But Janet was of age and had the obstinacy of those who can simply retire from the plane on which the argument is taking place, leaving the opponent to waste his energy on a mere untenanted body. She ended by doing what she wanted. When she discovered, as she discovered only too soon, that there was very little connection between the admirable artist she had loved and the husband she had married, Janet Bidlake was restrained by a very natural pride from complaining. She had no wish to give her relations the pleasure of saying, ‘I told you so.’ John slept and woke ‘around,’ faded more and more completely out of conjugality. She held her peace and herself retired for consolation into those regions of artistic and literary fancy, where she was native and felt most at home.
A private income, supplemented by the irregular and fluctuating contributions which John Bidlake made whenever he remembered or felt he could afford to support a wife and family, allowed her to make a habit of this foreign travel of the imagination. Elinor was born a year after their marriage. Four years later an ulcerated stomach brought John Bidlake home, a temporarily reformed character, to be nursed. Walter was the result of his still domestic convalescence. The ulcers healed, John Bidlake faded away again. Nurses and governesses looked after the children. Mrs. Bidlake superintended their upbringing dimly and as though from a distance. From time to time she swooped across the border dividing her private country from the world of common fact; and her interferences with the quotidian order of things had always a certain disconcerting and almost supernatural quality. Incalculable things were liable to happen whenever she descended, a being from another plane’ and judging events by other standards than those of the common world, into the midst of the children’s educational routine. Once, for example, she dismissed a governess because she had heard her playing Dan Leno’s song about the Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg on the schoolroom piano.
She was a good girl, taught well and supported a paralytic father. But great artistic principles were at stake. Elinor’s musical taste might be irretrievably ruined (incidentally Elinor resembled her father in detesting music); and the fact that she was very fond of Miss Dempster made the danger of contamination even greater. Mrs. Bidlake was firm. ‘The Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg’ could not be permitted. Miss Dempster was sent away. When he heard the news, her old father had another stroke and was picked up blind in one eye and unable to speak. But Mrs. Bidlake’s returns from imaginative travel were generally less serious in their results. When she interfered with the practical business of her children’s upbringing, it was usually only to insist that they should read classical authors usually considered incomprehensible or unsuitable for the very young. Children, it was her theory, should be brought up only with the very best in the way of philosophy and the arts. Elinor had had Hamlet read to her when she was three, her picture-books were reproductions of Giotto and Rubens.
She had been taught French out of Candide, had been given Tristram Shandy and Bishop Berkeley’s Theory of Vision when she was seven, Spinoza’s Ethics, Goya’s etchings and, as a German text-book, Also sprach Zarathustra when she was nine. The result of this premature introduction to the best philosophy was to produce in Elinor that slightly amused contempt for the grand abstractions and highfaluting idealisms, which had come to be so characteristic of her. Brought up at the same time on the unexpurgated classics, she had acquired in childhood a complete theoretical knowledge of all those matters which it is thought least suitable for the young to know. This knowledge had reinforced rather than tempered the coldness and practical incuriosity about all amorous matters which were natural to her; and she had grown up in a state of well-informed and superficially cynical innocence, like one of those Shakespearean heroines, whose scientific and Rabelaisian speech accompanies actions of the most delicately virtuous refinement.
Mrs. Bidlake was a little distressed by Elinor’s irreverent attitude towards her cherished fancies; but, wise in her way, she did not comment, did not try to reform, only ignored and retired, as she had ignored her husband’s shortcomings, had retired from the realization of them into the happier realms of art and imagination. There can be no cancellation of accomplished facts; but for practical purposes a conspiracy of silence is almost as effective as cancellation. Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not. When John Bidlake arrived at Gattenden, a sick man made sicker by dejection, terror and an all-absorbing self-pity, Mrs. Bidlake passed over in silence the fact, upon which she might so easily have commented: that he only came to her when he needed a nurse. His room was made ready, he settled in.
