“But a very Anglican Belshazzar,” Walter qualified.
“Gosh!” exclaimed Illidge, who had been looking round. “This is the sort of thing that really does make me feel pleb-ish.”
Philip laughed, rather uncomfortably. Changing the subject, he pointed out the protectively coloured waiters. They proved the Darwinian hypothesis. “Survival of the fittest,” he said as they sat down at their appointed table. “The men in other colours must have been killed off by infuriated members.” One of the claret-coloured survivors brought the fish. They began to eat.
“It’s curious,” said Illidge, pursuing the train of thought suggested by his first impressions of the room, “it’s really extraordinary that I should be here at all. Sitting with you, at any rate, as a guest. For there wouldn’t have been anything so very surprising about my being here in one of these wine-coloured coats. That at least would have been in harmony with what the parsons would call ‘my station in life.’ ” He uttered a brief resentful laugh. “But to be sitting with you—that’s really almost incredible. And it’s all due to the fact that a Manchester shopkeeper had a son with tendencies to scrofula. If Reggie Wright had been normally healthy, I’d probably be cobbling shoes in Lancashire. But luckily Reggie had tubercle bacilli in his lymph system. The doctors prescribed a country life. His father took a cottage in our village for his wife and child, and Reggie went to the village school. But his father was ambitious for Reggie. (What a disgusting little rat he was!)” Illidge remarked parenthetically. “Wanted him to go to Manchester Grammar School, later on. With a scholarship. Paid our schoolmaster to give him special coaching. I was a bright boy; the master liked me. While he was coaching Reggie, he thought he might as well coach me. Gratis, what’s more. Wouldn’t let my mother pay a penny. Not that she could have done so very easily, poor woman. The time came, and it was I who got the scholarship. Reggie failed.” Illidge laughed. “Miserable scrofulous little squit! But I’m eternally grateful to him and the busy bacilli in his glands. But for them I’d be carrying on my uncle’s cobbling business in a Lancashire village. And that’s the sort of thing one’s life hinges on—some absolutely absurd, million-to-one chance. An irrelevance, and your life’s altered.”
“Not an irrelevance,” objected Spandrell. “Your scholarship wasn’t irrelevant; it was very much to the point, it was in harmony with you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have won it, you wouldn’t be here. I doubt if anything is really irrelevant. Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.”
“That’s a bit oracular, isn’t it?” Philip objected. “Perceiving events, men distort them—put it like that—so that what happens seems to be like themselves.”
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. “There may be that sort of distortion. But I believe that events come ready-made to fit the people they happen to.”
“What rot!” said Illidge, disgustedly.
Philip dissented more politely. “But many people can be influenced by the same event in entirely different and characteristic ways.”
“I know,” Spandrell answered. “But in some indescribable way the event’s modified, qualitatively modified, so as to suit the character of each person involved in it. It’s a great mystery and a paradox.”
“Not to say an absurdity and impossible,” put in Illidge.
“Absurd, then, and impossible,” Spandrell agreed. “But all the same, I believe that’s how it happens. Why should things be logically explainable?”
“Yes, why indeed?” Walter echoed.
“Still,” said Philip, “your providence that makes the same event qualitatively different for different people—isn’t that a bit thick?”
“No thicker than our being here at all. No thicker than all this.” With a wave of his hand he indicated the Belshazzaresque dining room, the eaters, the plum-coloured waiters, and the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy, who happened at that moment to be entering the room with the Professor of Poetry at the University of Cambridge.
But Philip was argumentatively persistent. “But assuming, as the scientists do, that the simplest hypothesis is the best—though I could never for the life of me see what justification, beyond human ineptitude, they had for doing so …”
“Hear, hear!”
“What justification?” repeated Illidge. “Only the justification of observed fact, that’s all. It happens to be found experimentally that nature does do things in the simplest way.”
“Or else,” said Spandrell, “that human beings understand only the simplest explanatives. In practice, you couldn’t distinguish between those alternatives.”
“But if a thing has a simple, natural explanation, it can’t at the same time have a complicated, supernatural one.”
“Why not?” asked Spandrell. “You mayn’t be able to understand or measure the supernatural forces behind the superficially natural ones (whatever the difference between natural and supernatural may be). But that doesn’t prove they’re not there. You’re simply raising your stupidity to the rank of a general law.”
Philip took the opportunity to continue his argument. “But assuming all the same,” he broke in before Illidge could speak again, “that the simpler explanation is likely to be the truer—aren’t the facts more simply explained by saying it’s the individual, with his history and character, who distorts the event into his own likeness? We can see individuals, but we can’t see providence; we have to postulate it. Isn’t it best, if we can do without it, to omit the superfluous postulate?”
“But is it superfluous?” said Spandrell. “Can you cover the facts without it? I have my doubts. What about the malleable sort of people?—and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born—what about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist),
