‘It’s a good programme,’ said Philip. ‘But I don’t see you winning many votes on it at the next election.’
‘That’s the trouble.’ Rampion frowned. ‘One would have them all against one. For the only thing they’re all agreed on—Tories, Liberals, Socialists, Bolsheviks—is the intrinsic excellence of the industrial stink and the necessity of standardizing and specializing every trace of genuine manhood or womanhood out of the human race. And we’re expected to take an interest in politics. Well, well.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s think about something pleasanter. Look, I want to show you this picture.’ He crossed the studio and pulled out one from a stack of canvases leaning against the wall. ‘There,’ he said when he had set it up on an easel. Seated on the crest of a grassy bank, where she formed the apex of the pyramidal composition, a naked woman was suckling a child. Below and in front of her to the left crouched a man, his bare back turned to the spectator, and in the corresponding position on the right stood a little boy. The crouching man was playing with a couple of tiny leopard cubs that occupied the centre of the picture, a little below the seated mother’s feet; the little boy looked on. Close behind the woman and filling almost the whole of the upper part of the picture, stood a cow, its head slightly averted, ruminating. The woman’s head and shoulders stood out pale against its dun flank.
‘It’s a picture I like particularly,’ said Rampion after a little silence. ‘The flesh is good. Don’t you think. Has a bloom to it, a living quality. By God, how marvellously your father-in-law could paint flesh in the open air! Amazing! Nobody’s done it better. Not even Renoir. I wish I had his gifts. But this is all right, you know,’ he went on, turning back to the picture. ‘Quite good, really. And there are other qualities. I feel I’ve managed to get the living relationship of the figures to each other and the rest of the world. The cow, for example. It’s turned away, it’s unaware of the human scene. But somehow you feel it’s happily in touch with the humans in some milky, cud-chewing, bovine way. And the humans are in touch with it. And also in touch with the leopards, but in a quite different way-a way corresponding to the quick leopardy way the cubs are in touch with them. Yes, I like it.’
‘So do I,’ said Philip. ‘It’s something to put over against the industrial stink.’ He laughed. ‘You ought to paint a companion picture of life in the civilized world. The woman in a mackintosh, leaning against a giant Bovril bottle and feeding her baby with Glaxo. The bank covered with asphalt. The man dressed in a five-guinea suit for fifty shillings, squatting down to play with a wireless set. And the little boy, pimpled and with rickets, looking interestedly on.’
‘And the whole thing painted in the cubist manner,’ said Rampion; ‘so as to make quite sure that there should be no life in it whatever. Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things. Carbolic acid isn’t in it.’
CHAPTER XXIV
Local government among the Indians under the Maurya emperors continued, week after week, to necessitate Mr. Quarles’s attendance at the British Museum for at least two full days in every seven.
‘I had no idyah,’ he explained, ‘that there was so much available matyahrial.’
Gladys, meanwhile, was discovering that she had made a mistake. The good time which she had looked forward to enjoying under Mr. Quarles’s protection was no better than the good time she might have enjoyed with ‘boys’ hardly richer than herself. Mr. Quarles, it seemed, was not prepared to pay for the luxury of feeling superior. He wanted to be a great man, but for very little money. His excuse for the cheap restaurant and the cheap seats at the theatre was always the necessity of secrecy. It would never do for him to be seen by an acquaintance in Gladys’s company; and since his acquaintances belonged to the world which is carried, replete, from the Berkeley to the stalls of the Gaiety, Mr. Quarles and Gladys ate at a Corer House and looked at the play remotely from the Upper Circle. Such was the official explanation of the very unprincely quality of Sidney’s treats. The real explanation was not the need for secrecy, but Sidney’s native reluctance to part with hard cash.
For though large sums meant little to him, small ones meant a great deal. When it was a matter of’ improving the estate,’ he would lightheartedly sign away hundreds, even thousands of pounds. But when it was a question of parting with two or three half-crowns to give his mistress a better seat at the play or a more palatable meal, a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, he became at once the most economical of men. His avarice was at the root of a certain curious puritanism, which tinged his opinions about almost all pleasures and amusements other than the strictly sexual. Dining with a seduced work-girl in the cheap obscurity of a Soho eating-hell, he would (with all the passion of a Milton reproving the sons of Belial, all the earnestness of a Wordsworth advocating low living and high thinking) denounce the hoggish guzzlers at the Carlton, the gluttons at the Ritz, who in the midst of London’s serried miseries would carelessly spend a farm labourer’s monthly wage on a tete-a-tete dinner. Thus his inexpensive preferences in the matter of restaurants and theatre seats were made to assume a high moral as well as a merely diplomatic character. Seduced by an ageing libertine, Mr. Quarles’s mistresses were surprised to find themselves dining with a Hebrew prophet, and taking their amusements with a disciple of Cato or of Calvin.
‘One would think you were a blessed saint to hear you talk,’ said Gladys sarcastically, when he had paused for breath in the midst of one of his Corner House denunciations of the extravagant and greedy. ‘You!’ Her laughter was mockingly savage.
Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. He was used to being listened to respectfully, as an Olympian. Gladys’s tone was ribald and rebellious; he didn’t like it; it even alarmed him.
He raised his chin with dignity and fired a dropping shot of rebuke upon her head. ‘It isn’t a question of myah personalities,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s a question of general principles.’
‘I can’t see any difference,’ retorted Gladys, abolishing at one stroke all the solemn pretensions of all the philosophers and moralists, all the religious leaders and reformers and Utopia-makers from the beginning of human time.
What exasperated Gladys most was the fact that even in the world of the Maison Lyons and cheap seats, Mr. Quarles did not abandon his Olympian pretensions and his Olympian manners. His indignation, when one evening there was a crowd on the stairs leading to the Upper Circle was loud and righteous. ‘A ryahl scandal!’ he called it.
‘One would think you’d taken the royal box,’ said Gladys sarcastically.
And when, at a tea-shop, he complained that the one-and-fourpenny slice of salmon tasted as though it had come from British Columbia rather than from Scotland, she advised him to write to the Times about it. The discovery tickled her fancy and, after that, she was always ironically telling him to write to the Times. Did he complain, a noble and disillusioned philosopher, of the shallowness of politicians and the sordid triviality of political life, Gladys bade him write to the Times. He was eloquent about iniquitous Mrs. Grundy and English illiberality; let him write to the Times. It was a ryahl scandal that neither Sir Edward Grey nor Lloyd George should have been able to speak French; the Times again was indicated. Mr. Quarles was hurt and outraged. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
In the company of his other mistresses the consciousness of his superiority had been a serene happiness. They had worshipped and admired; he had felt himself a god. And during the first days Gladys too had seemed a worshipper. But coming to pray, she had stayed to mock. His spiritual happiness was ruined. If it had not been for the bodily solace which the species in her provided, Mr. Quarles would have quickly exhausted the subject of local self-government under the Mauryas and stayed at home. But there was in Gladys a more than usually large admixture of undifferentiated species. It was too much for Mr. Quarles. The derisive individual in her pained and repelled him; but the attraction of what was generic, of the whole feminine species, the entire sex, was stronger than that individual repulsion. In spite of her mockery, Mr. Quarles returned. The claims of the Indians became increasingly peremptory.
Realizing her power, Gladys began to withhold what he desired. Perhaps he could be blackmailed into the generosity which it was not in his nature to display spontaneously. Returning from a very inexpensive evening at Lyons’ and the pictures, she pushed him angrily away when, in the taxi, he attempted the