It was as though he had never been away. In the privacy of the kitchen the housemaids grumbled a little at the extra work, while Mrs. Inman sighed and Dobbs was massively and Anglicanly indignant over old Mr. Bidlake’s treatment of his wife. At the same time all felt a kind of gloating pity for the old man. His disease and its symptoms were talked of in lowered voices, religiously. Aloud, the servants might grumble and disapprove. But secretly they were all rather pleased. John Bidlake’s arrival broke the daily monotony, and the fact that he was going to die made them all feel somehow more important. To the domesticities of Gattenden his approaching death gave a new significance. That future event was the sun round which the souls of the household now meaningfully and almost stealthily revolved. They might grumble and disapprove, but they looked after him solicitously. In an obscure way they were grateful to him. Dying, he was quickening their life.
CHAPTER XXVIII
With Molly d’Exergillod everything had to be articulate, formulated, expressed. The whole of experience was, for her, only the raw material out of which an active mind could manufacture words. Ironstone was of no use to man until he learnt to smelt it and hammer out the pure metal into tools and swords. For Molly, the raw facts of living, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts and recollections, were as uninteresting in themselves as so many lumps of rock. They were of value only when they had been transformed by conversational art and industry into elegant words and well-shaped phrases. She loved a sunset because she could say of it: ‘It’s like a mixture of Bengal lights, Mendelssohn, soot and strawberries and cream’; or of spring flowers: ‘They make you feel as you feel when you’re convalescent after influenza. Don’t you think so?’ And leaning intimately she would press the rhetorical question. ‘Don’t you think so?’ What she liked about a view of distant mountains in a thunderstorm was that it was so like El Greco’s landscapes of Toledo. As for love, why, the whole charm of love, in Molly’s eyes, was its almost infinite capacity for being turned into phrases. You could talk about it for ever. She was talking about it now to Philip Quarles-had been talking about it for the last hour; analysing herself, recounting her experiences, questioning him about his past and his feelings. Reluctantly and with difficulty (for he hated talking about himself and did it very badly) he answered her.
‘Don’t you think,’ she was saying, ‘that the most exciting thing about being in love is the discoveries it enables you to make about yourself?’
Philip duly thought so.
‘I’d no idea how motherly I really was, before I married Jean. I’m so preoccupied now when he gets his feet wet.’
‘I’d be very worried if you got your feet wet,’ said Philip essaying a gallantry. Too stupid! he thought. He was not very good at gallantries. He wished he wasn’t so much attracted by Molly’s rather creamy and florid beauty. He wouldn’t be here making a fool of himself if she were ugly.
‘Too sweet of you,’ said Molly. ‘Tell me,’ she added, leaning towards him with offered face and bosom, ‘why do you like me.’
‘Isn’t it fairly obvious why?’ he answered.
Molly smiled. ‘Do you know why Jean says I’m the only woman he could ever fall in love with?’
‘No,’ said Philip, thinking that she was really superb in her Junonian way.
‘Because,’ Molly went on, ‘according to him, I’m the only woman who isn’t what Baudelaire calls le contraire du dandy. You remember that fragment in Mon Coeur Mis a Nu? “La femme a faim et elle veut manger; soif, et elle veut boire. La femme est naturelle, c’est-a-dire abominable. Aussi est-elle…”’
Philip interrupted her. ‘You’ve left out a sentence,’ he said, laughing. ‘Soif, et elle veut boire. And then: Elle est en rut, et elle veut etre…They don’t print the word in Crepet’s edition; but I’ll supply it if you like.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Molly, rather put out by the interruption. It had spoilt the easy unfolding of a welltried conversational gambit. She wasn’t accustomed to people being so well up in French literature as Philip. ‘The word’s irrelevant.’
‘Is it?’ Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘I wonder.’
‘Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire,’ Molly went on, hurrying back to the point at which she had been interrupted, ‘c’est-a-dire le contraire du dandy. Jean says I’m the only female dandy. What do you think?’
‘I’m afraid he’s right.’
‘Why “afraid”?’
‘I don’t know that I like dandies much. Particularly female ones.’ A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind—a good character, he reflected, for his novel. But trying in private
