How much P2 05 did we find out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?’ He turned a page. ‘Four hundred thousand tons. That was it. Practically irrecoverable. Just thrown away. Then there’s the stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three-quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide in every body. Restored to the earth, you may say.’ Lord Edward was ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut, every shift of advocacy. ‘But how inadequately!’ he swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to bits. ‘Huddling bodies together in cemeteries! How can you expect the phosphorus to get distributed? It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency.
Now, given three-quarters of a kilo of P2 05. for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an average deathrate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored every year to the earth? You can do sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.’ Illidge sat in silence, shielding his face with his hand. ‘But then one has to remember,’ the Old Man continued, ‘ that there are a lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that the phosphorus is taken out of circulation. Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick vaults.
The only people more wasteful than we are the Indians. Burning bodies and throwing the ashes into rivers! But the Indians are stupid about everything. The way they burn all the cow-dung instead of putting it back on the land. And then they’re surprised that half the population hasn’t enough to eat. We shall have to make a separate calculation about the Indians. I haven’t got the figures, though. But meanwhile will you work out the grand total for the world? And another, if you don’t mind, for the white races. I’ve got a list of the populations here somewhere. And, of course, the deathrate will be lower than the average for the whole world, at any rate in Western Europe and America. Would you like to sit here? There’s room at this end of the table.’ He cleared a space. ‘And here’s paper. And this is quite a decent pen.’
‘Do you mind,’ said Illidge faintly, ‘if I lie down for a minute. I’m not feeling well.’
CHAPTER XXXIV
It was nearly eleven before Philip Quarles appeared at Sbisa’s. Spandrell saw him as he was entering and beckoned him to the table where he was sitting with Burlap and Rampion. Philip came limping across the room and sat down beside him.
‘I’ve got messages for you,’ said Spandrell, ‘and, what’s more important,’ he felt in his pocket, ‘ the key of your house.’ He handed it over, explaining how he had come into possession of it. If the man knew what had happened in his house that evening… ‘And Elinor’s gone down to Gattenden,’ he went on. ‘She had a telegram. The child doesn’t seem to be well. And she expects you to-morrow.’
‘The devil she does!’ said Philip. ‘But I have at least fifteen engagements. What’s wrong with the boy?’
‘Unspecified.’
Philip shrugged his shoulders. ‘If it had been serious, my mother-in-law wouldn’t have telegraphed,’ he said, yielding to the temptation to say something amusing. ‘She’s like that. She’ll. take a case of double pneumonia with perfect calm and then get terribly excited about a headache or a pain in the belly.’ He interrupted himself to order an omelette and half a bottle of Moselle. Still, Philip reflected, the boy hadn’t been very flourishing these last weeks. He rather wished he hadn’t yielded to the temptation. And what he had said hadn’t really been in the least amusing. Wanting to be amusing—that was his chief literary defect. His books would be much better if he would allow them to be much duller. He sank into a rather gloomy silence.
‘These children!’ said Spandrell. ‘If you will go in for them….’
‘still, it must be wonderful to have a child,’ said Burlap with proper wistfulness. ‘I often wish…’
Rampion interrupted him. ‘It must be still more wonderful to be one. When one’s grown up, I mean.’ He grinned.
‘What do you do about your children?’ asked Spandrell.
‘As little as I can. Unfortunately they have to go to school. I only hope they won’t learn too much. It’d be really awful if they emerged as little professors stuffed with knowledge, trotting out their smart little abstract generalizations. They probably will. Just to spite me. Children generally do spite their parents. Not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously, because they can’t help it, because the parents have probably gone too far in one direction and nature’s reacting, trying to get back to the state of equilibrium. Yes, yes, I can feel it in my bones. They’ll be professors, the little devils. They’ll be horrid little scientists. Like your friend Illidge,’ he said, turning to Spandrell, who started uncomfortably at the name and was annoyed that he should have started. ‘Horrid little brains that do their best to suppress the accompanying hearts and bowels.’
Spandrell smiled his significant, rather melodramatically-ironic smile. ‘Young Illidge hasn’t succeeded in suppressing his heart and bowels,’ he said. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
‘Of course not. Nobody can suppress them. All that happens in the process is that they’re transformed from living organs into offal. And why are they transformed? In the interests of what? Of a lot of silly knowledge and irrelevant abstractions.’
‘Which are after all quite amusing in themselves,’ said Philip, breaking his silence to come to the rescue of the intellect. ‘Making generalizations and pursuing knowledge are amusements. Among the most entertaining, to my mind.’ Philip went on to develop his hedonistic justification of the mental life. ‘So why be so hard on our little diversions?’ he concluded. ‘You don’t denounce golf; so why should you denounce the sports of the highbrows?’
‘That’s fairly rudimentary, isn’t it?’ said Rampion. ‘The tree shall be known by its fruits. The fruits of golf are either non-existent, harmless or positively beneficial. A healthy liver, for example—that’s a very fine fruit. Whereas the fruits of intellectualism—my God!’ He made a grimace. ‘Look at them. The whole of our industrial civilization—that’s their fruit. The morning paper, the radio, the cinema, all fruits. Tanks and trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mond—fruits again. They’re all the result of the systematically organized, professional intellectualism of the last two hundred years. And you expect me to approve of your amusements? But, I tell you, I prefer bull-fighting. What’s the torture of a few animals and the brutalizing of a few hundred spectators compared to the ruining and befouling and degrading of a whole world? Which is what you highbrows have done since you professionalized and organized your amusements.’
‘Come, come,’ said Philip. ‘The picture’s a little lurid. And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results.’
‘They are responsible. Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition. After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane. A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science. He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one, And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration. For of course,’ he added parenthetically, ‘the fruits of your amusements aren’t merely the external apparatus of modern industrial life. They’re an inward decay; they’re infantilism and degeneracy and all sorts of madness and primitive reversion. No, no, I have no patience with your precious amusements of the mind. You’d be doing far less harm if you were playing golf.’
‘But truth?’ queried Burlap, who had been listening to the discussion without speaking. ‘What about truth?
Spandrell nodded approval. ‘Isn’t that worth looking for?’
‘Certainly,’ said Rampion. ‘But not where Philip and his scientific and scholarly friends are looking for it. After all, the only truth that can be of any interest to us, or that we can know, is a human truth. And to discover that, you must look for it with the whole being, not with a specialized part of it. What the scientists are trying to get at is nonhuman truth. Not that they can ever completely succeed; for not even a scientist can completely cease to be human. But they can go some way towards abstracting themselves from the human world of reality. By torturing their brains they can get a faint notion of the universe as it would seem if looked at through nonhuman eyes. What with their quantum theory, wave mechanics, relativity and all the rest of it, they do really seem to have got a little way outside humanity. Well, what the devil’s the good of that?’
‘Apart from the fun of the thing,’ said Philip, ‘the good may be some astonishing practical discovery, like the secret of disintegrating the atom and the liberation of endless supplies of energy.’
‘And the consequent reduction of human beings to absolute imbecility and absolute subservience to their machines,’ jeered
