress.’
The swing-doors of the temple of the unknown god closed behind them. Spandrell and his companion stepped out into the cold and rainy darkness.
‘Oof!’ said the choirboy, shivering, and turned up the collar of his raincoat. ‘It’s like jumping into a swimming-bath.’
‘It’s like reading Haeckel after Fenelon. You Christians live in such a jolly little public-house of a universe.’
They walked a few yards down the street.
‘Look here,’ said Spandrell,’do you think you can get home on foot? Because you don’t look as though you could.’
Leaning against a lamp-post the choirboy shook his head.
‘We’ll wait for a cab.’
They waited. The rain fell. Spandrell looked at the other man with a cold distaste. The creature had amused him, while they had been in the pub, had served as a distraction. Now, suddenly, he was merely repulsive.
‘Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?’ he asked. ‘They’ll make you drink burning whiskey there. A perpetual Christmas pudding in your belly. If you could see yourself! The revolting spectacle…’
The choirboy’s sixth whiskey had been full of contrition. ‘I know, I know,’ he groaned. ‘I’m disgusting. I’m contemptible. But if you knew how I’d struggled and striven and…’
‘There’s a cab.’ Spandrell gave a shout.
‘How I’d prayed,’ the choirboy continued.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens. I’ve wrestled…’
The cab drew up in front of them. Spandrell opened the door.
‘Get in, you sot,’ he said, and gave the other a push. ‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens,’ he said to the driver. The choirboy, meanwhile, had crawled into his seat. Spandrell followed. ‘Disgusting slug!’
‘Go on, go on. I deserve it. You have every right to despise me.’
‘I know,’ said Spandrell. ‘But if you think I’m going to do you the pleasure of telling you so any more, you’re much mistaken.’ He leaned back in his corner and shut his eyes. All his appalling weariness and disgust had suddenly returned. ‘God,’ he said to himself. ‘God, God, God.’ And like a grotesque derisive echo of his thoughts, the choirboy prayed aloud. ‘God have mercy upon me,’ the maudlin voice repeated. Spandrell burst out laughing.
Leaving the drunkard on his front door step, Spandrell went back to the cab. He remembered suddenly that he had not dined.’sbisa’s Restaurant,’ he told the driver. ‘God, God,’ he repeated in the darkness. But the night was a vacuum.
‘There’s Spandrell,’ cried Lucy, interrupting her companion in the middle of a sentence. She raised her arm and waved.
‘Lucy!’ Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. He sat down at their table. ‘It’ll interest you to hear, Walter, that I’ve just been doing a good Samaritan to your victim.’
‘My victim?’
‘Your cuckold. Carling; isn’t that his name?’ Walter blushed in an agony. ‘He wears his horns without any difference. Quite traditionally.’ He looked at Walter and was glad to see the signs of distress on his face. ‘I found him drowning his sorrows,’ he went on maliciously. ‘In whiskey. The grand romantic remedy.’ It was a relief to be able to take some revenge for his miseries.
CHAPTER XVIII
At Port Said they went ashore. The flank of the ship was an iron precipice. At its foot the launch heaved on a dirty and slowly wallowing sea; between its gunwale and the end of the ship’s ladder a little chasm alternately shrank and expanded. For a sound pair of legs the leap would have been nothing. But Philip hesitated. To jump with his game leg foremost might mean to collapse under the impact of arrival; and if he trusted to the game leg to propel him, he had a good chance of falling ignominiously short. He was delivered from his predicament by the military gentleman who had preceded him in the leap.
‘Here, take my hand,’ he called, noticing Philip’s hesitation and its cause.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Philip when he waa safely in the launch.
‘Awkward, this sort of thing,’ said the other. ‘Particularly if one’s short of a leg, what?’
‘Very.’
‘Damaged in the War?’
Philip shook his head. ‘Accident when I was a boy,’ he explained telegraphically, and the blood mounted to his cheeks. ‘There’s my wife,’ he mumbled, glad of an excuse to get away. Elinor jumped, steadied herself against him; they picked their way to seats at the other end of the launch.
‘Why didn’t you let me go first and help you over?’ she asked.
‘I was all right,’ he answered curtly and in a tone that decided her to say no snore. She wondered what was the matter. Something to do with his lameness? Why was he so queer about it?
Philip himself would have found it hard to explain what there was in the military gentleman’s question to distress him. After all there was nothing in the least discreditable in having been run over by a cart. And to have been rejected as totally unfit for military service was not in the least unpatriotic. And yet, quite unreasonably, the question had disturbed him, as all such questions, as any too overt reference to his lameness, unless deliberately prepared for by himself, invariably did.
Discussing him with Elinor, ‘Philip was the last person,’ his mother had once said, ‘the very last person such an accident ought to have happened to. He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more, if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world. It meant no games, to begin with; and no games meant fewer contacts with other boys, more solitude, more leisure for books. And then (poor Phil!) it meant fresh causes for shyness.
A sense of inferiority. Children can be so horribly ruthless; they used to laugh at him sometimes at school. And later, when girls began to matter, how I wish he’d been able to go to dances and tennis parties! But he couldn’t waltz or play. And of course he didn’t want to go as an onlooker and an outsider. His poor smashed leg began by keeping him at a physical distance from girls of his own age. And it kept him at a psychological distance, too. For I believe he was always afraid (secretly, of course, and without admitting it) that they might laugh at him, as some of the boys did; and he didn’t want to run the risk of being rejected in favour of someone who wasn’t handicapped as he was. Not that he’d ever have taken very much interest in girls,’ Mrs. Quarles had added.
And Elinor had laughed. ‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’
‘But he wouldn’t have got into such a habit of deliberately avoiding them. He wouldn’t have so systematically retired from all personal contacts—and not with girls only; with men, too. Intellectual contacts—those are the only ones he admits.’
‘It’s as though he only felt safe among ideas,’ Elinor had said.
‘Because he can hold his own there; because he can be certain of superiority. He’s got into the habit of feeling afraid and suspicious outside that intellectual world. He needn’t have. And I’ve always tried to reassure him and tempt him out; but he won’t let himself be tempted, he creeps back into his shell.’ And after a silence, ‘it’s had only one good result,’ she had added, ‘the accident, I mean. It saved him from going to the War, from being killed, probably. Like his brother.’
The launch began to
