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she married.'
'What's wrong in that?'
'Wrong? But it's disgustingly bourgeois! Theoretically he sees no distinction
between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized
society, she'd be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he
sends her I don't know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I
twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he'd been
caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and
begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm,
detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. "One of these days," I threatened, "I'll
take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party." And what's more, I will.'
'Unless you just go on chattering, like everybody else.'
'Unless,' Spandrell agreed, ' I just go on chattering.'
'Let me know if you ever stop chattering and do something. It might be lively.'
'Deathly, if anything.'
'But the deathly sort of liveliness is the most lively, really.' Lucy frowned. 'I'm so
sick of the ordinary conventional kinds of liveliness. Youth at the prow and pleasure at
the helm. You know. It's silly, it's monotonous. Energy seems to have so few ways of
manifesting itself nowadays. It was different in the past, I believe.'
'There was violence as well as love-making. Is that what you mean?'
'That's it.' She nodded. 'The liveliness wasn't so exclusively...so exclusively
bitchy, to put it bluntly.'
'They broke the sixth commandment too. There are too many policemen
nowadays.'
'Many too many. They don't allow you to stir an eyelid. One ought to have had all
the experiences.'
'But if none of them are either right or wrong--which is what you seem to feel--
what's the point?'
'The point? But they might be amusing, they might be exciting.'
'They could never be very exciting if you didn't feel they were wrong.' Time and
habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He
performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the
morning train to the city. 'Some people,' he went on meditatively, trying to formulate the
vague obscurities of his own feelings,'some people can only realize goodness by
offending against it.' But when the old offences have ceased to be felt as offences, what
then? The argument pursued itself internally. The only solution seemed to be to commit
new and progressively more serious offences, to have all the experiences, as Lucy would
say in her jargon. 'One way of knowing God,' he concluded slowly, 'is to deny Him.'
'My good Maurice!' Lucy protested.
'I '1 stop.' He laughed. 'But really, if it's a case of "my good Maurice"' (he imitated
her tone), 'if you're equally unaware of goodness and offence against goodness, what is
the point of having the sort of experiences the police interfere with?'
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. 'Curiosity. One's bored.'
'Alas, one is.' He laughed again. 'All the same, I do think the cobbler should stick
to his last.'
 'But what _is_ my last?'
Spandrell grinned. 'Modesty,' he began, 'forbids...'
CHAPTER XIII
Walter travelled down to Fleet Street feeling not exactly happy, but at least calm--calm
with the knowledge that everything was now settled. Yes, everything had been settled;
everything--for in the course of last night's emotional upheaval, everything had come to
the surface. To begin with, he was never going to see Lucy again; that was definitely
decided and promised, for his own good as well as for Marjorie's. Next he was going to
spend all his evenings with Marorie. And finally he was going to ask Burlap for more
money. Everything was settled. The very weather seemed to know it. It was a day of
white insistent mist, so intrinsically calm that all the noises of London seemed an
irrelevance. The traffic roared and hurried, but somehow without touching the essential
stillness and silence of the day. Everything was settled; the world was starting afresh--not
very exultantly, perhaps, not at all brilliantly, but with resignation, with a determined
calm that nothing could disturb.
Remembering the incident of the previous evening, Walter had expected to be
coldly received at the office. But on the contrary, Burlap was in one of his most genial
moods. He too remembered last night and was anxious that Walter should forget it. He
called Walter 'old man' and squeezed his arm affectionately, looking up at him from his
chair with those eyes that expressed nothing, but were just holes into the darkness inside
his skull. His mouth, meanwhile, charmingly and subtly smiled. Walter returned the 'old
man' and the smile, but with a painful consciousness of insincerity. Burlap always had
that effect on him; in his presence, Walter never felt quite honest or genuine. It was a
most uncomfortable sensation. With Burlap he was always, in some obscure fashion, a
liar and a comedian. And at the same time all that he said, even when he was speaking his
innermost convictions, became a sort of falsehood.
'I liked your article on Rimbaud,' Burlap declared, still pressing Walter's arm, still
smiling up at him from his tilted swivel chair.
'I'm glad,' said Walter, feeling uncomfortably that the remark wasn't really
addressed to him, but to some part of Burlap's own mind which had whispered, 'You
ought to say something nice about his article,' and was having its demands duly satisfied
by another part of Burlap's mind.
'What a man!' exclaimed Burlap. 'That was someone who believed in Life, if you
like!'
Ever since Burlap had taken over the editorship, the leaders of the _Literary
World_ had almost weekly proclaimed the necessity of believing in Life. Burlap's belief
in Life was one of the things Walter found most disturbing. What did the words mean?
Even now he hadn't the faintest idea. Burlap had never explained. You had to understand
intuitively; if you didn't, you were as good as damned. Walter supposed that he was
among the damned. He was never likely to forget his first interview with his future chief.
'I hear you're in want of an assistant editor,' he had shyly begun. Burlap nodded. 'Yes, I
am.' And after an enormous and horrible silence, he suddenly looked up with his blank
eyes and asked: 'Do you believe in Life?' Walter blushed to the roots of his hair and said,
Yes. It was the only possible answer. There was another desert of speechlessness and
then Burlap looked up again. 'Are you a virgin?' he enquired. Walter blushed yet more
violently, hesitated and at last shook his head. It was only later that he discovered, from
one of Burlap's own articles, that the man had been modelling his behaviour on that of
Tolstoy--' going straight to the great simple fundamental things,' as Burlap himself
described the old Salvationist's soulful impertinences.
'Yes, Rimbaud certainly believed in Life,' Walter acquiesced feebly, feeling while
he spoke the words as he felt when he had to write a formal letter of condolence. Talking
about believing in Life was as bad as talking about grieving with you in your great
bereavement.
'He believed in it so much,' Burlap went on, dropping his eyes (to Walter's great
relief) and nodding as he ruminatively pronounced the words,'so profoundly that he was
prepared to give it up. That's how I interpret his abandonment of literature--as a
deliberate sacrifice.' (He uses the big words too easily, thought Walter.) 'He that would
save his life must lose it.' (Oh, oh!) 'To be the finest poet of your generation and, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]