But now the moment had come.
‘Good-evening,’ she called, and stepped forward.
They were all startled; but as for poor Hugh – he jumped as though someone had fired a cannon in his ear. And after the first fright, what an expression of appalled dismay! Irresistibly comic!
‘Well, Hugh,’ she said.
He looked up into her laughing face, unable to speak. Ever since the first laudatory notices of his book had begun to come in, he had been feeling so strong, so blissfully secure. And now here was Helen – come to humiliate him, come to bear shameful witness against him.
‘I didn’t expect,’ he managed to mumble incoherently. ‘I mean, why did you . . .?’
But Caldwell, who had a reputation for after-dinner speaking to keep up, interrupted him. Raising the glass he was holding, ‘To the Muse,’ he called out. ‘The Muse and also – I don’t think it’s an indiscretion if I say so – also the heroine of our masterpiece.’ Charmed by the felicity of his own phrasing, he beamed at Helen; then, turning to Hugh with a gesture of affectionate proprietorship, he patted him on the shoulder. ‘You must drink too, old man. It’s not a compliment to you – not this time.’ And he uttered a rich chuckle.
Hugh did as he was told and, averting his eyes, took a gulp of whisky-and-soda.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ cried Helen. The laughter was seething within her, like water in a kettle. She gave one hand to Caldwell and the other to Hugh. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled I was,’ she went on. ‘Dante and Beatrice by Hans Andersen – it sounds too delicious.’
Blushing, Hugh tried to protest. ‘That frightful article . . .’
Cutting him short, ‘But why did you keep it up your sleeve?’ she asked.
Yes why, why? Hugh was thinking; and that he had been mad to publish the book without first showing it to Helen. He had always wanted to show it to her – and always, at the last moment, found the task too difficult, too embarrassing. But the desire to publish had remained with him, had grown stronger, until at last, senselessly, he had taken the manuscript to Caldwell and, after its acceptance, arranged with him that it should appear while Helen was out of the country. As though that would prevent her knowing anything about it! Madness, madness! And the proof that he had been mad was her presence here tonight, with that strange wild smile on her face, that brightness in the eyes. An uncalculating recklessness was one of the child-beloved’s most characteristic and engaging traits; she was a celestial enfant terrible. But in the real Helen this recklessness seemed almost fiendish. She was capable of doing anything, absolutely anything.
‘Why did you?’ she insisted.
He made a vague apologetic noise.
‘You ought to have told me you were Dante Andersen. I’d have tried to live up to you. Beatrice and the Little Match Girl rolled into one. Good-evening, Beppo! And Mark!’ They had come over from the piano to greet her. ‘And, Mr Croyland, how are you?’
Mr Croyland gave a perfect performance of an old gentleman greeting a lovely young woman – benevolently, yet with a touch of playfulness, an attenuated echo of gallantry.
‘Such an unexpected enchantment,’ he breathed in the soft, deliberately ecstatic voice he ordinarily reserved for describing quattrocento paintings or for addressing the celebrated or the very rich. Then, with a gesture that beautifully expressed an impulsive outburst of affection, Mr Croyland sandwiched her hand between both of his. They were very pale, soft hands, almost gruesomely small and dainty. By comparison, it seemed to Helen that her own brown hand was like a peasant’s. Mr Croyland’s silvery and prophetic beard parted in a smile that ought to have been the gracious confirmation of his words and gestures, but which, with its incongruous width and the sudden ferocity of all its large and yellowing teeth, seemed instead to deny all reality to the old gentleman’s exquisite refinement of manner. That smile belonged to the Mr Croyland who had traded so profitably in the Old Masters; the little white hands and their affectionate gestures, the soft, ecstatic voice and its heartfelt words, were the property of that other, that ethereal Croyland who only cared about Art.
Helen disengaged her hand. ‘Did you ever see those china mugs, Mr Croyland?’ she asked, ‘you who know Italy so well? The ones they sell at Montecatini for drinking the purgative waters out of? White, with an inscription in golden letters: lo son Beatrice che ti faccio andare.’
