“My poor dear lady!”
“I began going when I was six,” said Lucy.
“And dances,” Mrs. Betterton continued. “The hunt ball—what an excitement! Because it only happened once a year.” She quoted Shakespeare.
“Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since seldom coming, in the long year set,
Like stones of worth they thinly placed are. …
“They’re a row of pearls nowadays.”
“And false ones at that,” said Lucy.
Mrs. Betterton was triumphant. “False ones—you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t ‘blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure’ by daily wear. Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age. A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.”
“And what’s your remedy?” enquired John Bidlake. “If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,” he added ironically.
“Naughty!” cried Mrs. Betterton with an appalling playfulness. Then, becoming serious, “The remedy,” she went on, “is fewer diversions.”
“But I don’t want them fewer,” objected John Bidlake.
“In that case,” said Lucy, “they must be stronger—progressively.”
“Progressively?” Mrs. Betterton repeated. “But where would that sort of progress end?”
“In bull fighting?” suggested John Bidlake. “Or gladiatorial shows? Or public executions, perhaps? Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade? Where?”
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows?”
Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.
“I think it’s detestable,” Polly was saying—and her face was flushed with anger, “to make war on the poor.”
“But the Freemen don’t make war on the poor.”
“They do.”
“They don’t,” said Hugo. “Read Webley’s speeches.”
“I only read about his actions.”
“But they’re in accordance with his words.”
“They are not.”
“They are. All he’s opposed to is dictatorship of a class.”
“Of the poor class.”
“Of any class,” Hugo earnestly insisted. “That’s his whole point. The classes must be equally strong. A strong working class clamouring for high wages keeps the professional middle class active.”
“Like fleas on a dog,” suggested Polly, and laughed with a return toward good humour. When a ludicrous thought occurred to her she could never prevent herself from giving utterance to it, even when she was supposed to be serious, or, as in this case, in a rage.
“They’ve jolly well got to be inventive and progressive,” Hugo continued, struggling with the difficulties of lucid exposition. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to pay the workers what they demand and make a profit for themselves. And at the same time a strong and intelligent middle class is good for the workers, because they get good leadership and good organization. Which means better wages and peace and happiness.”
“Amen,” said Polly.
“So the dictatorship of one class is nonsense,” continued Hugo. “Webley wants to keep all the classes and strengthen them. He wants them to live in a condition of tension, so that the state is balanced by each pulling as hard as it can its own way. Scientists say that the different organs of the body are like that. They live in a state”—he hesitated, he blushed—“of hostile symbiosis.”
“Golly!”
“I’m sorry,” Hugo apologized.
“All the same,” said Polly, “he doesn’t want to allow men to strike.”
“Because strikes are stupid.”
“He’s against democracy.”
“Because it allows such awful people to get power. He wants the best to rule.”
“Himself, for example,” said Polly sarcastically.
“Well, why not? If you knew what a wonderful chap he was.” Hugo became enthusiastic. He had been acting as one of Webley’s aides-de-camp for the last three months. “I never met anyone like him,” he said.
Polly listened to his outpourings with a smile. She felt old and superior. At school she herself had felt and talked like that about the domestic economy mistress. All the same, she liked him for being so loyal.
V
A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers—it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake’s imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance. The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas—yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.
The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, toward the floor. But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night. He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky. Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cockatoos, up through the perennial mist of London into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke. He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise. That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left—it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon. And all these voices (what were they saying? “… made an excellent speech …”; “… no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you’ve tried them …”; “… such a bore …”; “… eloped with the chauffeur …”), all these voices—how exquisite and tiny they’d be up there! But meanwhile, down here, in the jungle … Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous!
Looking over the heads of the people who surrounded him, he saw Frank Illidge, alone, leaning against a pillar. His attitude, his smile were Byronic, at once world-weary and contemptuous; he glanced about
