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His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.
In fact a sense of positive disquiet swept through the small drawing-room so powerfully that mute condemnation seemed to rise in a thick cloud above the ‘comforts’, until its disturbing odour reached the ceiling and hung about the whole flat in vexed, compelling waves.
Feingold may have been right: on the other hand, he was not wholly free from a strain of Jewish romanticism.
He had that deep appreciation of family relationships and their ramifications that is a gift of its own, like being musical, or having an instinct for the value of horses or jewels.
‘Quite dotty,’ said Lovell. ‘Lives in a complete world of her own. Fairly happy about it though, I think.’
Smith looked Lovell up and down as if he considered the enquiry not merely silly, but downright insulting.
I found later that she was indeed what is called ‘a tease’, perhaps the only outward indication that her inner life was not altogether happy; since there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.
Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.
Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored, unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. There was something a little frightening about him.
It was plainly years since she had listened to any remarks addressed to her, either serious or trivial, so that perhaps deservedly—for the exposition was a formidable rigmarole upon which to embark at that moment—she swiftly disengaged herself from its demands.
His manner of asking personal questions was of that kind not uncommonly to be found which is completely divorced from any interest in the answer. He was always prepared to embark on a lengthy cross-examination of almost anyone he might meet, at the termination of which—apart from such details as might chance to concern himself—he had absorbed no more about the person interrogated than he knew at the outset of the conversation. At the same time this process seemed somehow to gratify his own egotism.
In any case, conscious or unconscious, Widmerpool had the knack of treading on the corns of others.
He positively forced one to agree that his own affairs were intensely important: indeed, the only existing question of any real interest. At the same time his intense egoism somehow dried up all sympathy for him.
The problem could be treated, as it were, clinically, or humorously; a combination of the two approaches was distasteful.
The fact that Widmerpool seemed a grotesque figure to some who knew him provided no reason why he should not inspire love in others. I record these speculations not for their subtlety, certainly not for their generosity of feeling, but to emphasise the difficulty in understanding, even remotely, why people behave as they do.
Aylmer Conyers, notably tall, possessed in addition to his height, much natural distinction. In fact, his personality filled the room, although without active aggression. At the same time he was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he would stop at nothing.
like the inextinguishable laughter of the Homeric gods on high Olympus, to whose characteristic faults and merits General Conyers’s own nature probably approximated closely enough.
She was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser.
Men of action have, in any case, a predisposition to be jealous of women, especially if the woman is young, good looking or placed in some relatively powerful position. Beauty, particularly, is a form of power of which, perhaps justly, men of action feel envious.
‘I had no idea your uncle had a fund of stories of that kind,’ ‘He hasn’t. That is his only one. He is rather a shy man, you see, and nothing ever happens to him.’
Amusing in themselves, the stories were at the same time plainly intended to establish a specific approach to life. Beneath their fluency, it was possible to detect in Frederica Budd herself, at least so far as personal rather than social life was concerned, a need for armour against strangers.
CURIOSITY, WHICH MAKES the world go round, brought me in the end to accept Quiggin’s invitation.
His reactions placed him more and more as a recognisable type, spending much of his time in boredom and loneliness, yet in some way inhibited from taking in anything relevant about other people: at home only with ‘causes’.
Like Widmerpool, he did not care for eating and drinking: was probably actively opposed to such sensual enjoyments, which detracted from preferable conceptions of pure power.
However, even faced with this utterly unforeseen problem, Erridge was by no means thrown off his guard. I could not help admiring the innate caution with which he seasoned his own eccentricity. Even in Erridge, some trace of that ‘realism’ was observable of which Chipps Lovell used to speak; among the rest of the Tollands, as I discovered later, a characteristic strongly developed.
Smith’s face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word ‘champagne’ used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question—these ravings, almost—might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned.
‘People do grow up. At least some do.’ ‘I am afraid Charles was not one of them,’ she said gravely. ‘He became a man, but he did not grow up. He is not grown up now.’