‘But what an outrage!’ Mr Croyland exclaimed, and lifted his small hands in horror.
‘But it’s the sort of joke I really enjoy. Particularly now that Beatrice is really me . . .’ Becoming aware that the flaxen-haired young man was standing at attention about a yard to the west of her, evidently trying to attract her notice, Helen interrupted herself and turned towards him, holding out her hand.
The young man took it, bowed stiffly from the waist and, saying, ‘Giesebrecht,’ firmly squeezed it.
Laughing (it was another joke), Helen answered, ‘Ledwidge’; then, as an afterthought, ‘geboren Amberley.’
Nonplussed by this unexpected gambit, the young man bowed again in silence.
Staithes intervened to explain that Ekki Giesebrecht was his discovery. A refugee from Germany. Not because of his nose, he added as (taking pity on poor old Hugh) he drew her confidentially out of the group assembled round the sofa; not because of his nose – because of his politics. Aryan, but communist – ardently and all along the line.
‘He believes that as soon as all incomes are equalized, men will stop being cruel. Also that all power will automatically find itself in the hands of the best people. And he’s absolutely convinced that nobody who obtains power will be capable of even wishing to abuse it.’ Staithes shook his head. ‘One doesn’t know whether to admire and envy, or to thank God for not having made one such an ass. And to complicate matters, he’s such a thoroughly good ass. An ass with the moral qualities of a saint. Which is why he’s such an admirable propagandist. Saintliness is almost as good as sex-appeal.’ He pulled up a chair for Helen, and himself sat down again at the piano and began to play the first few bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise; then broke off and, turning back to her, ‘The trouble’, he resumed, ‘is that nothing works. Not faith, not intelligence, not saintliness, not even villainy – nothing. Faith’s just organized and directed stupidity. It may remove a mountain or two by dint of mere obstinate butting; but it’s blinkered, it can’t see that if you move mountains, you don’t destroy them, you merely shove them from one place to another. You need intelligence to see that; but intelligence isn’t much good because people can’t feel enthusiastic about it; it’s at the mercy of the first Hitler or Mussolini that comes along – of anyone who can rouse enthusiasm for any cause however idiotic and criminal.’
Helen was looking across the room. ‘I suppose his hair’s naturally that colour?’ she said, more to herself than to her companion. Then, turning back to Staithes, ‘And what about saintliness?’ she asked.
‘Well, look at history,’ he answered.
‘I don’t know any.’
‘Of course not. But I take it that you’ve heard of someone called Jesus? And occasionally, no doubt, you read the papers? Well, put two and two together, the morning’s news and the saint, and draw your own conclusions.’
Helen nodded. ‘I’ve drawn them.’
‘If saintliness were enough to save the world,’ he went on, ‘then obviously the world would have been saved long ago. Dozens of times. But saintliness can exist without the intelligence. And though it’s attractive, it isn’t more attractive than lots of other things – good food, for example, comfort, going to bed with people, bullying, feeling superior.’
Laughing (for this also was laughable), ‘It looks,’ said Helen, ‘as if there were nothing to do but throw up everything and become an invisible lover.’ She helped herself to a sandwich and a tumbler of white wine from the tray.
The group at the other end of the room had disintegrated, and Beppo and Mr Croyland were drifting back towards the piano. Staithes smiled
at them and, picking up the thread of the argument that Helen’s arrival had interrupted, ‘Alternatively,’ he said, ‘one might become an aesthete.’
‘You use the word as though it were an insult,’ Beppo protested with the emphatic peevishness that had grown upon him with age. Life was treating him badly – making him balder, making him stouter, making young men more and more reluctant to treat him as their contemporary, making sexual successes increasingly difficult of achievement, making that young German of Staithes’s behave almost rudely to him. ‘Why should one be ashamed of living for beauty?’
