“Thanks for the compliment,” said Philip.
“A morality-philosophy pervert.” He turned to Spandrell. “Quite the little Stavrogin. Pardon my saying so, Spandrell, but you really are the most colossal fool.” He looked intently into his face. “Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one! But it won’t do. It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.”
Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew … But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?
“Laugh away, old Dostoevsky! But let me tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin. He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.”
“And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?” asked Philip.
“What indeed!” Rampion shook his head. His fine hair floated up silkily. He smiled. “A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah pervert. A worry-about-the-bloody-old-world pervert. Above all, a gibber pervert.” He got up. “That’s why I’m going home,” he said. “The way I’ve been talking—it’s nonhuman. Really scandalous. I’m ashamed. But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against nonhuman things and people, you inevitably become nonhuman yourself. It’s all your fault.” He gave a final grin, waved good night, and was gone.
Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him. Sitting—for such was the engagingly childlike habit he had formed during the last few weeks—on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion. An extraordinary man, a great man, even. Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly. She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself. Hardly great, she insisted jealously. Well, perhaps not quite. But very nearly. If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot. The attitude was comprehensible. Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other. His incapacity to understand St. Francis, for example. The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint. That was extraordinary and deplorable.
“What does he say?” asked Beatrice severely. Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St. Francis under her protection.
Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said. Beatrice was indignant. How could he say such things? How did he dare? It was an outrage. Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real defect. But so few people, he added in charitable palliation, were born with a real feeling for spiritual beauty. Rampion was an extraordinary man in many ways, but it was as though he lacked the extra sense-organ which enables men like St. Francis to see the beauty that is beyond earthly beauty. In a rudimentary form he himself, he thought, had the power. How rarely he met anyone who seemed to be like him! Almost everybody was in this respect a stranger. It was like seeing normally in a country where most people were colour blind. Didn’t Beatrice feel that too? For of course she was one of the rare, clear-seeing ones. He had felt it at once, the first time he met her. Beatrice nodded gravely. Yes, she too felt like that. Burlap smiled up at her; he knew it. She felt proud and important. Rampion’s idea of love, for example; Burlap shook his head. So extraordinarily gross and animal and corporeal.
“Dreadful,” said Beatrice feelingly. Denis, she was thinking, was so different. Tenderly she looked down at the head that reposed, so trustingly, against her knee. She adored the way his hair curled, and his very small, beautiful ears, and even the pink bare spot on the top of his crown. That little pink tonsure was somehow rather engagingly pathetic. There was a long silence.
Burlap at last profoundly sighed. “How tired I am!” he said.
“You ought to go to bed.”
“Too tired even to move.” He pressed his cheek more heavily against her knee and shut his eyes.
Beatrice raised her hand, hesitated a moment, dropped it again, then raised it once more and began to run her fingers soothingly through his dark curls. There was another long silence.
“Ah, don’t stop,” he said, when at last she withdrew her hand. “It’s so comforting. Such a virtue seems to go out from you. You’d almost cured my headache.”
“You’ve got a headache?” asked Beatrice, her solicitude running as usual to a kind of anger. “Then you simply must go to bed,” she commanded.
“But I’m so happy here.”
“No, I insist.” Her protective motherliness was thoroughly aroused. It was a bullying tenderness.
“How cruel you are!” Burlap complained, rising reluctantly to his feet. Beatrice was touched with compunction. “I’ll stroke your head when you’re in bed,” she promised. She too now regretted that soft warm silence, that speechless intimacy, which her outburst of domineering solicitude had too abruptly shattered. She justified herself by an explanation. The headache would return if he didn’t go to sleep the moment it was cured. And so on.
Burlap had been in bed nearly ten minutes when she came to keep her promise. She was dressed in a green dressing gown and her yellow hair was plaited into a long thick pigtail that swung heavily as she moved, like a heavy plaited tail of a cart horse at a show.
“You look about twelve with that pigtail hanging down your back,” said Burlap, enchanted.
Beatrice laughed, rather nervously, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He raised his hand and took hold of the thick plait. “Too charming,” he said. “It simply invites pulling.” He gave a little tug at it, playfully.
“Look out,” she warned. “I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.” She