I had no clear idea of how she would set about ‘helping’ Stringham, but the way she spoke made me conscious of her undoubted strength of will. In fact, her voice chilled my blood a little, she sounded so firm.
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.’
Jeavons’s companionship demanded an almost infinite capacity for adaptation to changed moods and circumstances.
War not an exact science, but a terrible and passionate drama? Something like that. Fact is, marriage is rather like that too.’
Even if that story were untrue, the toughness of Moreland’s innate romanticism in matters of the heart certainly remained unimpaired by gravitating from one hopeless love affair to another.
‘The man has got it in him to be a traitor to any cause,’ Quiggin said, when he reported this. ‘We shall never see Clarke manning a machine-gun.’
Even now, forgotten by the critics but remembered fairly faithfully by the circulating libraries, he had remained a minor public figure, occasionally asked to broadcast on some non-literary, non-political subject like the problem of litter or the abatement of smoke, talks into which he would always inject – so Members alleged – some small admixture of Marxist lore.
Mutual relationship between writers, whatever their age, is always delicate, not so much – as commonly supposed – on account of jealousy, but because of the intensely personal nature of a writer’s stock in trade.
To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people’s marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed.
the same time taking my hand in a firm, smooth, interrogatory, medical grip, no doubt intended to give confidence to a patient, but in fact striking at once a disturbing interior dread at the possibilities of swift and devastating diagnosis.
‘All the same, he shows small visible pleasure in meeting most people.’ ‘One must rise above that. It is a kindness to do so. Maclintick does not get on too well with his wife. The occasional company of friends eases the situation.’
When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.
He now showed signs of wanting to pick a quarrel with someone. His wife was clearly the easiest person present with whom to come into conflict.
He was now on his dignity. There was a moment of silence.
‘You get tired of all that clumping about,’ said Eleanor, kicking some bedroom slippers out of sight under the sofa.
He said these words in such an appealing tone that I felt torn inwardly to think of the condition he must be in, of the circumstances in which he must live. His awareness of his own state seemed almost worse than total abandonment to the bottle.
Apart from that scarcely perceptible lurch, Stringham’s physical removal was in general accomplished by her with such speed and efficiency that probably no one but myself recognised this trifling display of unsteadiness on his feet.
Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland. ‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’ Moreland and I both laughed a lot, but it was a horrible moment. Maclintick had spoken with that strange, unearthly dignity that a drunk man can suddenly assume.
I recalled Miss Orchard’s account of the Furies. They inflicted the vengeance of the gods by bringing in their train war, pestilence, dissension on earth; torturing, too, by the stings of conscience. That last characteristic alone, I could plainly see, made them sufficiently unwelcome guests.
This establishment was one of those fairly common strongholds of unsorted ideas that played such a part in the decade ended by the war. Simple-lifers, utopian socialists, spiritualists, occultists, theosophists, quietists, pacifists, futurists, cubists, zealots of all sorts in their approach to life and art, later to be relentlessly classified into their respective religious, political, aesthetic or psychological categories, were then thought of by the unenlightened as scarcely distinguishable one from another: a collection of visionaries who hoped to build a New Heaven and a New Earth through
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Once, we saw Dr Trelawney and his flock roaming through the scrub at the same moment as the Military Policeman on his patrol was riding back from the opposite direction. The sun was setting. This meeting and merging of two elements – two ways of life – made a striking contrast in physical appearance, moral ideas and visual tone-values.
Bertha Conyers, rather sad and apologetic in appearance, had acquired, so people said, a persecuted manner in girlhood from her father’s delight in practical jokes (like the clockwork mouse he had launched on Albert), and also from his harrying of his daughters for failing to be born boys.
‘I like to rest my mind after work,’ he would say. ‘I don’t like books that make me think.’ That was perfectly true. In due course, as he grew older, my father became increasingly committed to this exclusion of what made him think, so that finally he disliked not only books, but also people – even places – that threatened to induce this disturbing mental effect.
