Philip followed him. He had expected to be overwhelmed with questions about the East and the tropics. Instead of which his father had only perfunctorily enquired if the voyage had been good, and had gone on, almost before Philip could answer, to speak about his own affairs. For the first moment Philip had been surprised and even a little nettled. But the moon, he reflected, seems larger than Sirius, because it is nearer. The voyage, his voyage, was to him a moon, to his father the smallest of little stars.
‘Here,’ said Mr. Quarles and raised the cover. The dictaphone was revealed. ‘Wonderful invention!’ He spoke with profound selfsatisfaction. It was the sudden rising, in all its refulgence, of his moon. He explained the workings of the machine. Then, tilting up his face, ‘It’s so useful,’ he said, ‘when an idyah occurs to you. You put it into wahds at once. Talk to yourself; the machine remembahs. I have it brought up to my bedroom every night. Such valuable idyahs come to one when one’s in bed, don’t you find? Without a dictaphone they would get lost.’
‘And what do you do when you’ve got to the end of one of these phonograph records?’ Philip enquired.
‘Send it to my secretarah to be typed.’
Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve got a secretary now?’
Mr. Quarles nodded importantly. ‘Only a half-time one, so far,’ he said, addressing the cornice of the opposite wall. ‘You’ve no idyah what a lot I have to do. What with the book, and the estate, and letters, and accounts and…and…things,’ he concluded rather lamely. He sighed, he shook the martyr’s head. ‘You’re lucky, my dyah boy,’ he went on. ‘You have no distractions. You can give your whole time to writing. I wish I could give all mine. But I have the estate and all the rest. Trivial—but the business must be done.’ He sighed again. ‘I envy you your freedom.’
Philip laughed. ‘I almost envy myself sometimes. But the dictaphone will be a great help.’
‘Oh, it will,’ said Mr. Quarles
‘Undoubtedlah.’
‘How’s the book going?’
‘Slowly,’ his father replied, ‘but surely. I think I have most of my materials now.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘You novelists,’ said Mr. Quarles patronizingly, ‘you’re fortunate. You can just sit down and write. No preliminarah labour necessarah. Nothing like this.’ He pointed to the filing cabinets and the cardindex boxes. They were the proofs of his superiority, as well as of the enormous difficulties against which he had to struggle. Philip’s books might be successful. But after all, what was a novel? An hour’s entertainment, that was all; to be picked up and thrown aside again, carelessly. Whereas the largest book on democracy…And anyone could write a novel. It was just a question of living and then proceeding to record the fact. To compose the largest book on democracy one had to take notes, collect materials from innumerable sources, buy filing cabinets and typewriters, portable, polyglottic, calculating; one needed a cardindex and loose-leaf notebooks and a fountain-pen that could write six thousand words without having to be refilled; one required a dictaphone and a half-time secretary who would shortly have to become a whole-time one. ‘Nothing like this,’ he insisted.
‘Oh, no,’ said Philip, who had been wandering round the room examining the literary apparatus. ‘Nothing like this.’ He picked up some newspaper clippings that were lying under a paper weight on the lid of the unopened Corona. ‘Puzzles?’ he asked, holding up the irregularly chequered diagrams. ‘I didn’t know you’d become a crossword fiend.’
Mr. Quarles took the clippings from his son and put them away in a drawer. He was annoyed that Philip should have seen them. The crosswords spoiled the effect of the dictaphone. ‘Childish things,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘But they’re a distraction when the mind is tired. I like to amuse myself with them occasionalah.’ In reality Mr. Quarles spent almost the whole of his mornings on crosswords. They exactly suited his type of intelligence. He was one of the most expert puzzle-solvers of his epoch.
In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Mrs. Quarles was talking with her daughter-in-law. She was a small and active woman, grey-haired but preserving unblurred and hardly distorted the pure outlines of regular and well-moulded features. The expression of the face was at once vivacious and sensitive. It was a delicate energy, a strong but quiveringly responsive life, that shone in incessant variations of brilliance and shade of colour from her expressive grey-blue eyes. Her lips responded hardly less closely and constantly to her thoughts and feelings than did her eyes, and were grave or firm, smiled or were melancholy through an almost infinitesimally chromatic scale of emotional expression.
