‘We’ve had a mild local excitement,’ wrote Clifford. ‘The game-keeper Parkin’s wife came back to him unexpectedly and, it seems, unwelcome. He turned her out of the house and locked the door on her, but when he returned from the wood in the evening he found her in bed without even a nightdress on her rather battered nudity. What happened I don’t know, but he retired to his mother’s house in the village for the night. It appears the woman had broken a window pane and got into the cottage. The collier she lived with had turned her out, got tired of her. So she came back to Parkin. He, apparently, declares he will not go within a mile of her. She, on the other hand, declares he got into bed with her before abandoning her to go to his mother in the village. The heavenly hosts being sole witnesses, this matter remains to be threshed out. I am sorry to treat you to this especial bit of local garbage, but Mrs Bolton, our particular garbage bird, our sacred ibis, our intimate buzzard, suggested that Her Ladyship might like to know. For my own part, the conjugalities and amorosities of Mr and Mrs Parkin are not my concern, I only do not wish that an excellent gamekeeper should be spoiled for me.
‘I like your picture of Sir Malcolm in the sea, with his white hair washed over his forehead, looking like a bonny babe in a bath. He is one of the most mortal of mortals. He washes off his immortality every time he washes his face. It is strange that a man so utterly devoid of immortality — I should say void — can be your father. But this is but one more proof that immortality is a gift from the Immortal Sphere, and mortals cannot hand it on—’
At first this letter did not penetrate into Constance. She was so strung up to the world that surrounded her, the social world where every individual is tense, holding his own or her own against the rest and scrambling over the faces of the others to assert some kind of valueless superiority; living, dressing, acting only to acquire some peculiar temporary prestige, some meaningless power of veto, some equally meaningless power of suggesting plans for the general amusement: that the whole world of Wragby and the woods seemed unreal.
Here in the villa by the sea everything was social and artificial. The landscape itself was not quite so theatrically stagey as Monte Carlo or Cannes, but it served the same purpose, as back curtain to the social events. The very sea was like a huge bathtub set out by the servants each morning.
And with a queer tightening of the nerves Constance had entered right into this world. She was on the stage of social events. She held her own in conversation and repartee. She dressed in her own way to please herself. And by exerting the peculiar heavy sort of power that was in her she held her own and gained ground in the shifting company. She enhanced her own prestige in the temporary crowd. People would always name her as having been one of the guests. In a world which fights solely and simply for that unpleasant substitute called prestige, a shoddy sort of superiority that is the margarine which butters the social bread since the war as a substitute for the old superiority of rank and talent, she knew how to hold her own.
At the same time somewhere she was ashamed of it all. It was too shoddy and shameful. Even Clifford’s megalomaniac immortality was better.
But somehow, having got into the swim, she couldn’t get out. She half-wanted to leave, to take the train home. But again, she didn’t want to go home, home to Clifford and his insistent immortality, home to Parkin and his insistent desire. Here, at least, she was free. She was bound to nobody, intimate with nobody, dear to nobody, and nobody was dear to her. So she was free.
She knew it was a tawdry, a squalid freedom, tawdry as the pink geraniums and squalid as the awful and inevitable bridge and poker parties. She could see the squalor of the card parties playing for high stakes, plainly enough. She could feel the squalor of the remorseless and incessant fight for a margarine ‘superiority’ among the guests. But she was in the swim, and she could hold her own, she did not finally want to break away.
‘The thing possesses me like some evil spirit possessing a maniac. We are all maniacs,’ she said to herself.
She told Hilda of Clifford’s letter about Parkin.
‘Well!’ said Hilda after due consideration. ‘If you’re going to have the child you’ve got what you want. It is perhaps the easiest way out of the intrigue.’
The easiest way out of the intrigue! My God!
Constance began to hate the child which she was not even sure was conceived within her. It was not the child she had wanted. The child was merely another substitute for something she knew she wanted without knowing exactly what it was. What did the child matter, if she lost — what? Something hard and angry rose in her and refused to allow her to know what it was she was losing.
