‘Would you by any chance be referring to Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, my Lord?’
Lord Sanford was somewhat taken aback. ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I was. Have you read it?’
‘Yes, my lord. And if I might venture the remark . . .’
Houghton paused for the requisite permission.
‘Of course, Houghton. This is a free country.’
‘I had not recently observed that, my lord. . . . But about Veblen’s book, what I was going to say was that its assertions, though plausible, are wholly unproved. And in my opinion, the same author’s The Engineers and the Price System is a very much more important and illuminating work.’
‘Ah,’ said Lord Sanford rather unhappily. It was evident that he was not acquainted with this essay; he stared, embarrassed, at the visiting-card. ‘Let’s see, who’s this? . . . Oh, Professor Fen. Perhaps’ – he gazed indecisively about him – ‘you would ask Professor Fen if he would care to join us here.’
‘Very good, my lord.’
‘And Houghton, I’ve told you before that there’s no need to address me as “my lord”.’
‘No, my lord.’
‘If there are to be distinctions in society, they should be based on achievement and not on birth.’
Momentarily forgetting himself, Houghton made a low, longish, inflected sound, which Diana interpreted as ‘lotofbloodynonsense.’ Then, recovering, ‘Quite so, my lord,’ he observed, bowed obsequiously and departed. Lord Sanford gazed after him in despair.
‘I never know what to make of Houghton,’ he said ruefully. ‘Or the other servants, for that matter. You’d think they’d be glad to be rid of all these . . . these emblems of servility, but in fact they seem determined to stick to them at all costs.’
Diana suppressed a desire to giggle. ‘But, my dear Robert,’ she said, ‘hasn’t it yet occurred to you that they may actually enjoy what you call “the emblems of servility”?’
‘Well, that’s even worse. A system which makes people enjoy being servile ought to be abolished.’
‘I didn’t say they enjoyed being servile. They aren’t servile. The only servile person in the house is you.’
‘You may be right about that,’ Lord Sanford admitted after some thought. ‘But all the same, Diana, it’s disgraceful that five people should devote their whole lives to looking after me, and doing things for me which I could quite well do for myself. As you know, I’ve tried to get rid of them, but they just won’t go.’
‘Oh, Robert, of course they won’t go; they’re on velvet,’ Diana pointed out. ‘And it just isn’t true to say they devote their whole lives to looking after you. Most of their time’s spent doing something quite different.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Looking after each other, of course. It’s a most luxurious cooperative arrangement, and if they went off and took independent jobs it’d collapse altogether.’
‘Yes, I see that,’ said Lord Sanford, who was an intellectually honest young man. ‘It is a good arrangement. But it’d work equally well – better, in fact – if I wasn’t involved in it all.’
‘On the contrary, it wouldn’t work at all. Someone’s got to pay them the salaries they live on.’
‘Yes, Diana, but look here – –’
And it was at that point, quite without premonition, sudden exasperation overwhelmed Diana – exasperation, not with Lord Sanford’s views on servants, but with the fact that they were back again in the old groove.
‘Robert!’ she interrupted.
‘Yes, Diana?’
‘Kiss me, please.’
For an instant his face was a study in stupefaction. And then his expression changed to one of such relief and delight that Diana’s heart sang.
He did what was required.
Their mumbled endearments were too extrinsically futile to be worth reproducing here. And their first contact gave them such mutual satisfaction that they immediately repeated it, at much greater length.
‘Of course you’ll marry me,’ said Lord Sanford with an air of surprise.
‘Of course,’ Diana agreed. ‘Tell me, darling, are you frightened of young women?’
‘Terrified.’
‘I’ll try to let you down lightly. . . . Darling, what are you going to do next?’
Lord Sanford made certain suggestions.
‘No, not that,’ said Diana, blushing slightly. ‘I mean, now you’ve got your First.’
‘I think,’ said Lord Sanford gravely, ‘that as soon as we’re married it would be a good idea for us to go off and be cook and gardener to a Trades Union official – For the Cause, you understand.’