The thought of Beppo living for beauty – living for it with his bulging waistcoat and the tight seat of his check trousers and his bald crown and Florentine page’s curls – almost made Helen choke over her wine.
From the depths of his armchair, ‘“Glory be to God for dappled things,”’ murmured Mr Croyland. ‘I’ve been re-reading Father Hopkins lately. So poignant! Like a dagger. “What lovely behaviour of silk-sack clouds!”’ He sighed, he pensively shook his head. ‘They’re among the things that wound one with their loveliness. Wound and yet sustain, make life liveable.’
There was cathedral silence.
Then, making an effort to keep the laughter out of her voice, ‘Be an angel, Beppo,’ said Helen, ‘and give me some more of that hock.’
Mr Croyland sat remote, behind half-closed eyelids, the inhabitant of a higher universe.
When the clinking of the glasses had subsided, ‘“Ripeness is all,”’ he quoted. ‘“That sober certainty of waking bliss.” Waking,’ he insisted. ‘Piercingly conscious. And then, of course, there are pictures – the Watteaus at Dresden, and Bellini’s Transfiguration, and those Raphael portraits at the Pitti. Buttresses to shore up the soul. And certain philosophies, too. Zarathustra, the Symposium.’ He waved his little hand. ‘One would be lost without them – lost!’
‘And, with them, I take it, you’re saved?’ said Mark from his seat at the piano; and, without waiting for an answer, ‘I wish I were,’ he went on. ‘But there seems to be so little substance in it all. Even in the little that’s intrinsically substantial. For of course most thinking has never been anything but silly. And as for art, as for literature – well, look at the museums and the libraries. Look at them! Ninety-nine per cent. of nonsense and mere rubbish.’
‘But the Greeks,’ Mr Croyland protested, ‘the Florentines, the Chinese . . .’ He sketched in the air an exquisitely graceful gesture, as though he were running his fingers over the flanks of a Sung jar, round the cup-shaped navel of a High Renaissance water-nymph. Subtly, with what was meant to be the expression of a Luini Madonna, he smiled; but always, through the opening fur, his large yellow teeth showed ferociously, rapaciously – even when he talked about the Schifanoia frescoes, even when he whispered, as though it were an Orphic secret, the name of Vermeer of Delft.
But nonsense, Staithes insisted, almost invariably nonsense and rubbish. And most of what wasn’t nonsense or rubbish was only just ordinarily good. ‘Like what you or I could do with a little practice,’ he explained. ‘And if one knows oneself – the miserable inept little self that can yet accomplish such feats – well, really, one can’t be bothered to take the feats very seriously.’
Mr Croyland, it was evident from his frown, didn’t think of his own self in quite this spirit.
‘Not but what one can enjoy the stuff for all kinds of irrelevant reasons,’ Staithes admitted. ‘For its ingenuity, for example, if one’s in any way a technician or an interpreter. Steady progressions in the bass, for example, while the right hand is modulating apparently at random. Invariably delightful! But then, so’s carpentry. No; ultimately it isn’t interesting, that ordinarily good stuff. However great the accomplishment or the talent. Ultimately it’s without value; it differs from the bad only in degree. Composing like Brahms, for example – what is it, after all, but a vastly more elaborate and intellectual way of composing like Meyerbeer? Whereas the best Beethoven is as far beyond the best Brahms as it’s beyond the worst Meyerbeer. There’s a difference in kind. One’s in another world.’
‘Another world,’ echoed Mr Croyland in a religious whisper. ‘But that’s just what I’ve been trying to get you to admit. With the highest art one enters another world.’
Beppo fizzled with emphatic agreement.
‘A world,’ Mr Croyland insisted, ‘of gods and angels.’
‘Don’t forget the invisible lovers,’ said Helen, who was finding, as she drank her white wine, that everything was becoming more and more uproariously amusing.
Mr Croyland ignored the interruption. ‘A next world,’ he went on. ‘The great artists carry you up to heaven.’
