Herself, Rachel Quarles was only conscious of being a Christian. She could never imagine how people contrived to live without being Christians. But a great many, she sadly had to admit, did so contrive. Almost all the young people of her acquaintance. ‘It’s as though one’s children talked a different languages’ she had once complained to an old friend.
In Marjorie Carling she discovered someone who spoke and understood her own spiritual idiom.
‘You’ll find her, I’m afraid, a bit of a bore,’ Philip had warned her, when he announced his intention of lending his little house at Chamford to Walter and Marjorie. ‘But be nice to her, all the same. She deserves it, poor woman. She’s had a very thin time of it.’ And he detailed a story that made his mother sigh to listen to.
‘I shouldn’t have expected Walter Bidlake to be like that,’ she said.
‘But in these matters one doesn’t expect anything of anybody. Things happen to them, that’s all. They don’t do them.’
Mrs. Quarles did not answer. She was thinking of the time when she had first discovered one of Sidney’s infidelities. The astonishment, the pain, the humiliation…. ‘But still,’ she said aloud, ‘one wouldn’t have thought he’d knowingly have made somebody unhappy.’
‘Still less that he’d knowingly have made himself unhappy. And yet I think he’s really made himself quite as wretched as Marjorie. Perhaps that’s his chief justification.’
His mother sighed. ‘It all seems so extraordinarily unnecessary.’
Mrs. Quarles called on Marjorie almost as soon as she had settled in.
‘Come and see me often,’ she said, as she took her leave. ‘Because I like you,’ she added, with a sudden smile, for which poor Marjorie was quite pathetically grateful. It wasn’t often that people liked her. That she had fallen so deeply in love with Walter was due, above everything, to his having been one of the few people who had ever shown any interest in her. ‘And I hope you like me,’ Mrs. Quarles added.
Marjorie could only blush and stammer. But she already adored.
Rachel Quarles had spoken in all sincerity. She did like Marjorie—liked her, even, for the very defects which made other people find her such a bore; for her stupidity—it was so good and well-meaning; for her lack of humour—it was the mark of such earnestness. Even those intellectual pretensions, those deep or informative remarks dropped portentously out of a meditative silence, did not displease her. Mrs. Quarles recognized in them the rather absurd symptoms of a genuine love of the good, the true and the beautiful, of a genuine desire for self-improvement.
At their third meeting Marjorie confided all her story. Mrs. Quarles’s comments were sensible and Christian. ‘There’s no miraculous cure for these things,’ she said; ‘no patent medicine for unhappiness. Only the old dull virtues, patience, resignation and the rest; and the old consolation, the old source of strength—old, but not dull. There’s nothing less dull than God. But most young people won’t believe me when I tell them so, even though they’re bored to death with jazz bands and dancing.’
Marjorie’s first adoration was confirmed and increased—increased so much, indeed, that Mrs. Quarles felt quite ashamed, as though she had extorted something on false pretences, as though she had fraudulently acted a part.
‘You’re such a wonderful help and comfort,’ Marjorie declared.
‘No, I’m not,’ she answered almost angrily. ‘The truth is that you were lonely and unhappy and I was conveniently there at the right moment.’
Marjorie protested; but the older woman would not permit herself to be praised or thanked.
They talked a good deal about religion. Carling had given Marjorie a horror for all that was picturesque or formal in Christianity. Piran of Peranzabuloe, vestments, ceremonials—everything remotely connected with a saint, a rite, a tradition was hateful to her. But she preserved a vague inchoate faith in what she regarded as the essentials; she had retained from girlhood a certain habit of Christian feeling and thought. Under the influence of Rachel Quarles the faith became more definite, the habitual emotions were reinforced.
‘I feel so enormously much happier since I’ve been here, with you,’ she announced hardly more than a week after her arrival.