‘And little Phil?’ she said, enquiring after her grandchild.
‘Radiant.’
‘Darling little man!’ The warmth of Mrs. Quarles’s affection enriched her voice and was visible as a light in her eyes. ‘You must have felt miserable, leaving him for such a long time.’
Elinor gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. ‘Well, I knew that Miss Fulkes and mother between them would look after him much better than I could do.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘I don’t believe nature ever meant me to have children. Either I’m impatient with them, or else I spoil them. Little Phil’s a pet, of course; but I know that a family would have driven me crazy.’
Mrs. Quarles’s expression changed. ‘But wasn’t it wonderful to see him again after all those months? ‘ The tone of the question was almost anxious. She hoped that Elinor would answer it with the enthusiastic affirmative which would have been natural in the circumstances to herself. But at the same time she was haunted by a fear lest the strange girl might answer (with the frankness which was so admirable a quality in her, but which was also so disquieting, in its revelation of unfamiliar and to Rachel incomprehensible states of soul) that she hadn’t been in the least pleased to see her child again. Elinor’s first words came to her as a relief.
‘Yes, it was wonderful,’ she said, but robbed the phrase of its full effect by adding. ‘I didn’t imagine I could be so glad to see him again. But it was really a wild excitement.’
There was a silence. ‘A queer girl,’ Mrs. Quarles was thinking; and her face reflected something of that bewilderment which she always felt in Elinor’s presence. She did her best to love her daughter-in-law; and up to a point she succeeded. Elinor had many excellent qualities. But something seemed to be lacking in her, something without which no human being could be entirely sympathetic to Rachel Quarles.
It was as though she had been born without certain natural instincts. Not to have expected to feel happy when she saw her baby again—that was strange enough. But what Rachel found almost stranger was Elinor’s calm and casual admission of the fact. She herself would have blushed to make such an admission, even if it had been the truth. It would have seemed to her something shameful—a kind of blasphemy, a denial of what was holy. To Rachel the reverence for holy things came naturally. It was Elinor’s lack of this reverence, her inability even to realize that holy things were holy, which made it impossible for Mrs. Quarles to love her daughter-in-law as much as she would have liked.
On her side Elinor admired, respected and genuinely liked her husband’s mother. For her, the chronic difficulty was to establish effectual contact with a person whose ruling ideas and motives seemed to her so oddly incomprehensible and even so absurd. Mrs. Quarles was unobtrusively but ardently religious and lived to the best of her ability in accordance with her beliefs. Elinor admired, but felt that it was all rather absurd and superfluous. Her education had been orthodox. But she never remembered a time, even in her childhood, when she seriously believed what people told her about the other world and its inhabitants. The other world bored her; she was interested only in this. Confirmation had evoked in her no more enthusiasm than a visit to the theatre, indeed considerably less. Her adolescence had passed without the trace of a religious crisis.
‘It all seems to me just nonsense,’ she would say when the matter was discussed in her presence. And there was no affectation in her words, they were not uttered provocatively. She simply stated a fact of her personal history. Religion and, along with religion, all transcendental morality, all metaphysical speculation seemed to her nonsensical in precisely the same way as the smell of Gorgonzola seemed to her disgusting. There was no getting behind the immediate experience. Often, on occasions like this, she wished there were. She would have liked to cross the abyss which separated her from Mrs. Quarles.
As it was, she felt a certain uneasiness when she was with her mother-in-law; she hesitated in her presence to express her feelings or to say what she thought. For she had found, only too often, that the frank utterance of what seemed to her perfectly natural sentiments and reasonable opinions, was apt to distress her mother-in-law, to strike her as strange and shocking. It had happened again now, as she could see from the expression which showed itself for an instant on Mrs. Quarles’s mobile and sensitive face. What had it been this time? Conscious of no offence, Elinor could only wonder. In future, she decided, she would volunteer nothing of her own; she would just agree with what was said.
As it happened, however, the next topic of conversation to be broached was one