‘But they never allow you to stay there,’ Mark Staithes objected. ‘They give you just a taste of the next world, then let you fall back, flop, into the mud. Marvellous while it lasts. But the time’s so short. And even while they’ve actually got me in heaven, I catch myself asking: Is that all? Isn’t there anything more, anything further? The other world isn’t other enough. Even Macbeth, even the Mass in D, even the El Greco Assumption.’ He shook his head. ‘They used to satisfy me. They used to be an escape and a support. But now . . . now I find myself wanting something more, something heavenlier, something less human. Yes, less human,’ he repeated. Then the flayed face twisted itself up into an agonized smile. ‘I feel rather like Nurse Cavell about it,’ he added. ‘Painting, music, literature, thought – they’re not enough.’
‘What is enough, then?’ asked Beppo. ‘Politics? Science? Money-making?’ Staithes shook his head after every suggestion.
‘But what else is there?’ asked Beppo.
Still anatomically smiling, Mark looked at him for a moment in silence, then said, ‘Nothing – absolutely nothing.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Mr Croyland. ‘They’re enough for me.’ He dropped his eyelids once more and retired into spiritual fastnesses.
Looking at him, Staithes was moved by a sudden angry desire to puncture the old gentleman’s balloon-like complacency – to rip a hole in that great bag of cultural gas, by means of which Mr Croyland contrived to hoist his squalid traffickings sky-high into the rarefied air of pure aesthetics. ‘And what about death? You find them adequate against death?’ he insisted in a tone that had suddenly become brutally inquisitorial. He paused, and for a moment the old man was enveloped in a horribly significant silence – the silence of those who in the presence of a victim or an incurable tactfully ignore the impending doom. ‘Adequate against life, for that matter,’ Mark Staithes went on, relenting; ‘against life in any of its more unpleasant or dangerous aspects.’
‘Such as dogs falling on one out of aeroplanes!’ Helen burst out laughing.
‘But what are you talking about?’ cried Beppo.
‘Father Hopkins won’t keep dogs off,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘I agree with you, Mark. A good umbrella, any day . . .’
Mr Croyland rose to his feet. ‘I must go to bed,’ he said. ‘And so should you, my dear.’ The little white hand upon her shoulder was benevolent, almost apostolic. ‘You’re tired after your journey.’
‘You mean, you think I’m drunk,’ Helen answered, wiping her eyes. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Gosh,’ she added, ‘how nice it is to laugh for a change!’
When Mr Croyland was gone, and Beppo with him, Staithes turned towards her. ‘You’re in a queer state, Helen.’
‘I’m amused,’ she explained.
‘What by?’
‘By everything. But it began with Dante; Dante and Hans Andersen. If you’d been married to Hugh, you’d know why that was so extraordinarily funny. Imagine Europa if the bull had turned out after all to be Narcissus!’
‘I don’t think you’d better talk so loud,’ said Staithes, looking across the room to where, with an expression on his face of hopeless misery, Hugh was pretending to listen to an animated discussion between Caldwell and the young German.
Helen also looked round for a moment;
then turned back with a careless shrug of the shoulders. ‘If he says he’s invisible, why shouldn’t I say I’m inaudible?’ Her eyes brightened again with laughter. ‘I shall write a book called The Inaudible Mistress. A woman who says exactly what she thinks about her lovers while they’re making love to her. But they can’t hear her. Not a word.’ She emptied her glass and refilled it.
‘And what does she say about them?’
‘The truth, of course. Nothing but the truth. That the romantic Don Juan is just a crook. Only I’m afraid that in reality she wouldn’t find that out till afterwards. Still, one might be allowed a bit of poetic licence – make the esprit d’escalier happen at the same time as the romantic affair. The moonlight, and “My darling,” and “I adore you,” and those extraordinary sensations – and at the same moment “You’re nothing but a sneak-thief, nothing but a low blackguardly swindler.” And then there’d be the spiritual lover – Hans Dante, in fact.’ She shook her head. ‘Talk of Kraft Ebbing!’