‘Poor Rupert Brooke! One smiles now at that thing of his about honour having come back into the world again. Events have made it seem a bit comical.’
‘It was a bad joke even when it was written,’ said Illidge.
‘No, no. At the time it was exactly what I felt myself.’
‘Of course you did. Because you were what Brooke was—a spoilt and blase member of the leisured class. You needed a new thrill, that was all. The War and that famous “honour” of yours provided it.’
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Explain it like that if you want. All I say is that in August 1914 I wanted to do something noble. I’d even have been quite pleased to get killed.’
‘“Rather death than dishonour,” what?’
‘Yes, quite literally,’ said Spandrell. ‘For I can assure you that all the melodramas are perfectly realistic. There are certain occasions when people do say that sort of thing. The only defect of melodrama is that it leads you to believe that they say it all the time. They don’t, unfortunately. But “rather death than dishonour” was exactly what I was thinking in August 1914. If the alternative to death was the stupid kind of life I’d been leading. I wanted to get killed.’
‘There speaks the gentleman of leisure again,’ said Illidge.
‘And then, just because I’d been brought up a good deal abroad and knew three foreign languages, because I had a mother who was too fond of me and a stepfather with military influence, I was transferred willynilly into the Intelligence. God was really bent on damning me.’
‘He was very kindly trying to save your life,’ said Philip.
‘But I didn’t want it saved. Not unless I could do something decent with it, something heroic for preference, or at least difficult and risky. Instead of which they put me on to liaison work and then to hunting spies. Of all the sordid and ignoble businesses…’
‘But after all the trenches weren’t so very romantic.’
‘No, but they were dangerous. Sitting in a trench, you needed courage and endurance. A spy catcher was perfectly safe and didn’t have to display any of the nobler virtues; while as to his opportunities for vice… Those towns behind the lines, and Paris, and the ports-whores and alcohol were their chief products.’
‘But after all,’ said Philip, ‘those are avoidable evils.’ Naturally cold, he found it easy to be reasonable.
‘Not avoidable by me,’ Spandrell answered. ‘Particularly in those circumstances. I’d wanted to do something decent, and I’d been prevented. So it became a kind of point of honour to do the opposite of what I’d desired. A point of honour—can you understand that?’
Philip shook his head. ‘A little too subtle for me.’
‘But just imagine yourself in the presence of a man you respect and like and admire more than you’ve ever admired and liked anyone before.’
Philip nodded. But in point of fact, he reflected, he had never deeply and whole-heartedly admired anyone. Theoretically, yes; but never in practice, never to the point of wanting to make himself a disciple, a follower. He had adopted other people’s opinions, even their modes of life—but always with the underlying conviction that they weren’t really his, that he could and certainly would abandon them as easily as he had taken them up. And whenever there had seemed any risk of his being carried away, he had deliberately resisted, had fought or fled for his liberty.
‘You’re overcome with your feeling for him,’ Spandrell continued. ‘And you go towards him with outstretched hands, offering your friendship and devotion. His only response is to put his hands in his pockets and turn away. What would you do then? ‘ Philip laughed. ‘I should have to consult Vogue’s Book of Etiquette.’
‘You’d knock him down. At least that’s what I would do. It would be a point of honour. And the more you’d admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcase. That’s why the whores and the alcohol weren’t avoidable. On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them. That life in France was like the life I’d been leading before the War—only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature. And after a year of it, I was desperately wangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death. Augustine was right, I tell you,; we’re damned or saved in advance. The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.’
‘Providential balderdash!’ said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second oldest Judge of the High Court just behind him. Twenty years before the odds against, his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at the rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one. But there, all the same, he was. He took another draught of claret.
And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and cars laid back; and how it suddenly started forward, dragging the carter along with it; and the rumble of the wheels; and, ‘Aie!’ his own scream; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.
And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount’s drawing-room. ‘Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.’
‘But what’s her secret?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Why should he have gone mad about her? Because he has gone mad. Literally.’
‘Isn’t it rather an obvious secret?’ said Elinor. What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should ever have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘Lucy’s very amusing and alive. And besides,’ she added, remembering Philip’s exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, ‘she has a bad reputation.’
‘But is that attractive? A bad reputation?’ The tea-pot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.
‘Of course. It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible. No sugar, thanks.’
‘But surely,’ said Marjorie, handing her the cup, men don’t want to share their mistress with other lovers.’
‘Perhaps not. But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope. “Where others have succeeded, I can succeed.” That’s the man’s argument. And at the same time a bad reputation makes him immediately think of the woman in terms of love-making. It gives a twist to his imaginations about her. When you met Lola Montes, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms. You didn’t think of bedrooms when you met Florence Nightingale. Only sickrooms. Which are rather different,’ Elinor concluded.
There was a silence. It was horrid of her, Elinor was thinking, not to feel more sympathetic. But there it was; she didn’t. She reminded herself of the abominable life the poor woman had had—first with her husband, and now with Walter. Really abominable. But those dreadful, dangling, sham jade earrings! And the voice, the earnest manner…
Marjorie looked up. ‘But is it possible that men can be so easily taken in? By such a cheap bait? Men like Walter. Like Walter,’ she insisted. ‘Can men like that be such…such…’
‘Pigs?’ suggested Elinor. ‘Apparently they can. It seems odd, certainly.’ Perhaps it would be better, she reflected, if Philip were rather more of a pig and less of a hermit crab. Pigs are human—all too much so, perhaps; but still human. Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.
Marjorie shook her head and sighed. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said with a conviction that struck Elinor as rather ludicrous. ‘What sort of an opinion can she have of herself?’ she wondered. But Marjorie’s good opinion was not for herself so much as for virtue. She had been brought up to believe in the ugliness of vice and the animal part of human nature, the beauty of virtue and the spirit. And cold by nature, she had the cold woman’s utter incomprehension of sensuality. That Walter should suddenly cease to be the Walter she had known and behave ‘like a pig,’ as Elinor rather crudely put it, was to her really extraordinary, quite apart from any personal considerations of her own attractiveness.
‘And then you must remember,’ Elinor said aloud, ‘Lucy has another advantage where men like Walter are concerned. She’s one of those women who have the temperament of a man. Men can get pleasure out of casual encounters. Most women can’t; they’ve got to be in love, more or less. They’ve got to be emotionally involved. All but a few of them. Lucy’s one of the few. She has the masculine detachment. She can separate her appetite from the rest of her soul.’
‘What a horror!’ Marjorie shuddered.
Elinor observed the shudder and was annoyed by it into contradiction.
‘Do you think so? It seems to me sometimes rather an enviable talent.’ She laughed and Marjorie was duly shocked by her cynicism. ‘For a boy with Walter’s shyness and timidity,’ she went on, ‘there’s something very exciting about that kind of bold temperament. It’s the opposite of his. Reckless, without scruple, wilful, unconscientious. I can so well understand its going to his head.’ She thought of Everard Webley. ‘Force is always attractive,’ she added. ‘Particularly if one lacks it oneself, as Walter does. Lucy’s obviously a force.
