‘Absurd, then, and impossible,’ Spandrell agreed. ‘But all the same, I believe that’s how it happens. Why should things be logically explainable?’
‘Yes, why indeed? ‘ Walter echoed.
‘Still,’ said Philip, ‘your providence that makes the same event qualitatively different for different peopleisn’t that a bit thick?’
‘No thicker than our being here at all. No thicker than all this.’ With a wave of his hand he indicated the Belshazzaresque dining-room, the eaters, the plumcoloured waiters and the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy, who happened at that moment to be entering the room with the Professor of Poetry at the University of Cambridge.
But Philip was argumentatively persistent. ‘But assuming, as the scientists do, that the simplest hypothesis is the best—though I could never for the life of me see what justification, beyond human ineptitude, they had for doing so…’
‘Hear, hear.’
‘What justification?’ repeated Illidge. ‘Only the justification of observed fact, that’s all. It happens to be found experimentally that nature does do things in the simplest way.’
‘Or else,’ said Spandrell, ‘that human beings understand only the simplest explanations. In practice, you couldn’t distinguish between those alternatives.’
‘But if a thing has a simple, natural explanation, it can’t at the same time have a complicated supernatural one.’
‘Why not?’ asked Spandrell. ‘You mayn’t be able to understand or measure the supernatural forces behind the superficially natural ones (whatever the difference between natural and supernatural may be). But that doesn’t prove they’re not there. You’re simply raising your stupidity to the rank of a general law.’
Philip took the opportunity to continue his argument. ‘But assuming, all the same,’ he broke in before Illidge could speak again, ‘that the simpler explanation is likely to be the truer—aren’t the facts more simply explained by saying it’s the individual, with his history and character, who distorts the event into his own likeness? We can see individuals, but we can’t see providence; we have to postulate it. Isn’t it best, if we can do without it, to omit the superfluous postulate?’
‘But is it superfluous?’ said Spandrell. ‘Can you cover the facts without it? I have my doubts. What about the malleable sort of people—and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born? What about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it’s the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of—what then? Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?’
‘Who decides whether a penny shall come down heads or tails?’ asked Illidge contemptuously.
‘But why bring in pennies?’ Spandrell retorted. ‘Why bring in pennies, when we’re talking about human beings? Consider yourself. Do you feel like a penny when things happen to you?’
‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Feelings have nothing to do with objective facts.’
‘But sensations have. Science is the rationalization of sense-perceptions. Why should one class of psychological intuitions be credited with scientific value and all others denied it? A direct intuition of providential action is just as likely to be a bit of information about objective facts as a direct intuition of blueness and hardness. And when things happen to one, one doesn’t feel like a penny. One feels that events are significant; that they’ve been arranged. Particularly when they occur in series. Tails a hundred times in succession, shall we say?’
‘Give us the credit of coming down heads,’ said Philip laughing. ‘We’re the intelligentsia, remember.’ Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity, as an irrelevance. The subject for him was a serious one. ‘When I think of myself,’ he said, ‘I feel sure that everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance. As a young boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something entirely different from this actual Me.’
‘A little angel, what?’ said Illidge.
Spandrell ignored the interruption. ‘But from the time that I was fifteen onwards, things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.’ He was silent.
‘And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings. A sad story. Has it ever struck you,’ Illidge went on, turning towards Walter, ‘you who are an expert on art, or at least ought to be—has it ever struck you that the paintings of angels are entirely incorrect and unscientific?’ Walter shook his head. ‘A seventy-kilogram man, if he developed wings, would have to develop colossal muscles to work them. And big flying muscles would mean a correspondingly large sternum, like a bird’s. A ten-stone angel, if he wanted to fly as well as a duck, would have to have a breastbone projecting at least four or five feet. Tell your father that, next time he wants to paint a picture of the Annunciation. All the existing Gabriels are really shockingly improbable.’
Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and how they were all—the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the spectacle of a flower or a landscape—in some way bound up with his sentiment for his mother, somehow rooted and implied in it. He remembered that Girls’ School in Paris, those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets. The book had been written in the age when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic fashion, when ‘kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt.’ The seductive and priapic major’s moustaches had been long, curly and waxed. What shame he had felt and what remorse! Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for strength! And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother. To resist temptation was to be worthy of her. Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God. He had begun to triumph. And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. Major Knoyle’s moustaches were also curly.
‘Augustine and the Calvinists were right,’ he said aloud, breaking in on the discussion of Seraphim’s breastbones.
‘Still harping?’ said Illidge.
‘God means to save some people and damn others.’
‘Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation, and (c)…’
‘When I think of the War,’ Spandrell went on, interrupting him, ‘what it might have been for me and what in fact it was…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, Augustine was right.’
‘Well, I must say,’ said Philip, ‘I’ve always been very grateful to Augustine, or whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg. It prevented me from being a hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.’
Spandrell looked at him; the corers of his wide mouth ironically twitched. ‘Your accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life. In other words, the event was like you. Just as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me. I’d been up at Oxford a year, when it began,’ he went on.
‘The dear old College, what?’ said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some derisive comment.
‘Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs—discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination. Such an apocalypse, the first real woman!’ he added parenthetically. ‘And at the same time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the superheated fancy and the pornographic book.’
‘Which is a tribute to art,’ said Philip. ‘As I’ve so often pointed out.’ He smiled at Walter, who blushed, remembering what his brother-in-law had said about the dangers of trying to make love after high poetic models. ‘We’re brought up topsy-turvy,’ Philip went on. ‘Art before life; Romeo and Juliet and filthy stories before marriage or its equivalents. Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned. Inevitably. In the good old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical. If boys and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare’s day, there’d be a revival of the Elizabethan love lyric.’
‘You may be right,’ said Spandrell. ‘All I know is that, when I discovered the reality, I found it disappointing—but attractive, all the same. Perhaps so attractive just because it was so disappointing. The heart’s a curious sort of manure—heap; dung calls to dung, and the great charm of vice consists in its stupidity and sordidness. It attracts because it’s so repellent. But repellent it always remains. And I remember when the War came, how exultantly glad I was to have a chance of getting out of the muck and doing something decent, for a change.’
‘For King and Country!’
