“Do you mind,” said Illidge faintly, “if I lie down for a minute. I’m not feeling well.”
XXXIV
It was nearly eleven before Philip Quarles appeared at Sbisa’s. Spandrell saw him as he was entering and beckoned to the table where he was sitting with Burlap and Rampion. Philip came limping across the room and sat down beside him.
“I’ve got messages for you,” said Spandrell, “and what’s more important,” he felt in his pocket, “the key of your house.” He handed it over, explaining how he had come into possession of it. If the man knew what had happened in his house that evening … “And Elinor’s gone down to Gattenden,” he went on. “She had a telegram. The child doesn’t seem to be well. And she expects you tomorrow.”
“The devil she does!” said Philip. “But I have at least fifteen engagements. What’s wrong with the boy?”
“Unspecified.”
Philip shrugged his shoulders. “If it had been serious, my mother-in-law wouldn’t have telegraphed,” he said, yielding to the temptation to say something amusing. “She’s like that. She’ll take a case of double pneumonia with perfect calm and then get terribly excited about a headache or a pain in the belly.” He interrupted himself to order an omelette and half a bottle of moselle. Still, Philip reflected, the boy hadn’t been very flourishing these last weeks. He rather wished he hadn’t yielded to the temptation. And what he had said hadn’t really been in the least amusing. Wanting to be amusing—that was his chief literary defect. His books would be much better if he would allow them to be much duller. He sank into a rather gloomy silence.
“These children!” said Spandrell. “If you will go in for them …”
“Still, it must be wonderful to have a child,” said Burlap with proper wistfulness. “I often wish …”
Rampion interrupted him. “It must be still more wonderful to be one. When one’s grown up, I mean.” He grinned.
“What do you do about your children?” asked Spandrell.
“As little as I can. Unfortunately, they have to go to school. I only hope they won’t learn too much. It’d be really awful if they emerged as little professors stuffed with knowledge, trotting out their smart little abstract generalizations. They probably will. Just to spite me. Children generally do spite their parents. Not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously, because they can’t help it, because the parents have probably gone too far in one direction and nature’s reacting, trying to get back to the state of equilibrium. Yes, yes, I can feel it in my bones. They’ll be professors, the little devils. They’ll be horrid little scientists. Like your friend Illidge,” he said, turning to Spandrell, who started uncomfortably at the name and was annoyed that he should have started. “Horrid little brains that do their best to suppress the accompanying hearts and bowels.”
Spandrell smiled his significant, rather melodramatically ironic smile. “Young Illidge hasn’t succeeded in suppressing his heart and bowels,” he said. “Not by a long chalk.”
“Of course not. Nobody can suppress them. All that happens in the process is that they’re transformed from living organs into offal. And why are they transformed? In the interests of what? Of a lot of silly knowledge and irrelevant abstractions.”
“Which are after all quite amusing in themselves,” said Philip, breaking his silence to come to the rescue of the intellect. “Making generalizations and pursuing knowledge are amusements. Among the most entertaining, to my mind.” Philip went on to develop his hedonistic justification of the mental life. “So why be so hard on our little diversions?” he concluded. “You don’t denounce golf; so why should you denounce the sports of the highbrows?”
“That’s fairly rudimentary, isn’t it?” said Rampion. “The tree shall be known by its fruits. The fruits of golf are either nonexistent, harmless, or positively beneficial. A healthy liver, for example—that’s a very fine fruit. Whereas the fruits of intellectualism—my God!” He made a grimace. “Look at them. The whole of our industrial civilization—that’s their fruit. The morning paper, the radio, the cinema, all fruits. Tanks and trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mond—fruits again. They’re all the result of the systematically organized, professional intellectualism of the last two hundred years. And you expect me to approve of your amusements? But, I tell you, I prefer bullfighting. What’s the torture of a few animals and the brutalizing of a few hundred spectators compared to the ruining and befouling and degrading of a whole world? Which is what you highbrows have done since you professionalized and organized your amusements.”
“Come, come,” said Philip. “The picture’s a little bird. And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results.”
“They are responsible. Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition. After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane. A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science. He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one. And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration.