A man who did music came to the villa for a few days. He was not young, nor handsome nor famous: a smallish man with an ascetic grey sort of face and a weak digestion, a restless, nerve-wracked creature who would have been a nonentity save for some little power of music in him. He made no fight for prestige, didn’t care what the crowd thought of him and was thoroughly miserable, though fairly used to such bunches of company, and therefore used to being thoroughly miserable. He played the piano well — but unwillingly: and his own compositions in the dainty Elizabethan style of music were charming if not memorable.
The second evening he sat down beside Constance on a sofa in the music room.
‘My God!’ he gasped. ‘What an awful place!’
He seemed to be talking to her as if she were a tree he could commune with.
‘Rather awful!’ she murmured somewhat against her own will.
‘Why is it that these places are always so ghastly?’
‘Which places?’
‘These big smart houses where you meet everybody, and never anybody that’s alive. I shall go mad! I am going mad. I know it.’
‘Why don’t you stay away then?’
‘Yes, why don’t I? It’s like drink, I suppose. My stomach is too weak for alcohol, and my nerves are too weak for drugs, so I suppose I do this sort of thing.’
‘What do you get out of it?’
‘What does one get out of it — except a sort of conceit at staying in a house with six footmen and four motor cars? It’s just conceit, you know, just conceit.’
‘And is it worth it?’
‘One must always pay for one’s vices: I’m insignificant really, so I think if I have a valet de chambre and sit next to the Duchess of Toadstool at dinner I become significant. I know it all. I know it’s driving me mad. Yet I do it.’
‘But why? Why do you if you know all the time?’
‘Oh, because it’s my vice. I’m egoistic: we’re all egoistic: everybody in this house is a sheer materialistic egoist. We play each other’s game. It flatters us. And we’re all going mad.’
‘Am I too?’ asked Constance, amused.
‘You must be or you wouldn’t be here. Only perhaps it will take longer in your case than in mine. And they won’t shut you up so soon, because you’ve got a background, and I’m one of the bits that come unravelled off the loose end.’
Constance, though amused, was rather impressed. ‘But why don’t you do something quite different?’ she said. ‘If you know it is sending you quite mad why don’t you break away?’
‘What should I do that is quite different? I was Red Cross-working during the war, and that deranged me more than ever. — Besides, perhaps I want to go mad. Very few people who are going mad want to be cured. They are in love with their own derangement. They are proud of going mad. They would hate you for curing them: just as the maniac hated Jesus.’
Constance laughed at him, he was so funny, half-serious, half-taunting. Yet that in itself was perhaps an incipient state of madness.
‘Is everybody going mad then?’ she asked laughing.
‘Most people, yes!’
He looked at her with serious, rather beautiful blue eyes in which she could see the purity of music.
‘But which people aren’t?’
‘Those people whose souls are warm. Our souls are cold — at least mi
ne is, and all the people’s here. We’ve all got cold souls, and it’s worse than having cold feet. We’re so awfully nice and apparently unselfish, but we’re crawling about in cold herds like crabs and lobsters, really, eating putrefaction in perfect cold egoism. We should all go scarlet if we were boiled.’
The last was really amusing.
‘But we shan’t be boiled, you see,’ she said.
‘Who knows!’ he retorted. ‘They may boil us one day.’
‘Who?’
‘The people who’ve still got some life in them, some warm passion.’
‘And where are they?’
‘Oh, down among the lower classes mostly. And odd ones here and there. We’re killing them off as fast as we can. We killed most of our lot during the war. That’s why we had a war: to kill off the generous, and leave the cold-blooded and the charitable.’
‘But you don’t sound very charitable,’ said Constance.
‘I don’t feel it. But my blood has gone cold, below a certain degree. And now I am going mad.’
‘What a queer fish you are! Do you like to think you are going off your head?’
‘Yes! It’s a sort of revenge on my head for being too much on top of me. It’s a sort of revenge I have on myself: going mad. — But when the head chills the blood below a certain point people always go mad. The Americans are all mad, or going mad. Now Europe is going coldly insane. If the warm-blooded people, who are mostly slow and rather stupid, because they believe that everybody is warm-blooded like themselves — they can’t conceive that lobsters are cold — they only see them boiled, when they look so ruddy — What was I saying?’
‘If the warm-blooded people don’t do something or other —’
‘Oh yes! If the warm-blooded people don’t wake up and begin to exterminate us cold-blooded ones, we shall destroy the world. We shall destroy the race of mankind.’
