Point Counter Point (18 page)

‘Because he was one of nature’s dukes,’ she answered. ‘That’s why. He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king. Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they’re terribly preoccupied about to-morrow. Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down. None of your titled financiers or soap boilers. A genuine aristocrat. And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius. He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and to-morrow.’ She was silent for a little and then added, as an afterthought: ‘And what’s more, he wasn’t respectable. He didn’t care about appearances. They have their reward. But I don’t mind if we do look like scarecrows.’

‘You’ve paid yourself a nice lot of compliments, said Rampion. But he meditated her words and her spontaneous, natural, untroubled way of living. He envied her her Atavismus.

It was not merely tramping that Mary liked. She got almost as much enjoyment out of the more prosaic settled life they led, when they returned to England. ‘Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon,’ was what Rampion called her, when he saw her cooking the dinner; she did it with such childlike enthusiasm.

‘Think carefully,’ he had warned her before they married

‘You’re going to be poor.
Really
poor; not poor on a thousand a year like your impecunious friends. There’ll be no servants. You’ll have to cook and mend and do housework. You won’t find it pleasant.’

Mary only laughed. ‘_You’ll_ be the one who won’t find it pleasant,’ she answered, ‘at any rate until I’ve learnt to cook.’

She had never so much as fried an egg when she married him.

Strangely enough that childlike, Marie-Antoinette-ish enthusiasm for doing things—for cooking on a real range, using a real carpet sweeper, a real sewing machine—survived the first novel and exciting months. She went on enjoying herself.

‘I could never go back to being a perfect lady,’ she used to say. ‘It would bore me to death. Goodness knows, housework and managing and looking after the children can be boring and exasperating enough. But being quite out of touch with all the ordinary facts of existence, living in a different planet from the world of daily, physical reality—that’s much worse.’

Rampion was of the same opinion. He refused to make art and thought excuses for living a life of abstraction. In the intervals of painting and writing he helped Mary with the housework.

‘You don’t expect flowers to grow in nice clean vacuums.’ That was his argument. ‘They need mould and clay and dung. So does art.’

For Rampion, there was also a kind of moral compulsion to live the life of the poor. Even when he was making quite a reasonable income, they kept only one maid and continued to do a great part of the housework themselves. It was a case, with him, of
noblesse obligeor
rather
roture oblige
. To live like the rich, in a comfortable abstraction from material cares would be, he felt, a kind of betrayal of his class, his own people. If he sat still and paid servants to work for him, he would somehow be insulting his mother’s memory, he would be posthumously telling her that he was too good to lead the life she had led.

There were occasions when he hated this moral compulsion, because he felt that it was compelling him to do foolish and ridiculous things; and hating, he would try to rebel against it. How absurdly shocked he had been, for example, by Mary’s habit of lying in bed of a morning. When she felt lazy, she didn’t get up; and there was an end of it. The first time it happened, Rampion was really distressed.

‘But you can’t stay in bed all the morning,’ he protested.

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? But because you
can’t
.’

‘But I
can
,’ said Mary calmly. ‘And I
do
.’

It shocked him. Unreasonably, as he perceived when he tried to analyse his feelings. But all the same, he was shocked. He was shocked because he had always got up early himself, because all his people had had to get up early. It shocked him that one should lie in bed while other people were up and working. To get up late was somehow to add insult to injury. And yet, obviously, getting up early oneself, unnecessarily, did nothing to help those who had to get up early. Getting up, when one wasn’t compelled to get up, was just a tribute of respect, like taking off one’s hat in a church. And at the same time it was an act of propitiation, a sacrificial appeasement of the conscience

‘One oughtn’t to feel like that,’ he reflected. ‘Imagine a Greek feeling like that!’

It was unimaginable. And yet the fact remained that, however much he might disapprove of the feeling, he did in fact feel like that.

‘Mary’s healthier than I am,’ he thought; and he remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals. ‘They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.’ Mary was like that and it was good. To be a perfect animal
and
a perfect human—that was the ideal. All the same, he was shocked when she didn’t get up in the morning. He tried not to be; but he was shocked. Rebelling, he would sometimes lie in bed himself till noon, on principle. It was a duty not to be a barbarian of the conscience. But it was a very long time before he could genuinely enjoy his laziness.

Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him. During those first months of their marriage he was often, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her. Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly. The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.

‘You’re such an absurd old puritan,’ she told him.

The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded. By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he
was
half a puritan. His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being. Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice. The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself. Theoretically, he approved of Mary’s easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification. And yet, whenever, in those early days, she began to talk in her calm matter-of-fact way of what he had only heard of, portentously, as fornication and adultery, he felt a shock, not in his reason (for that, after a moment’s reflection, approved), but in some deeper layer of his being. And the same part of him obscurely suffered from her great and whole-heartedly expressed capacity for pleasure and amusement, from her easy laughter, her excellent appetite, her unaffected sensuality. It took him a long time to unlearn the puritanism of his childhood. There were moments when his love for his mother turned almost to hatred.

‘She had no right to bring me up like that,’ he said. ‘Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree. No right.’

And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary. He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery. Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.

‘Living comes to you too easily,’ he tried to explain. ‘You live by instinct. You know what to do quite naturally, like an insect when it comes out of the pupa. It’s too simple, too simple.’ He shook his head. ‘You haven’t earned your knowledge; you’ve never realized the alternatives.’

‘In other words,’ said Mary, ‘I’m a fool.’

‘No, a woman.’