‘It’s because you’re not trying to be happy or wondering why you should have been made unhappy, because you’ve stopped thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That’s the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,’ Mrs. Quarles went on; ‘they never think of life except in terms of happiness. How shall I have a good time? That’s the question they ask. Or they complain. Why am I not having a better time? But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it’s inevitably a disappointment—for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it’s been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody’s happy. It’s because they’re on the wrong road.
The question they ought to be asking themselves isn’t: Why aren’t we happy, and how shall we have a good time? It’s: How can we please God, and why aren’t we better? If people asked themselves those questions and answered them to the best of their ability in practice, they’d achieve happiness without ever thinking about it. For it’s not by pursuing happiness that you find it; it’s by pursuing salvation. And when people were wise, instead of merely clever, they thought of life in terms of salvation and damnation, not of good times and bad times. If you’re feeling happy now, Marjorie, that’s because you’ve stopped wishing you were happy and started trying to be better. Happiness is like coke—something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.’
At Gattenden, meanwhile, the days passed gloomily.
‘Why don’t you do a little painting?’ Mrs. Bidlake suggested to her husband on the morning that followed his arrival.
Old John shook his head.
‘You’d enjoy it so much once you started,’ coaxed Elinor.
But her father would not allow himself to be persuaded. He didn’twant to paint, precisely because painting would have been so enjoyable. His very dread of pain, sickness and death made him perversely refuse to let his mind be distracted from their abhorred contemplation. It was as though some part of him obscurely desired to accept defeat and misery, were anxious to make abjection yet more abject. His courage, his Gargantuan power, his careless high spirits had been the fruits of a deliberate and lifelong ignorance. But now that to ignore was no longer possible, now that the enemy was installed in his very vitals, the virtue had gone out of him. He was afraid and could not conceal his terrors. He no longer even desired to conceal them. He somehow wanted to be abject. And abject he was. Mrs. Bidlake and Elinor did their best to rouse him from the apathetic misery in which he spent the greater part of his days at Gattenden. But he would not be roused except to complain and occasionally fly into a querulous rage.
‘Deplorable,’ wrote Philip in his notebook, ‘to see an Olympian reduced by a little tumour in his stomach to a state of subhumanness. But perhaps,’ he added a few days later as an afterthought, ‘he was always subhuman, even when he seemed most Olympian; perhaps being Olympian was just a symptom of subhumanity.’
It was only with little Phil that John Bidlake would occasionally rouse himself from his abjection. Playing with the child, he would sometimes forget for a little to be wretched.
‘Draw something for me,’ he would say.
And with his tongue between his teeth little Phil would draw a train, or a ship, or the stags in Gattenden Park fighting, or the old marquess in his donkey-drawn chair.
‘Now you draw me something, grandfather,’ he would say, when he was tired.
And the old man would take the pencil and make half a dozen marvellous little sketches of T’ang, the Pekingese dog, or Tompy, the kitchen cat. Or sometimes, in a fit of naughtiness, he would scribble a caricature of poor Miss Fulkes writhing. And sometimes, forgetting all about the child, he would draw for his own amusement—a group of bathers, two men wrestling, a dancer.
‘But why have they got no clothes on?’ the child would ask.
‘Because they’re nicer without.’
‘I don’t think so.’ And losing interest in drawings that had so little in the way of a story to tell him, he would ask for the pencil back again.
But it was not always that John Bidlake responded so happily to his grandson. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly wretched, he felt the child’s mere presence as an outrage, a kind of taunting. He would fly into a rage, would shout at the boy for making a noise and disturbing him.
‘Can’t I ever be left in peace?’ he would shout, and then would go on to complain with curses of the general inefficiency of everybody. The house was full of women, all supposed to be looking after that damned brat. But there he always was, rampaging round, kicking up hell’s own din, getting in the way. It was intolerable. Particularly when one wasn’t well. Absolutely intolerable. People were without any consideration. Flushed and writhing, poor Miss Fulkes would lead her howling charge back to the nursery.
The most trying scenes were at meal-times. For it was at meals (now reduced, so far as he was concerned, to broth and milk and Benger’s food) that John Bidlake was most disagreeably reminded of
