John Bidlake leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The enormous military man with the grey moustache was his son. Young John was fifty. Fifty. There had been a time when fifty seemed a Methusalem age. “If Manet hadn’t died prematurely …” He remembered the words of his old teacher at the art school in Paris. “But did Manet die so young?” The old man had shaken his head. (Old? John Bidlake reflected. He had seemed very old then. But probably he wasn’t more than sixty.) “Manet was only fifty-one,” the teacher had answered. He had found it difficult to restrain his laughter. And now his own son was the age of Manet when Manet died. An enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And his brother was dead and buried at the other side of the world, in California. Cancer of the intestine. Elinor had met his son at Santa Barbara—a young man with a rich young wife, evading the prohibition laws to the tune of a bottle of gin a day between them.
John Bidlake thought of his first wife, the mother of the military gentleman and the Californian who had died of cancer of the intestine. He was only twenty-two when he married for the first time. Rose was not yet twenty. They loved one another frantically, with a tigerish passion. They quarrelled, too, quarrelled rather enjoyably at first, when the quarrels could be made up in effusions of sensuality as violent as the furies they assuaged. But the charm began to wear off when the children arrived, two of them within twenty-five months. There was not enough money to keep the brats at a distance, to hire professionals to do the tiresome and dirty work. John Bidlake’s paternity was no sinecure. His studio became a nursery. Very soon, the results of passion—the yelling and the wetted diapers, the broken sleep, the smells—disgusted him of passion. Moreover, the object of his passion was no longer the same. After the babies were born Rose began to put on fat. Her face became heavy, her body swelled and sagged. The quarrels, now, were not so easily made up. At the same time, they were more frequent; paternity got on John Bidlake’s nerves. His art provided him with a pretext for going to Paris. He went for a fortnight and stayed away four months. The quarrels began again on his return. Rose now frankly disgusted him. His models offered him facile consolations; he had a more serious love affair with a married woman who had come to him to have her portrait painted. Life at home was a dreariness tempered by scenes. After a particularly violent scene Rose packed up and went to live with her parents. She took the children with her; John Bidlake was only too delighted to be rid of them. The elder of the squalling diaper-wetters was now an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And the other was dead of cancer of the intestine. He had not seen either of them since they were boys of five and twenty. The sons had stuck to their mother. She too was dead, had been in the grave these fifteen years.
Once bitten, twice shy. After his divorce John Bidlake had promised himself that he would never marry again. But when one falls desperately in love with a virtuous young woman of good family, what can one do? He had married, and those two brief years with Isabel had been the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the happiest of all his life. And then she had died in childbirth, pointlessly. He did his best never to think of her. The recollection was too painful. Between her remembered image and the moment of remembering, the abysses of time and separation were vaster than any other gulf between the present and the past. And by comparison with the past which he had shared with Isabel every present seemed dim; and her death was a horrible reminder of the future. He never spoke of her, and all that might remind him of her—her letters, her books, the furniture of her room—he destroyed or sold. He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. But his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabel’s were destroyed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defences this evening. The widest breath was opened by this letter of Elinor’s. Sunk in his armchair, John Bidlake sat for a long time, unmoving.
Polly Logan sat in front of the looking-glass. As she drew the comb through her hair there was a fine small crackling of electric sparks.
“Little sparks, like a tiny battle, tiny, tiny ghosts shooting. Tiny battle, tiny ghost of a battle-rattle.”
Polly pronounced the words in a sonorous monotone, as though she were reciting to an audience. She lingered lovingly over them, rolling the r’s, hissing on the s’s, humming like a bee on the m’s, drawing out the long vowels and making them round and pure. “Ghost rattle of ghost rifles, in-fin-it-es-imal ghost cannonade.” Lovely words! It gave her a peculiar satisfaction to be able to roll them out, to listen with an appreciative, a positively gluttonous ear to the rumble of the syllables as they were absorbed into the silence. Polly had always liked talking to herself. It was a childish habit which she would not give up. “But if it amuses me,” she protested when people laughed at her for it, “why shouldn’t I? It does nobody any harm.”
She refused to let herself be laughed out of the habit.
“Electric, electric,” she went on, dropping her voice and speaking in a dramatic whisper. “Electrical musketry, metrical biscuitry. Ow!” The comb had caught in