‘Would it be a great disaster?’
‘From our cold-blooded point of view it would be a great blessing. We hate ourselves, so we hate everything, and only hate makes us so well mannered and so grimly philanthropic. We want to buy ourselves off, buy off the day of our own extermination. And every one of us hopes he will be the last man left alive. So we keep up appearances. But we eat putrescence.’
Constance was a little afraid of this mad musician. Most of all, it sank in her like a stone that he classed her among the cold-blooded ones. She looked round the music room, at the well-nourished young men with rather fat thighs and sleek dress suits, laughing with young smart women in silvery, metallic fabrics and naked knees, and she said:
‘There are plenty of love-affairs going on, even here. So the human race does not look like dying out.’
The musician glanced round with extraordinary aversion.
‘They are all eating putrescence!’ he said.
‘But why? Perhaps some of them are warm-blooded,’ she said.
‘The lobster looks ruddy when he’s been boiled.’
‘But there’s no question of boiling. There are really warm-hearted people everywhere.’
‘There may be kind-hearted crabs, but there are no hot-blooded crabs as far as I am aware. Hot blood is the part of those with the milk of kindness. Even tigresses have milk. These women have no milk. They are fish. There are kind-hearted people in this house. But there are no hot-blooded ones. We’ve killed them all off or driven them out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they are dangerous. You never know what they will do.’
‘Do we know what these will do?’
‘Oh yes! They will destroy all life ultimately. But they will destroy it according to formula. And that is better than if they destroyed the social fabric without a formula. So we think, who love a formula above everything because it is compatible with our own egoism, which invented formulas as well as everything else.’
‘Look at the Russians!’
‘They had a formula: a cold-blooded Jewish formula. That is why we are able to despise them. A real revolution goes beyond a formula.’
‘And will there ever be a revolution?’
‘Perhaps! and perhaps not! If we are quick enough to stifle and exterminate all hot-blooded people, there will never be a revolution. Only, as in Russia, subversion under a formula.’
‘But can the blood change hot or cold or what you like?’
‘You can chill the hot blood — but the animal usually dies. You can never warm the blood of the cold ones. That is the miracle even Jesus couldn’t accomplish. He could only call forward the hot-blooded ones, and make them active.’
‘But there are always both, cold-blooded and hot-blooded people in the world at once. Why shouldn’t they get on well together? They do really.’
‘They are always in conflict. Cold blood always wants to subjugate all hot blood. And hot-blooded ones have great fits of exterminating the cold-blooded ones. But the cold-blooded ones are cunning, and they never rest till they have made servants of the hot-blooded ones. Then they go too far. Then comes the retribution: and it all starts again.’
‘And the hot-blooded ones are always servants?’
‘Ye Gods, no! Alexander was hot-blooded, so was Jesus, so was Socrates, so was Caesar, so were Tamerlane and Attila, and Peter the Great and Frederick the Great and even Voltaire. But since Napoleon we’ve had the slow but awful triumph of the cold-blooded ones in every country, fascist or democratic or bolshevist, all alike: different displays of cold-bloodedness.’
The little madman took his departure the next day. But what it all meant to Constance, as she realised with growing anger and perplexity, was that she would have to choose between Clifford and Parkin. There seemed no earthly reason why she shouldn’t have both men, situated as she was. Only for some unearthly reason, apparently she couldn’t.
She did not want to choose between them. She wanted both. She wanted to have her cake and eat it. It infuriated her to have to say: I will take this one, I will forfeit the other. She was extremely angry with Parkin for putting her in a dilemma. She was so extremely angry with him, because she could not forfeit him. She couldn’t let him go. As for Clifford, it was not just the man in him that she clung to. It was all he stood for. And she could not forfeit all the things he stood for. She felt inclined to do as Hilda had done and cut clear of everything. She was deeply angry inside herself.
She wrote to Clifford, announcing her return, and also to Mrs Bolton, asking for news of Clifford, and casually, for further news of the gamekeeper scandal. For Clifford had forgotten to mention anything further.
‘You will be pleased, I am sure, My Lady, when you see Sir Clifford, for he has made great strides. He seems greatly improved in health and looking forward to having you home again, I am sure. Indeed it seems a dull house without My Lady, and we shall all welcome her bright presence among us once more, I can say it for all at Wragby, from the highest to the lowest, for you are quite loved by everyone.
