was a practical, workable ideal. The land supplied all the needs of those who lived on it; there was little functional specialization; every peasant was, to a great extent, his own manufacturer as well as his own butcher, baker, green-grocer and vintner. It was a society in which money was still comparatively unimportant. The majority lived in an almost moneyless condition. They dealt directly in things—household stuff of their own making and the kindly fruits of the earth—and so had no need of the precious metals which buy things. St. Francis’s ideal of poverty was practicable then, because it held up for admiration a way of life not so enormously unlike the actual way of his humbler contemporaries. He was inviting the leisured and the functionally specialized members of society—those who were living mainly in terms of money—to live as their inferiors were living, in terms of things. How different is the state of things to-day!’ Burlap relapsed once more into blank verse, moved this time by indignation, not by lyrical tenderness. ‘We are all specialists, living in terms only of money, not of real things, inhabiting remote abstractions, not the actual world of growth and making.’ He rumbled on a little about ‘the great machines that having been man’s slaves are now his masters,’ about standardization, about industrial and commercial life and its withering effect on the human soul (for which last he borrowed a few of Rampion’s favourite phrases). Money, he concluded, was the root of the whole evil: the fatal necessity under which man now labours of living in terms of money, not of real things. ‘To modern eyes St. Francis’s ideal appears fantastic, utterly insane. The Lady Poverty has been degraded by modern circumstances into the semblance of a sackaproned, leaky-booted charwoman…No one in his senses would dream of following her. To idealize so repulsive a Dulcinea one would have to be madder than Don Quixote himself. Within our modern society the Franciscanideal is unworkable. We have made poverty detestable. But this does not mean that we can just neglect St. Francis as a dreamer of mad dreams. No, on the contrary, the insanity is ours, not his. He is the doctor in the asylum. To the lunatics the doctor seems the only madman. When we recover our senses, we shall see that the doctor has been all the time the only healthy man. As things are at present the Franciscan ideal is unworkable. The moral of that is that things must be altered, radically. Our aim must be to create a new society in which Lady Poverty shall be, not a draggled charwoman, but a lovely form of light and graciousness and beauty. Oh Poverty, Poverty, beautiful Lady Poverty!…’
Beatrice came in to say that supper was on the table.
‘Two eggs,’ she commanded, rapping out her solicitude. ‘Two, I insist. They were made especially for you.’
‘You treat me like the prodigal son,’ said Burlap. ‘Or the fatted calf while it was being fattened.’ He wagged his head, he smiled a Sodoma smile and helped himself to the second egg.
‘I want to ask your advice about some gramophone shares I’ve got,’ said Beatrice. ‘They’ve been rising so violently.’
‘Gramophones!’ said Burlap. ‘Ah…’ He advised.
CHAPTER XVII
It had been raining for days. To Spandrell it seemed as though the fungi and the mildew were sprouting even in his soul. He lay in bed, or sat in his dismal room, or leaned against the counter in a public house, feeling the slimy growth within him, watching it with his inward eyes.
‘But if only you’d do something,’ his mother had so often implored. ‘Anything.’
And all his friends had said the same thing, had gone on saying it for years.
But he was damned if he’d do anything. Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare—all that tripe and nonsense. ‘Work!’ he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, ‘work’s no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work’s simply a drug, that’s all. It’s humiliating that