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formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it's the individual
who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite
character to distort events into the likeness of--what then? Who decided the sort of things
that should happen to him then?'
'Who decides whether a penny shall come down heads or tails?' asked Illidge
contemptuously.
'But why bring in pennies?' Spandrell retorted. 'Why bring in pennies, when we're
talking about human beings? Consider yourself. Do you _feel_ like a penny when things
happen to you?'
'It doesn't matter how I feel. Feelings have nothing to do with objective facts.'
'But sensations have. Science is the rationalization of sense-perceptions. Why
should one class of psychological intuitions be credited with scientific value and all
others denied it? A direct intuition of providential action is just as likely to be a bit of
information about objective facts as a direct intuition of blueness and hardness. And
when things happen to one, one doesn't feel like a penny. One feels that events are
significant; that they've been arranged. Particularly when they occur in series. Tails a
hundred times in succession, shall we say?'
'Give us the credit of coming down heads,' said Philip laughing. 'We're the
intelligentsia, remember.' Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity, as an irrelevance. The
subject for him was a serious one. 'When I think of myself,' he said, 'I feel sure that
everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance. As a young
boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something
entirely different from this actual Me.'
'A little angel, what?' said Illidge.
Spandrell ignored the interruption. 'But from the time that I was fifteen onwards,
things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.' He was
silent.
'And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings. A sad
story. Has it ever struck you,' Illidge went on, turning towards Walter, 'you who are an
expert on art, or at least ought to be--has it ever struck you that the paintings of angels are
entirely incorrect and unscientific?' Walter shook his head. 'A seventy-kilogram man, if
he developed wings, would have to develop colossal muscles to work them. And big
flying muscles would mean a correspondingly large sternum, like a bird's. A ten-stone
angel, if he wanted to fly as well as a duck, would have to have a breast-bone projecting
at least four or five feet. Tell your father that, next time he wants to paint a picture of the
Annunciation. All the existing Gabriels are really shockingly improbable.'
Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those
delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and
how they were all--the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the
spectacle of a flower or a landscape--in some way bound up with his sentiment for his
mother, somehow rooted and implied in it. He remembered that _Girls' School in Paris_,
those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets. The book had been written in the age
when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic
fashion, when 'kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt.'
The seductive and priapic major's moustaches had been long, curly and waxed. What
shame he had felt and what remorse! Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for
strength! And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother. To resist
temptation was to be worthy of her. Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God. He had
begun to triumph. And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was
going to marry Major Knoyle. Major Knoyle's moustaches were also curly.
'Augustine and the Calvinists were right,' he said aloud, breaking in on the
discussion of Seraphim's breast-bones.
'Still harping?' said Illidge.
'God means to save some people and damn others.'
'Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation,
and (c)...'
'When I think of the War,' Spandrell went on, interrupting him, 'what it might
have been for me and what in fact it was...' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Yes, Augustine
was right.'
 'Well, I must say,' said Philip, 'I've always been very grateful to Augustine, or
whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg. It prevented me from being a
hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.'
Spandrell looked at him; the corers of his wide mouth ironically twitched. 'Your
accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life. In other words, the event was like you. Just
as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me. I'd been up at Oxford a year,
when it began,' he went on.
'The dear old College, what?' said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one
of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some
derisive comment.
'Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs--discovering alcohol and poker
and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination.
Such an apocalypse, the first real woman!' he added parenthetically. 'And at the same
time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the superheated fancy and
the pornographic book.'
'Which is a tribute to art,' said Philip. 'As I've so often pointed out.' He smiled at
Walter, who blushed, remembering what his brother-in-law had said about the dangers of
trying to make love after high poetic models. 'We're brought up topsy-turvy,' Philip went
on. 'Art before life; _Romeo and Juliet_ and filthy stories before marriage or its
equivalents. Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned. Inevitably. In the good
old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of
the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to
idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical. If boys
and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare's day, there'd be a
revival of the Elizabethan love lyric.'
'You may be right,' said Spandrell. 'All I know is that, when I discovered the
reality, I found it disappointing--but attractive, all the same. Perhaps so attractive just
because it was so disappointing. The heart's a curious sort of manure--heap; dung calls to
dung, and the great charm of vice consists in its stupidity and sordidness. It attracts
because it's so repellent. But repellent it always remains. And I remember when the War
came, how exultantly glad I was to have a chance of getting out of the muck and doing
something decent, for a change.'
'For King and Country!' mocked Illidge.
'Poor Rupert Brooke! One smiles now at that thing of his about honour having
come back into the world again. Events have made it seem a bit comical.'
'It was a bad joke even when it was written,' said Illidge.
'No, no. At the time it was exactly what I felt myself.'
'Of course you did. Because you were what Brooke was--a spoilt and blase
member of the leisured class. You needed a new thrill, that was all. The War and that
famous "honour" of yours provided it.'
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. 'Explain it like that if you want. All I say is that
in August 1914 I wanted to do something noble. I'd even have been quite pleased to get
killed.'
'"Rather death than dishonour," what?' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]