‘Oh, darling, that would be heavenly. Well, fairly heavenly.’
‘It would be torture of the most refined and abominable sort,’ said Lord Sanford with conviction. ‘Actually, I shall try for a Fellowship at Oxford. There are lots of Socialist Fellows. There’s Cole, and there’s – –’
‘Cole will be sufficient for now. Kiss me again.’
‘Professor Fen – –’
‘Damn Professor Fen,’ said Diana unjustly. Lord Sanford kissed her again.
They were still at it when Fen came into sight. He did not discreetly retire, but bore relentlessly down on them, with Jane Persimmons’ box under his arm, like a dragon making for a defenceless and succulent child. Having sent his card, he felt he had given all the warning of his approach which decency required, and he was not prepared to skulk about until they were in a posture to receive him. He was only five yards off when they became aware of him, and hurriedly disengaged themselves.
‘Oh, Professor Fen,’ said Diana unintelligently. ‘It’s you.’
‘So it is,’ said Lord Sanford, not much less inanely. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
Fen shook him by the hand, which was still damp from contact with Diana’s undried body. ‘I hope,’ he said urbanely, ‘that I don’t intrude?’
‘Good Lord, no.’ The seventeenth Earl spoke with such heartiness as to suggest that Fen’s absence had been the only flaw in an otherwise perfect afternoon. ‘Not in the least. I hope you’ve come to tea.’
‘That’s very kind. But first, I’m afraid, there’s rather an important matter I want to discuss with you.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Lord Sanford glanced at Diana. ‘Perhaps I ought to tell you that Diana – Miss Merrion – has just consented to marry me: so from now on, anything that concerns me concerns her, too.’
Fen looked at them benignantly. ‘Well, I think that’s a very good scheme,’ he said. ‘Getting married, I mean. Of course, it mostly doesn’t work out very well,’ he added by way of encouragement, ‘but yours may be an exceptional case. I’ll send you a wedding present, if I remember. But as regards my errand here’ – he became more serious – ‘it might perhaps be the easier way, my lord, if you were to hear of it first and then to tell Diana subsequently.’
‘If you really think so – –’
‘On the whole, I do.’
‘Well, you can talk while I get dressed,’ said Diana, ‘and afterwards we can all have tea together.’
‘Or a drink,’ said Fen, who never hesitated to make his requirements known. ‘Your engagement calls, I fancy, for a drink, and even if it didn’t, I should still want one.’
‘A drink, of course,’ Lord Sanford agreed good-naturedly. ‘And now, sir . . .’
Diana retired into a convenient thicket, and the two men strolled slowly along the lake-side. ‘There’s no need for me to do any talking,’ said Fen. ‘The contents of this box explain themselves.
All I need say is that the box is the property of a girl called Jane Persimmons.’
‘You mean, sir, the girl who had that accident, and whom someone tried to kill?’
‘Yes. I’ll leave you to it, if I may, and stroll round the grounds.’
When he returned some twenty minutes later, Diana, reclothed, was sitting with Lord Sanford at the lake’s edge, and both were thoughtful.
‘I’ve told my fiancée,’ said Lord Sanford.
‘Quite so,’ Fen murmured. ‘Very proper. Of course, you may rely on my discretion, and on the discretion of the police. Do you consider we did right in letting you know?’
‘Certainly you did right.’ Lord Sanford spoke with that touching earnestness which belongs exclusively to the young. ‘My father . . . well, I knew he hadn’t been faithful to my mother, but I never dreamed there was a child.’ Fen noted with pleasure that his calmness was not the calmness of cynicism. ‘Diana and I want to do everything for Jane that we can. We hope she’ll come and live with us.’
‘You’ll have to be extremely tactful about it,’ Fen warned him. ‘From what I’ve seen of her, she’s an uncommonly sensitive girl. There must be no suspicion that you’re offering charity.’
