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By Root 5855 0

bed with them, but just two angels holding hands. Ugh! Think of his treatment of women—shocking, really shocking. The women loved it of course—for a little. It made them feel so spiritual—that is, until it made them feel like committing suicide. So spiritual. And all the time he was just a young schoolboy with a sensual itch like anybody else’s, but persuading himself and other people that he was Dante and Beatrice rolled into one, only much more so. Dreadful, dreadful! The only excuse is that, I suppose, he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t born a man; he was only a kind of fairy slug with the sexual appetites of a schoolboy. And then, think of that awful incapacity to call a spade a spade. He always had to pretend it was an angel’s harp or a platonic imagination. Do you remember the Ode to the Skylark?” Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert!”’ Rampion recited with a ludicrous parody of an elocutionist’s ‘expression.’ ‘Just pretending, just lying to himself, as usual. The lark couldn’t be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no! That wasn’t nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse. It had to be a disembodied spirit. Bloodless, boneless. A kind of ethereal flying slug. It was only to be expected. Shelley was a kind of flying slug himself; and, after all, nobody can really write about anything except himself. If you’re a slug, you must write about slugs, even though your subject is supposed to be a skylark. But I wish to God,’ Ramplon added, with a sudden burst of comically extravagant fury, ‘I wish to God the bird had had as much sense as those sparrows in the book of Tobit and dropped a good large mess in his eye. It would have served him damned well right for saying it wasn’t a bird. Blithe spirit, indeed! Blithe spirit!’

CHAPTER XI

In Lucy’s neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public. The more the merrier was her principle; or if ‘merrier’ were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously distracting. Within five minutes of her arrival, the corner in which Spandrell and the Rampions had been sitting all evening in the privacy of quiet conversation was invaded and in a twinkling overrun by a loud and alcoholic party from the inner room. Cuthbert Arkwright was the noisiest and the most drunken—on principle and for the love of art as well as for that of alcohol. He had an idea that by bawling and behaving offensively, he was defending art against the Philistines. Tipsy, he felt himself arrayed on the side of the angels, of Baudelaire, of Edgar Allan Poe, of De Quincey, against the dull unspiritual mob. And if he boasted of his fornications, it was because respectable people had thought Blake a madman, because Bowdler had edited Shakespeare, and the author of Madame Bovary had been prosecuted, because when one asked for the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom at the Bodleian, the librarians wouldn’t give it unless one had a certificate that one was engaged on bona fide literary research. He made his living, and in the process convinced himself that he was serving the arts, by printing limited and expensive editions of the more scabrous specimens of the native and foreign literatures. Blond, beef-red, with green and bulging eyes, his large face shining, he approached vociferating greetings. Willie Weaver jauntily followed, a little man perpetually smiling, spectacles astride his long nose, bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage. Behind him, his twin in height and also spectacled, but grey, dim, shrunken and silent, came Peter Slipe.

‘They look like the advertisement of a patent medicine,’ said Spandrell as they approached. Slipe’s the patient before, Weaver’s the same after one bottle, and Cuthbert Arkwright illustrates the appalling results of taking the complete cure.’

Lucy was still laughing at the joke when Cuthbert took her hand. ‘Lucy! ‘ he shouted. ‘My angel! But why in heaven’s name do you always write in pencil? I simply cannot read what you write. It’s a mere chance that I’m here to-night.