“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 blasé 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?”
“Yes, quite literally,” said Spandrell. “For I can assure you that all the melodramas are perfectly realistic. There are certain occasions when people do say that sort of thing. The only defect of melodrama is that it leads you to believe that they say it all the time. They don’t, unfortunately. But ‘rather death than dishonour’ was exactly what I was thinking in August, 1914. If the alternative to death was the stupid kind of life I’d been leading, I wanted to get killed.”
“There speaks the gentleman of leisure again,” said Illidge.
“And then, just because I’d been brought up a good deal abroad and knew three foreign languages, because I had a mother who was too fond of me and a stepfather with military influence, I was transferred willy-nilly into the Intelligence. God was really bent on damning me.”
“He was very kindly trying to save your life,” said Philip.
“But I didn’t want it saved. Not unless I could do something decent with it, something heroic for preference, or at least difficult and risky. Instead of which they put me on to liaison work and then to hunting spies. Of all the sordid and ignoble businesses …”
“But after all, the trenches weren’t so very romantic.”
“No, but they were dangerous. Sitting in a trench, you needed courage and endurance. A spy catcher was perfectly safe and didn’t have to display any of the nobler virtues; while as to his opportunities for vice … Those towns behind the lines, and Paris, and the ports—whores and alcohol were their chief products.”
“But after all,” said Philip, “those are avoidable evils.” Naturally cold, he found it easy to be reasonable.
“Not avoidable by me,” Spandrell answered. “Particularly in those circumstances. I’d wanted to do something decent, and I’d been prevented. So it became a kind of point of honour to do the opposite of what I’d desired. A point of honour—can you understand that?”
Philip shook his head. “A little too subtle for me.”
“But just imagine yourself in the presence of a man you respect and like and admire more than you’ve ever admired and liked anyone before.”
Philip nodded. But in point of fact, he reflected, he had never deeply and wholeheartedly admired anyone. Theoretically, yes; but never in practice, never to the point of wanting to make himself a disciple, a follower. He had adopted other people’s opinions, even their modes of life—but always with the underlying conviction that they weren’t really his, that he could and certainly would abandon them as easily as he had taken them up. And whenever there had seemed any risk of his being carried away, he had deliberately resisted—had fought or fled for his liberty.
“You’re overcome with your feeling for him,” Spandrell continued. “And you go toward him with outstretched hands, offering your friendship and devotion. His only response is to put his hands in his pockets and turn away. What would you do then?”
Philip laughed. “I should have to consult Vogue’s Book of Etiquette.”
“You’d knock him down. At least, that’s what I would do. It would be a point of honour. And the more you’d admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcase. That’s why the whores and the alcohol weren’t avoidable. On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them. That life in France was like the life I’d been leading before the war—only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature. And after a year of it, I was desperately wangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death. Augustine was right, I tell you; we’re damned or saved in advance. The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.”
“Providential balderdash!” said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second-oldest Judge of the High Court just behind him. Twenty years before the odds against his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at the rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one. But there, all the same, he was. He took another draught of claret.
And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and ears laid back; and how it