Lord Sanford nodded in sober agreement. And Diana said:
‘I knew all along that there was some mystery about her, and she’s so like you, Robert, that I was passionately keen to find out what the mystery was. . . . I was going to mention the resemblance to Professor Fen at the time of her accident, but then I thought it might just be my imagination, so I didn’t.’
‘And how is she?’ Lord Sanford inquired of Fen.
‘Recovering fast, I understand.’
‘Well, I shall see to it, of course, that everything possible is done for her. Diana and I have agreed to go down to the hospital and see her, as soon as we possibly can. But this attempt on her life. . . .’ Lord Sanford glanced at Fen in mute perplexity.
‘It’s connected with the other deaths. She knows something about them – without, in all probability, knowing that she knows. As soon as they’re cleared up, she’ll be safe enough.’
‘And when are they expecting to be cleared up?’
‘Shortly, it may be. I have the ghost of a sensible idea about them, which is more than I’ve had so far.’
‘Tell us,’ said Diana.
‘Not yet, if you don’t mind.’
‘Champagne might melt him, Robert.’
‘Whether it does or not, we’ll have some.’
Fen accompanied them back to the dower-house. They were an amiable couple, he thought; they would like Jane Persimmons and she would like them. In that direction all would probably be well. He dismissed the matter from his mind and fell to considering the circumstances of Bussy’s death.
CHAPTER 19
BY some chicanery into which Fen did not feel impelled to inquire Captain Watkyn had forestalled the Labour and Conservative Parties in procuring, for the final public meeting on the following night, the best hall which Sanford Morvel had to offer; and it was tolerably well filled. Enthroned at the centre of the platform, and pretending to listen while Mr Judd droned away about the evils of the Party political system, Fen contemplated with contentment the speech which he proposed to make. His decision had not been rashly taken; he was, on the whole, a kindly man, and he was well aware that his action would give pain to the small band of his loyal supporters. But this consideration was as a feather on a scale whose opposite pan was weighted by his determination not to be elected and by his anxiety to cleanse a mind which he felt irreparably fouled by the week’s political activities. Mental antisepsis and political ruin should, he had determined, be accomplished by a single unprecedented act. And although most probably he would not be returned to Parliament in any case, any lingering risk of such an eventuality must be abolished once and for all; the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, he had discovered, was not to be had merely for the asking, and he was no longer prepared to chance being immured in the intellectual vacuum of Westminster for even so short a period as three years. He sat mobilizing his wits against this self-inflicted peril.
Thus it was that, when at last Mr Judd fell silent, Fen got to his feet and stood for a moment surveying the rows of politely expectant faces below him with a satisfaction such as he had not experienced in his whole lifetime. And the survey completed, the banquet of consternation savoured in anticipation, he removed the safety-pin from his grenade.
‘It is often asserted,’ he said, ‘that the English are unique among the nations for their good sense in political matters. In actual fact, however, the English have no more political good sense than so many polar bears. This I have proved in my own person. For some days past I have been regaling this electorate with projects and ideas so incomparably idiotic as to be, I flatter myself, something of a tour de force. Into what I have said no gleam of reason has been allowed to intrude; and I can think of scarcely a single error, however ancient and obscure, which I have failed to propagate. Some, it is true, have cavilled at my twaddle; but their objection has been to its superficies, and not to its inane basic principles, which have included, among other laughable notions, the idea that humanity progresses, and that fatuous corruption of the Christian ethic which asserts that everyone is responsible for the well-being of everyone else. Such dreary fallacies as these, expounded by myself, have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker. And I am bound to conclude that this proven obtuseness is not unrepresentative of the British people as a whole, since their predilection for putting brainless megalomaniacs into positions of power stems, in the last analysis, from an identical vacuity of the intellect.’
He paused, regarding his audience benignly. A dreadful hush had fallen, but as yet they seemed too stupefied with surprise to make audible protest.
