“I merely try to amuse myself.” The cab drew up in front of her little house in Bruton Street. “God knows,” she added, as she stepped out, “without much success. Here, I’ve got money.” She handed the driver a ten-shilling note. Lucy insisted, when she was with men, on doing as much of the paying as possible. Paying, she was independent, she could call her own tune. “And nobody gives me much help,” she went on, as she fumbled with her latchkey. “You’re all so astonishingly dull.”
In the dining room a rich still-life of bottles, fruits, and sandwiches was awaiting them. Round the polished flanks of the vacuum flask their reflections walked fantastically in a non-Euclidean universe. Professor Dewar had liquefied hydrogen in order that Lucy’s soup might be kept hot for her into the small hours. Over the sideboard hung one of John Bidlake’s paintings of the theatre. A curve of the gallery, a slope of faces, a corner of the bright proscenium.
“How good that is!” said Spandrell, shading his eyes to see it more clearly.
Lucy made no comment. She was looking at herself in an old grey-glassed mirror.
“What shall I do when I’m old?” she suddenly asked.
“Why not die?” suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.
“I think I’ll take to science, like the Old Man. Isn’t there such a thing as human zoology? I’d get a bit tired of frogs. Talking of frogs,” she added, “I rather liked that little carroty man—what’s his name?—Illidge. How he does hate us for being rich!”
“Don’t lump me in with the rich. If you knew …” Spandrell shook his head. “Let’s hope she’ll bring some cash when she comes tomorrow,” he was thinking, remembering the message Lucy had brought from his mother. He had written that the case was urgent.
“I like people who can hate,” Lucy went on.
“Illidge knows how to. He’s fairly stuffed with theories and bile and envy. He longs to blow you all up.”
“Then why doesn’t he? Why don’t you? Isn’t that what your club’s there for?”
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. “There’s a slight difference between theory and practice, you know. And when one’s a militant communist and a scientific materialist, and an admirer of the Russian Revolution, the theory’s uncommonly queer. You should hear our young friend talking about murder! Political murder is what especially interests him, of course; but he doesn’t make much distinction between the different branches of the profession. One kind according to him, is as harmless and morally indifferent as another. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. And so on and so forth. Queer,” Spandrell commented parenthetically, “how old-fashioned and even primitive the latest manifestations of art and politics generally are! Young Illidge talks like a mixture of Lord Tennyson in In Memoriam and a Mexican Indian, or a Malay trying to make up his mind to run amok. Justifying the most primitive, savage, animal indifference to life and individuality by means of obsolete scientific arguments. Very queer indeed.”
“But why should the science be obsolete?” asked Lucy. “Seeing that he’s a scientist himself …”
“But also a communist. Which means he’s committed to Nineteenth Century materialism. You can’t be a true communist without being a mechanist. You’ve got to believe that the only fundamental realities are space, time, and mass, and that all the rest is nonsense, mere illusion and mostly bourgeois illusion at that. Poor Illidge! He’s sadly worried by Einstein and Edington. And how he hates Henri Poincaré! How furious he gets with old Mach! They’re undermining his simple faith. They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention. The idea’s as inexpressibly shocking and painful to him as the idea of the nonexistence of Jesus would be to a Christian. He’s a scientist, but his principles make him fight against any scientific theory that’s less than fifty years old. It’s exquisitely comic.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Lucy, yawning. “That is, if you happen to be interested in theories, which I’m not.”
“But I am,” retorted Spandrell; “so I don’t apologize. But if you prefer it, I can give you examples of his practical inconsistencies. I discovered not long ago, quite accidentally, that Illidge has the most touching sense of family loyalty. He keeps his mother, he pays for his younger brother’s education, he gave his sister fifty pounds when she married.”
“What’s wrong in that?”
“Wrong? But it’s disgustingly bourgeois! Theoretically, he sees no distinction between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized society, she’d be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he sends her I don’t know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he’d been caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. ‘One of these days,’ I threatened, ‘I’ll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party.’ And what’s more, I will.”
“Unless you just go on chattering, like everybody else.”
“Unless,” Spandrell agreed, “I just go on chattering.”
“Let me know if you ever stop chattering and do something. It might be lively.”
“Deathly, if anything.”
“But the deathly sort of liveliness is the most lively, really.” Lucy frowned. “I’m so sick of the ordinary conventional kinds of liveliness. Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm. You know. It’s silly, it’s monotonous. Energy seems to have so few ways
