‘This music is beginning to get rather tedious,’ John Bidlake whispered to his hostess. ‘Is it going to last much longer?’
Old Bidlake had no taste or talent for music, and he had the frankness to say so. He could afford to be frank. When one can paint as well as John Bidlake, why should one pretend to like music, when in fact one doesn’t? He looked over the seated audience and smiled.
‘They look as though they were in church,’ he said.
Lady Edward raised her fan protestingly.
‘Who’s that little woman in black,’ he went on, ‘rolling her eyes and swaying her body like St. Teresa in an ecstasy? ‘
‘Fanny Logan,’ Lady Edward whispered back. ‘But do keep quiet.’
‘People talk of the tribute vice pays to virtue,’ John Bidlake went on, incorrigibly. ‘But everything’s permitted nowadays-there’s no more need of moral hypocrisy. There’s only intellectual hypocrisy now. The tribute philistinism pays to art, what? Just look at them all paying it-in pious grimaces and religious silence!’
‘You can be thankful they payyou in guineas,’ said Lady Edward. ‘And now I absolutely insist that you should hold your tongue.’
Bidlake made a gesture of mock terror and put his hand over his mouth. Tolley voluptuously waved his arms; Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers scraped. And Bach, the poet, meditated of truth and beauty.
Fanny Logan felt the tears coming into her eyes. She was easily moved, especially by music; and when she felt an emotion, she did not try to repress it, but abandoned herself whole-heartedly to it. How beautiful this music was, how sad, and yet how comforting! She felt it within her, as a current of exquisite feeling, running smoothly but irresistibly through all the labyrinthine intricacies of her being. Even her body shook and swayed in time with the pulse and undulation of the melody. She thought of her husband; the memory of him came to her on the current of the music, of darling, darling Eric, dead now almost two years; dead, and still so young. The tears came faster. She wiped them away.
The music was infinitely sad; and yet it consoled. It admitted everything, so to speak-poor Eric’s dying before his time, the pain of his illness, his reluctance to go-it admitted everything. It expressed the whole sadness of the world, and from the depths of that sadness it was able to affirm-deliberately, quietly, without protesting too much-that everything was in some way right, acceptable. It included the sadness within some vaster, more comprehensive happiness. The tears kept welling up into Mrs. Logan’s eyes; but they were somehow happy tears, in spite of her sadness. She would have liked to tell Polly, her daughter, what she was feeling. But Polly was sitting in another row. Mrs. Logan could see the back of her head, two rows further forward, and her slim little neck with the pearls that darling Eric had given her on her eighteenth birthday, only a few months before he died.
And suddenly, as though she had felt that her mother was looking at her, as though she understood what she was feeling, Polly turned round and gave her a quick smile. Mrs. Logan’s sad and musical happiness was complete. Her mother’s were not the only eyes that looked in Polly’s direction. Advantageously placed behind and to one side of her, Hugo Brockle admiringly studied her profile. How lovely she was! He was wondering whether he would have the courage to tell her that they had played together in Kensington Gardens when they were children. He would come up to her when the music was over and boldly say: ‘We were introduced in our perambulators, you know.’ Or, if he wanted to be more unconventionally witty, ‘You’re the person who hit me on the head with a battledore.’
Looking restlessly round the room, John Bidlake had suddenly caught sight of Mary Betterton. Yes, Mary Betterton-that monster! He put his hand under his chair, he touched wood. Whenever John Bidlake saw something unpleasant, he always felt safer if he could touch wood. He didn’t believe in God, of course; he liked to tell disobliging stories about the clergy. But wood, wood-there was something about wood…. And to think that he had been in love with her, wildly, twenty, twenty-two, he dared not think how many years ago. How fat, how old and hideous! His hand crept down again to the chair leg. He averted his eyes and tried to think of something that wasn’t Mary Betterton. But the memories of the time when Mary had been young imposed themselves upon him. He still used to ride then.
The image of himself on a black horse, of Mary on a bay, rose up before him. They had often gone riding in those days. It was the time he was painting the third and best of his groups of ‘ Bathers.’ What a picture, by God! Mary was already a little too plump for some tastes, even then. Not for his; he had never objected to plumpness. These women nowadays, wanting to look like drain-pipes…. He looked at her again for a moment and shuddered. He hated her for being so repulsive, for having once been so charming. And he was the best part of twenty years her senior.
CHAPTER III
Two flights up, between the piano nobile and the servants’ quarters under the roof, Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory.
The younger Tantamounts were generally military. But the heir being a cripple, Lord Edward’s father had destined him for the political career, which the eldest sons had always traditionally begun in the Commons and continued majestically in the Lords. Hardly had Lord Edward come of age, when he was given a constituency to nurse. He nursed it dutifully. But oh, how he hated public speaking! And when one met a potential voter, what on earth was one to say? And he couldn’t even remember the main items in the Conservative party programme, much less feel enthusiastic about them. Decidedly, politics were not his line.
‘But what are you interested in? ‘ his father had asked. And the trouble was that Lord Edward didn’t know. Going to concerts was about the only thing he thoroughly enjoyed. But obviously, one couldn’t spend one’s life going to concerts. The fourth marquess could not conceal his anger and disappointment. ‘The boy’s an imbecile,’ he said, and Lord Edward himself was inclined to agree. He was good for nothing, a failure; the world had no place for him. There were times when he thought of suicide.
‘If only he’d sow a few wild oats!’ his father had complained. But the young man was, if possible, even less interested in debauchery than in politics. ‘And he’s not even a sportsman,’ the accusation continued. It was true. The massacre of birds, even in the company of the Prince of Wales, left Lord Edward quite unmoved, except perhaps by a faint disgust. He preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything. But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory. The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time. But what was the good of that? Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun. He might go on reading like this for the rest of his days; but it would never help him to achieve anything.
On the afternoon of April 18th, 1887, he was sitting in the library at Tantamount House, wondering whether life was worth living and whether drowning were preferable, as a mode of dying, to shooting. It was the day that the Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell’s, condoning the Phoenix Park murders. The fourth marquess had been in a state of apoplectic agitation ever since breakfast. At the clubs men talked of nothing else. ‘I suppose it’s very important,’ Lord Edward kept saying to himself. But he found it impossible to take much interest either in Parnellism or in crime. After listening for a little to what people were saying at the club, he went home in despair. The library door was open; he entered and dropped into a chair, feeling utterly exhausted as though he had come in from a thirty-mile walk. ‘I must be an idiot,’ he assured himself, when he thought of other people’s political enthusiasms and his own indifference. He was too modest to attribute the idiocy to the other people.
‘I’m hopeless, hopeless.’ He groaned aloud, and in the learned silence of the vast library the sound was appalling. Death; the end of everything; the river; the revolver…. Time passed. Even about death, Lord Edward found, he could not think consecutively and attentively. Even death was a bore. The current Quarterl1y lay on the table beside him. Perhaps it would bore him less than death was doing. He picked it up, opened it casually and found himself reading a paragraph in the middle of an article about someone called Claude Bernard. He had never previously heard of Claude Bernard. A Frenchman, he supposed. And what, he wondered, was the glycogenic function of the liver? Some scientific business, evidently. His eyes skimmed over the page There were inverted commas; it was a quotation from Claude Bernard’s own writings.
‘The living being does not
