“You prefer Pecksniff to Alcibiades,” Willie Weaver concluded.
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve had no experience of Pecksniff.”
“I don’t know,” Peter Slipe was saying, “whether you’ve ever been pecked by a goose.”
“Been what?” asked Walter, recalling his attention.
“Been pecked by a goose.”
“Never, that I can remember.”
“It’s a hard, dry sensation.” Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger. “Beatrice is like that. She pecks; she enjoys pecking. But she can be very kind at the same time. She insists on being kind in her way, and she pecks if you don’t like it. Pecking’s part of the kindness; so I always found. I never objected. But why should she have turned me out of the house as though I were a criminal? And rooms are so difficult to find now. I had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks. The food …” He shuddered.
Walter could not help smiling.
“She must have been in a great hurry to install Burlap in your place.”
“But why in such a hurry as all that?”
“When it’s a case of off with the old love and on with the new. …”
“But what has love to do with it,” asked Slipe, “in Beatrice’s case?”
“A great deal,” Willie Weaver broke in. “Everything. These superannuated virgins—always the most passionate.”
“But she’s never had a love affair in her life.”
“Hence the violence,” concluded Willie triumphantly. “Beatrice has a nigger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.”
“Perhaps she likes being well dressed,” suggested Lucy.
Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.
“That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.” Willie hesitated a moment. “Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,” he concluded, and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.
Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole. She was thirty-five, but seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless. Her skin was clear and fresh. From shallow and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining. In a sharp, determined way her face was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the pouting mouth, and round defiant chin. But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking and mischievously inquisitive.
She stitched away. The clock ticked. The moving instant which, according to Sir Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advanced inexorably through the dimension of time. Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man might suck forever at an unending piece of macaroni. Every now and then Beatrice actualized a potential yawn. In a basket by the fireplace a black she-cat lay on her side purring and suckling four blind and parti-coloured kittens. The walls of the room were primrose yellow. On the top shelf of the bookcase the dust was thickening on the textbooks of Assyriology which she had bought when Peter Slipe was the tenant of her upper floor. A volume of Pascal’s Thoughts, with pencil annotations by Burlap, lay open on the table. The clock continued to tick.
Suddenly the front door banged. Beatrice put down her pink silk camisole and sprang to her feet.
“Don’t forget that you must drink your hot milk, Denis,” she said, looking out into the hall. Her voice was clear, sharp, and commanding.
Burlap hung up his coat and came to the door. “You oughtn’t to have sat up for me,” he said, with tender reproachfulness, giving her one of his grave and subtle Sodoma smiles.
“I had some work I simply had to get finished,” Beatrice lied.
“Well, it was most awfully sweet of you.” These pretty colloquialisms, with which Burlap liked to pepper his conversation, had for sensitive ears a most curious ring. “He talks slang,” Mary Rampion once said, “as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English—but a foreigner’s command. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard an Indian calling anyone a ‘jolly good sport.’ Burlap’s slang reminds me of that.”
For Beatrice, however, that “awfully sweet” sounded entirely natural and un-alien. She flushed with a young-girlishly timid pleasure. But, “Come in and shut the door,” she rapped out commandingly. Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny; there was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient. “Sit down there,” she ordered; and while she was briskly busy over the milk jug, the saucepan, the gas ring, she asked him if he had enjoyed the party.
Burlap shook his head. “Fascinatio nugacitatis,” he said. “Fascinatio nugacitatis.” He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from Piccadilly Circus.
Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words connoted disapproval. “Parties are rather a waste of time, aren’t they?” she said.
Burlap nodded. “A waste of time,” he echoed in his slow ruminant’s voice, keeping his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice’s left. “One’s forty, one has lived more than half one’s life, the world is marvellous and mysterious. And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount House. Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one? It is some vague fantastic hope that one may meet the messianic person one’s always been looking for, or