‘About Mr Parkin. I don’t know how much Sir Clifford told you. It appears the wife came back one night just after dark, saying the collier had thrown her out that she lived with. I heard she had been carrying on with the new policeman, a great big ugly fellow as speaks so broad you can scarcely make out what he says, broad Scotch I suppose. It appears the collier threw her out, and the policeman wouldn’t have anything to say to her, so she went back to Mr Parkin. It was just about bed-time when she got to the cottage. But Mr Parkin wouldn’t have her in. He gave her ten shillings and told her to go and locked the door in her face. But she wouldn’t go, brazen as she is, she knew where she would be best off. She kept knocking and calling all the time, and the dog barking and growling, so at last Mr Parkin, he slipped out into the wood by the back door and left her to knock. But when he got back in the morning, she’d broken a window and got in, eaten everything she could lay hands on in the pantry, and was there lying in bed without a stitch of a chemise or a nightdress on her, showing the low woman she is. Well Mr Parkin he tried to make her get u
p and go, but she wouldn’t, so he went and fetched his mother. Old Mrs Parkin couldn’t do anything with her. She swore Mr Parkin had been in bed with her, and he swore he hadn’t. And there she lay in the bed without a stitch on her, nor would she get up. So Mrs Parkin and her son Oliver took all the food and everything they could out of the house, and they put a few things in the hut in the wood and took the rest to Tevershall, and left the woman lying in bed without a stitch on her, and a bare house and both doors locked. So I suppose she got up some time, for she was at the Three Tunns that afternoon, raving and carrying on and calling Mr Parkin all the blaggards and the b’s. It seems somebody told her to go to the police-station and get a summons to force her husband to take her back and keep her, so she went and kicked up a shine there, and then she went to Mr Linley, because he’s the J.P. now. So Mr Linley sent for Mr Parkin and asked him if he’d take her back. He said he’d see himself dead first, and her as well. Then Mr Linley asked him why he’d never applied for a divorce or a legal separation, and he said he’d never thought of it but he’d give his last penny to get a divorce from her. So she said he couldn’t, because he’d been in bed with her that morning, and he vowed he hadn’t, and she had a lot of nasty talk about showing the sheets and etc. So Mr Parkin lives with his mother now and is trying for a divorce. Sir Clifford is helping him all he can. That woman lives in the cottage, and vows and declares she will stop any divorce, and that he is a bad one and an underhand villain, and she will tell the judge a thing or two about him, a lot of low talk. Mr Parkin’s mother is very upset about it all, and she says she’s afraid Mr Parkin will do himself some injury. I believe Mr Parkin wants to give Sir Clifford notice to leave. He wants to get out of these parts, for that woman says she’ll not stop plaguing him till he’s underground, for he has been her ruin. More likely the boot is on the other leg. But she hates him, you can see that. The collier and the others are nothing to her now, it’s nothing but that d—d Oliver. Old Mrs Parkin says she’s quite capable of murdering him one of these nights in the wood, but I say he’s not the man “to let himself be murdered by a woman,” though she’s like a madwoman. She even came up to the Hall, but Sir Clifford gave orders that she was to go, and if she didn’t go quietly Benson and Field were to tie her up and carry her to the police-station and give her in charge. Now Sir Clifford is getting an order to have her evicted from the cottage, as Mr Parkin is domiciled with his mother. But there’s no mistake, that woman is like a madwoman. She is older than Mr Parkin, and it may be her time of life has something to do with it. But if ever a woman was possessed by a demon it’s that one. And all against Mr Parkin. I’m sure, My Lady, it makes me feel bad to hear the things she is going about saying about him, awful things, fearful things. Of course nobody believes her altogether, but something’s bound to stick. Sir Clifford says we will have her in gaol, but she doesn’t care about gaol nor anything else. She only wants to come up before a judge to vilify Mr Parkin and tell all the vile things he did to her when they were married, immoral things and horrible for a woman to go about saying. But Sir Clifford says she won’t be allowed to say anything at random before a judge, they won’t let her. Such women should be shut up, for there’s more talk in the place now then I’ve ever known, and such awful things. My Lady, it is shameful. But she is not responsible, she is evil mad—’
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