‘What is referred to as the political good sense of the British,’ Fen continued, ‘resolves itself upon investigation into the simple fact that until quite recently the British have been politically apathetic, paying as little attention to the bizarre junketings of their elected legislators as they decently could. It is this which accounts for the smoothness of our nation’s development in comparison with the other countries of Europe; and our fabled spirit of compromise – now virtually extinct – has derived from nothing more obscure or complicated than a general indifference as to the. issue of whatever controversy may have been in hand; though we, of course, have in our vanity ascribed it to tolerance. Propaganda, however, has altered all that, and politics nowadays engender heat, dismay, fury, and a variety of other discreditable emotions in every section of the populace. We are forever at each other’s throats; the safety-valve of our apathy is twisted and broken beyond repair. Only here and there does it survive, and I am happy to note that this constituency is one of its last strongholds. I congratulate this constituency on the fact. And I strongly advise this constituency, when confronted with reformers-by-compulsion who assert that it is everyman’s duty to take an interest in politics, to kick those gentry downstairs. For such an asseveration there is no single justification to be found, whether in morality, metaphysics, expediency, or sense. Do not allow yourselves to be cajoled into supposing that political apathy is dangerous. Dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are raised to power, not by apathy, but by mass fanaticism. That, darlings, is the danger, but you are so busy gaping up at me and wondering if I have gone out of my mind that I could talk for a week without convincing you of it. I do not intend to talk for a week. English political fanaticism is fast growing to a spate, and nothing that I or anyone else can do or say will check it now.
‘I shall now tell you the reason why fanaticism of this sort is so attractive to humankind. A contemporary French writer – whose name I shall not mention, since you are probably too stupid either to recognize it or to remember it – has pointed out with unanswerable logic that men adopt ideas, not because it seems to them that those ideas are true, or because it seems to them that those ideas are expedient, but because those ideas satisfy a basic emotional need of their nature. Now what emotion – I ask you – provides the chief motive power of the politically obsessed? You do not answer, because you have never given the matter a moment’s thought. But were you to do so, even you might dimly perceive that the reply to my question is in the monosyllable hate. Never forget that political zealots are people who are over-indulging their emotional n
eed of hatred. They have, of course, their “constructive” programmes, but it is not these which supply the fuel for their squalid engines; it is the concomitant attacks, upon a class, a system, a personality; it is the lust to defame and destroy. Let no such men be trusted. That they have landed themselves, here and hereafter, in the most arid of all the hells is a circumstance which I must confess does not greatly distress me, and with that spiritual aspect of the matter I do not propose to deal. However, certain important practical consequences emerge, and I shall illustrate one of them by means of a fable which I have cleverly invented for the purpose.
‘There lived in a forest three foxes, named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Shadrach had a fine suit of clothes and was immensely proud of it. Meshach had a portable gramophone and some records of dance music, to which he was greatly addicted. Abednego had a hogshead of ale, replenished monthly, with which he fortified himself against the manifold horrors of existence. In this fashion they co-existed for a long period, troubling little about each other. But there came a day when Meshach, communing with his soul in the forest to the accompaniment of a tango, discovered for the first time the obscene pleasures of righteous indignation. And having discovered them, he went to Abednego and communicated them to him, saying: “Shadrach has a fine suit of clothes, and we have not. It is not just or equitable that Shadrach should be thus privileged.” So they went together to Shadrach, overpowered him, and took his fine suit of clothes away from him. But as there was only one fine suit of clothes and they could not agree which of them was to wear it, they burned it. So then nobody had a fine suit of clothes.
‘And a year or so passed, and Abednego, whose indignation was more righteous than ever, went to Shadrach and said: “Meshach has a portable gramophone and a number of records of dance music, and we have not. It is not just or equitable that Meshach should be thus privileged.” So they went together to Meshach, overpowered him, and took his portable gramophone and his records of dance music away from him. But as there was only one portable gramophone and they could not agree which of them was to use it, they threw it into a pond. So then nobody had a portable gramophone.
Buried for Pleasure Page 17