‘Which is your polite way of saying the same thing. But I’d like to know,’ she went on with an irrelevance that was only apparent, ‘where you’d be without me. I’d like to know what you’d be doing if you’d never met me.’ She moved from stage to stage of an emotionally coherent argument.

‘I’d be where I am and be doing exactly what I’m doing now.’ He didn’t mean it, of course; for he knew, better than anyone, how much he owed to her, how much he had learnt from her example and precept. But it amused him to annoy her.

‘You know that’s not true,’ Mary was indignant.

‘It
is
true.’

‘It’s a lie. And to prove it,’ she added, ‘I’ve a very good mind to go away with the children and leave you for a few months to stew in your own juice. I’d like to see how you get on without me.’

‘I should get on perfectly well,’ he assured her with exasperating calmness.

Mary flushed; she was beginning to be genuinely annoyed.’very well then,’ she answered, ‘ I’ll really go. This time I really will.’ She had made the threat before; they quarrelled a good deal, for both were quick-tempered.

‘Do,’ said Rampion. ‘But remember that two can play at that going-away game. When you go away from me, I go away from you.’

‘We’ll see how you get on without me,’ she continued menacingly.

‘And you?’ he asked.

‘What about me?’

‘Do you imagine you can get on any better without me than I can get on without you?’

They looked at one another for a little time in silence and then, simultaneously, burst out laughing.

A regular technique,’ Spandrell repeated. ‘One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking they’re
dmes incomprises
.’ He was boastfully generalizing from the case of poor little Harriet Watkins. If he had just baldly recounted his affair with Harriet, it wouldn’t have sounded such a very grand exploit. Harriet was such a pathetic, helpless little creature; anybody could have done her down. But generalized like this, as though her case was only one of hundreds, told in a language of the cookery book (‘one chooses them unhappy’—it was one of Mrs. Beeton’s recipes), the history sounded, he thought, most cynically impressive. ‘And one starts by being very, very kind, and so wise, and perfectly pure, an elder brother, in fact. And they think one’s really wonderful, because, of course, they’ve never met anybody who wasn’t just a city man, with city ideas and city ambitions. Simply wonderful, because one knows all about art and has met all the celebrities and doesn’t think exclusively about money and in terms of the morning paper. And they’re a little in awe of one too,’ he added remembering little Harriet’s expression of scared admiration; ‘one’s so unrespectable and yet so high-class, so at ease and at home among the great works and the great men, so wicked but so extraordinarily good, so learned, so well travelled, so brilliantly cosmopolitan and West-End (have you ever heard a suburban talking of the West-End?), like that gentleman with the order of the Golden Fleece in the advertisements for De Reszke cigarettes. Yes, they’re in awe of one; but at the same time they adore. One’s so understanding, one knows so much about life in general and their souls in particular, and one isn’t a bit flirtatious or saucy like ordinary men, not a bit. They feel they could trust one absolutely; and so they can, for the first weeks. One has to get them used to the trap; quite tame and trusting, trained not to shy at an occasional brotherly pat on the back or an occasional chaste uncle-ish kiss on the forehead. And meanwhile one coaxes out their little confidences, one makes them talk about love, one talks about it oneself in a man-to-man sort of way, as though they were one’s own age and as sadly disillusioned and bitterly knowing as oneself—which they find terribly shocking (though of course they don’t say so), but oh, so thrilling, so enormously flattering. They simply love you for that. Well then, finally, when the moment seems ripe and they’re thoroughly domesticated and no more frightened, one stages the denouement. Tea in one’s rooms—one’s got them thoroughly used to coming with absolute impunity to one’s rooms—and they’re going to go out to dinner with one, so that there’s no hurry. The twilight deepens, one talks disillusionedly and yet feelingly about the amorous mysteries, one produces cocktailsvery strong—and goes on talking so that they ingurgitate them absentmindedly without reflection. And sitting on the floor at their feet, one begins very gently stroking their ankles in an entirely platonic way, still talking about amorous philosophy, as though one were quite unconscious of what one’s hand were doing. If that’s not resented and the cocktails have done their work, the rest shouldn’t be difficult. So at least I’ve always found.’ Spandrell helped himself to more brandy and drank. ‘But it’s then, when they’ve become one’s mistress that the fun really begins. It’s then one deploys all one’s Socratic talents. One develops their little temperaments, one domesticates them—still so wisely and sweetly and patiently—to every outrage of sensuality. It can be done, you know; the more easily, the more innocent they are. They can be brought in perfect ingenuousness to the most astonishing pitch of depravity.’

‘I’ve no doubt they can,’ said Mary indignantly. ‘But what’s the point of doing it?’

‘It’s an amusement,’ said Spandrell with theatrical cynicism. ‘It passes the time and relieves the tedium.’

‘And above all,’ Mark Rampion went on, without looking up from his coffee cup, ‘ above all it’s a vengeance. It’s a way of getting one’s own back on women, it’s a way of punishing them for being women and so attractive, it’s a way of expressing one’s hatred of them and of what they represent, it’s a way of i expressing one’s hatred of oneself. The trouble with I you, Spandrell,’ he went on, suddenly and accusingly raising his bright pale eyes to the other’s face, ‘is that you really hate yourself. You hate the very source of your life, its ultimate basis—for there’s no denying it,’sex
is
fundamental. And you hate it,
hate
it.’

‘Me?’ It was a novel accusation. Spandrell was accustomed to hearing himself blamed for his excessive love of women and the sensual pleasures.