‘But that’s nonsense, father. You mustn’t talk like that.’
‘Nyah,’ Mr. Quarles repeated, obstinately nodding, ‘very nyah. That’s why I’m so glad you’re hyah. I should have been unhappah to die when you were at the other end of the wahld. But with you hyah, I feel I can go’—his voice trembled again—’quite contentedlah.’ Once more he squeezed Philip’s hand. He was convinced that he had always been a devoted father, living for nothing but his children. And so he had been, every now and then. ‘Yes, quite contentedlah.’ He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and while he was doing so surreptitiously wiped his eyes.
‘But you’re not going to die.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Mr. Quarles insisted. ‘I can feel it.’ He genuinely did feel it; he believed he was going to die, because there was at least a part of his mind that desired to die. These complications of the last weeks had been too much for him; and the future promised to be worse, if that were possible. To fade out, painlessly—that would be the best solution of all his problems. He wished, he believed; and, believing in his approaching death, he pitied himself as a victim and at the same time admired himself for the resigned nobility with which he supported his fate.
‘But you’re not going to die,’ Philip dully insisted, not knowing what consolation, beyond mere denial, to offer. He had no gift for dealing extempore with the emotional situations of practical life. ‘There’s nothing…’ He was going to say, ‘There’s nothing the matter with you’; but checked himself, reflecting, before it was too late, that his father might be offended.
‘Let’s say no more about it.’ Mr. Quarles spoke tartly; there was a look of annoyance in his eye. Philip remembered what his mother had said about humouring him. He kept silence. ‘One can’t quarrel with Destinah,’ Mr. Quarles went on in another tone. ‘Destinah,’ he repeated with a sigh. ‘You’ve been fortunate, dyah boy; you discovered your vocation from the farst. Fate has treated you well.’
Philip nodded. He had often thought so himself, with a certain apprehension even. He had an obscure belief in nemesis.
‘Whereas in my case…’ Mr. Quarles did not finish the sentence, but raised his hand and let it fall again, hopelessly, on to the coverlet. ‘I wasted yahs of my life on false scents. Yahs and yahs before I discovered my ryahl bent. A philosopher’s wasted on practical affairs. He’s even absard. Like what’s-his-name’s albatross. You know.’
Philip was puzzled. ‘Do you mean the one in The Ancient Mariner?’
‘No, no,’ said Mr. Quarles impatiently. ‘That Frenchman.’
‘Oh, of course.’ Philip had caught the reference. ‘Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees. Baudelaire, you mean.’
‘Baudelaire, of course.’
‘Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees,
Ses ailes de geant l’empechent de marcher,’
Philip quoted, glad to be able to divert the conversation if only for a moment from personalities to literature.
His father was delighted. ‘Exactlah!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s the same with philosophers. Their wings prevent them from walking. For tharty yahs I tried to be a walker—in politics, in business. I didn’t ryahlize that my place was in the air, not on the ground. In the air!’ he repeated, raising his arm. ‘I had wings.’ He agitated his hand in a rapid tremolo. ‘Wings, and didn’t know it.’ His voice had grown louder, his eyes brighter, his face pinker and more shiny. His whole person expressed such an excitement, such restlessness and exaltation, that Philip was seriously disquieted.
‘Hadn’t you better rest a little?’ he anxiously suggested.
Mr. Quarles disregarded the interruption. ‘Wings, wings,’ he cried. ‘I had wings and if I’d ryahlized it as a young man, what heights I might have flown to! But I tried to walk. In the mud. For tharty yahs. Only after tharty yahs did I discover that I was meant to be flying. And now I must give up almost before I’ve begun.’ He sighed and, leaning back against his pillows, he shot the words almost perpendicularly up into the air. ‘My work unfinished. My dreams unryahlized. Fate’s been hard.’
‘But you’ll have all the time you need to finish your work.’
‘No, no,’ Mr. Quarles insisted, shaking his head. He wanted to be one of fate’s martyrs, to be able to point to himself and say: There, but for the malignity of providence, goes Aristotle. Destiny’s unkindness justified everything—his failure in sugar, in politics, in farming, the coldness with which his first book had been received, the indefinite delay in the appearance of the second; it even justified in some not easily explicable fashion his having put Gladys in a family way. To be a seducer of servants, secretaries, peasant girls was part of his unhappy destiny. And now that, to crown the edifice of his misfortune, he was about to die (prematurely but stoically, like the noblest Roman of them all), how trivial, how wretchedly insignificant was this matter of lost virginities and impending babies! And how unseemly, at the philosophic death-bed, was all the outcry!
But he could only ignore it on condition that this was. genuinely his death-bed and that destiny was universally admitted to have been cruel. A martyred philosopher on the point of death was justified in refusing to be bothered with Gladys and her baby. That was why (though the reason was felt and not formulated) Mr. Quarles repudiated, so vigorously and even with annoyance, his son’s consoling assurances of long life; that was why he arraigned malignant providence and magnified with even more than his ordinary self-complaisance the talents which providence had prevented him from using.
‘No, no, dyah boy,’ he repeated. ‘I shall never finish. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to have a talk with you.’
Philip looked at him with a certain apprehension. What was coming next? he wondered. There was a little silence.
‘One doesn’t want to shuffle off entirely unrecorded,’ said Mr. Quarles in a voice made husky by a recrudescence of self-pity
‘Shyahr extinction—it’s difficult to face.’ Before his mind’s eye the void expanded, lampless and abysmal. Death. It might be the end of his troubles; but it was none the less appalling. ‘You understand the feeling?’ he asked.
‘Perfectly,’ said Philip, ‘perfectly. But in your case, father…’ Mr. Quarles who had been blowing his nose again raised a protesting hand. ‘No, no.’ He had made up his mind that he was going to die; it was useless for anyone to attempt to dissuade him. ‘But if you understand my feeling, that’s all that matters. I can depart in peace with the knowledge that you won’t allow all memory of me to disappyah completely. Dyah boy, you shall be my literary executor. There are some fragments of my writing….’
‘The book on democracy?’ asked Philip, who saw himself being called upon to complete the largest work on the subject yet projected. His father’s answer took a load off his mind.
‘No, not that,’ Mr. Quarles hastily replied. ‘Only the bare matyahrials of that book exist. And to a great extent not on paper. Only in my mind. In fact,’ he went on, ‘I was just going to tell you that I wanted all my notes for the big book destroyed. Without being looked at. They’re myah jottings. Meaningless except to me.’ Mr. Quarles was not anxious that the emptiness of his files and the prevailing blankness of the cards in his cardindex should be posthumously discovered and commented on. ‘They must all be destroyed, do you understand?’
Philip made no protest.
‘What I wanted to entrust to you dyah boy,’ Mr. Quarles went on, ‘was a collection of more intimate fragments. Reflections on life, records of pahsonal expyahriences. Things like that.’
Philip nodded. ‘I see.’
‘I’ve been jotting them down for a long time past,’ said Mr. Quarles. ‘Memories and Reflections of Fifty Yahs—that might be a good title. There’s a lot in my notebooks. And these last days I’ve been recording on this.’ He tapped the dictaphone. ‘When one’s ill, you know, one thinks a lot.’ He sighed. ‘Syahriously.’
‘Of course,’ Philip agreed.
‘If you’d care to listen…’ he indicated the dictaphone.
Philip nodded. Mr. Quarles prepared the machine. ‘It’ll give you an idyah of the kind of thing. Thoughts and memories. Hyah.’ He pushed the machine across the table and, pushing, sent a piece of paper fluttering to the ground. It lay there on the carpet, chequered, a puzzle. ‘This is where you listen.’
Philip listened. After a moment of scratchy roaring, the Punch and Judy parody of his father’s voice said, ‘The key to the problem of sex:—passion is sacred, a manifestation of the divinitah.’ And then, without stop or transition, but in a slightly different tone: ‘The wahrst thing about politics is the frivolitah of politicians. Meeting Asquith one evening at dinner, I forget now where, I took the opportunitah of ahrging on him the necessitah of abolishing capital punishment. One of the most syahrious questions of modern life. But he myahrly suggested that we should go and play bridge. Unit of measure seven letters long: Verchok. Fastidious men do not live in pigsties, nor can they long remain in politics or business. There are nature’s Greeks and nature’s Mrs. Grundies. I never shared the mob’s high opinion of Lloyd George. Every man is born with a natural right to be happy; but what ferocious repression when anybody tried to claim his right! Brazilian stork, six letters: jabiru. True greatness is invarsely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you…!’ The scratchy roar supervened.
‘Yes, I see the style of the thing,’ said Philip, looking up. ‘How does one stop this affair? Ah, that’s it.’ He stopped it.
‘So many
