Every afternoon at five o'clock I am to be found in my conversation-room, giving tea to people who come to talk about the really important things, and then change their minds so soon as ever they have their cup of tea in their laps. This delicacy of mine, which gives you the impression of my pretending to be a perfect creature, and which gradually gets on your nerves, is, I agree, not perfection at all but merely a selfish understanding of everything. My real perfection is, I hope, not so obvious to you as the perfection of my manners.
Wherein that lies is my secret. I may tell you that it lies in my power to treat you as if you were really interested in the really important things, when it is quite clear to me that you are not, and to keep the really important things to myself all the time—but just that, and no more. I cannot tell you, in fact, what I am really like.
But I can tell you a story. And the matter of the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady is an illustration of my awareness that a story must be something more than a supercilious concession to your boredom with the really important things. You are bored with them but sorry that you are bored. I must tell about this business in a way that shows that I appreciate the fact that, though you have lost interest in the really important things, you once had an interest in them. And out of respect for your lost interest I must make my description of this business as real as possible. I must believe in it as if it were itself one of the really important things. I must make it stand for all the really important things whose omission from this story makes it a story. The business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady is a symbol of our agreement in the existence of really important things. Without such a symbol in our story we should, as a point of honour, refuse to have anything to do with it.
The business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady which had something to do with Foolish Island, and, further, with the store-room of the boat-house (though nobody knew this much about it), was the sorting, classification, arrangement and evaluation of the many possessions which people left behind when they went away from Port Huntlady, and which Cards disposed of in Port Huntlady in an informal way, working on Lady Port-Huntlady's calculation of the needs of the various residents according to their degree of temporary permanence.
I had hoped that this sentence would be a short sentence; and yet, long as it is, it may not, I fear, impress you as a symbol for the really important things. But since we are in a hurry to be getting along (shall we admit), does not the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady serve its purpose very well, after all? For in leaving it behind we are leaving behind all our patience with narrative accuracy and the slow difficult understanding of hidden activities and meanings—in fact, that strained pretence of indifference to time that constituted the charm of Lady Port-Huntlady's conversation-room. We are leaving behind the charm of our story. We have finished with compliments, and understanding, and moral niceties. Here follows the shameless gist of the story—something to loosen the tension of a not really frank state of affairs, the not really frank state of affairs in Port Huntlady, any not really frank state of affairs.
3
Dan the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and Slick. The three friends rented a house of Lady Port-Huntlady's, and at five o'clock on the day after their arrival they were brought into her conversation-room by Cards. Lady Port-Huntlady's tea-drinkers did not consist merely of her tenants, but she gave her tenants a preferential intimacy: they sat in the conversation-room with her rather as associate hosts than as guests. Dan, Baby and Slick were immediately induced into these ceremonial manœuvres. They soon understood that they must sit rather nearer Lady Port-Huntlady than the others, or, if they could not sit near, that they must sit in lesser corners of the room in the capacity of social secretaries. Besides helping with the tea-cups, they must talk with the others as Lady Port-Huntlady talked—in a sympathetic way but without yielding points. This technique created those significant lulls in the conversation that made five o'clock at Lady Port-Huntlady's seem to clarify the question-mark with which the people who came to Port Huntlady felt their souls branded.
The three friends had taken Lady Port-Huntlady's prettiest house, a smallish one, stippled in a sophisticated pink, with a veranda running along both sides as well as in front—due perhaps to a feeling in some preceding tenant that the house looked too small for permanent residence: with a veranda running around it, it seemed a chosen gem, not merely a house that one had rented cheap because, for all its prettiness, it could not be called more than a cottage. The three friends were students; they had a knack of making a home out of a bedroom. Each made himself a home apart from the others in his bedroom; and as this left the rest of the house practically unoccupied, it seemed to them that they were living in quite a large house.
They took their meals in a pension at the left of their house. The proprietor did not call it a pension. He would say, "Why not come along and take your meals with me? I am a lonely man, we are all lonely folk here. We can share the expenses." Nevertheless, people called it a pension. They shared the expenses in the sense that every week they had to pay something different; but they were expected to pay at the end of every week just as if they were at a pension, and so naturally they called it a pension. The man was known as Tomatoes. He was tall, and rather fat, and had a small blond head and a large bright-complexioned face. He was not a young man, but the facile serenity of his face prevented people from taking him seriously; they told him their histories with as little reserve and as little compulsion to good sense as they would employ in a diary. He had been a clergyman, but he had resigned his living because he loved hearing people talk about themselves, and because, as a clergyman, he had had to think always, "Now ought I, as a clergyman, to be listening to this?" He talked in order to make people say things that he could listen to. If people talked a lot, he thought "How stimulating," and he, on the other hand, thought himself stimulating if he succeeded in making them talk. He was only interested, however, in the conversation of men. His manners with women were irreproachable, and, as he said, he had a respect for them above his respect for men. But women were not interesting to him because they were not sinners. It was not natural in women to sin, but it was natural in men to sin, and this made them interesting. Sinning was wrong, but the exaltation of knowing that one had sinned and the broad-minded tolerant conversation of ex-sinners were worth the sinning. Sinning, he was fond of saying, made honourable scars on the soul. Heaven was the knowledge of one's own wickedness.
It has been necessary to tell about Tomatoes, even at the risk of seeming to digress from the three friends' first five-o'clock at Lady Port-Huntlady's. For Tomatoes was present at this five- o'clock, and already on terms of manly confidence with them, they having taken their first meal with him the previous evening. There were also present the right-hand neighbours of the three young men. These were two women who had between them adopted the baby of an actress—a sister of one of them. The younger, of youthful middle age, plump and impulsive, was Diana. The older—tall, big-boned, majestic and austerely kind—was Miss Bookworth. It was Miss Bookworth's sister, strangely enough, who was the actress. They had originally come away to Port Huntlady because they were rather embarrassed at owning the baby, although they were both earnestly dedicated to the idea of owning it. They were women, one felt, who were not happy in being women; who resented the finger of curiosity which life pointed at women. The baby expressed their resignation to the necessity of biding their time. Their settling down in Port Huntlady expressed their impatience with themselves. They lived there in the fatalistic hope of being swallowed up in some sudden catastrophe—for was it not a place that seemed to lean over the horrible edge of time into the future? Without being fond of the baby, they were loyal to it: it stood between them and the catastrophe with which they teased their weariness of self-conscious existence.
Many people in Port Huntlady had wondered about Miss Bookworth and Tomatoes. Miss Bookworth and Tomatoes had often wondered about eac
h other. When they were together they seemed like two people who had been married for a very long time: they had just such an inactive contempt for each other's qualities. Had they been married, she would have bitterly enjoyed seeing him throw himself into the confidence of other people, to get repeatedly thrown out. And he would have bitterly enjoyed seeing her grow older and feebler, for all her self-discipline against the sentimental follies of old age. For Tomatoes, youth meant that 'feeling young' of which only the old are capable; it did not matter to him that people thought him soft-minded. He was, indeed, deliberately soft-minded, on the principle that the body thrives on the frailties of the mind—if one knows what one is about. His attitude to Diana was equally based on his notions of youth and old age. Miss Bookworth was the same age as himself: she was old. Diana was a little younger: she was not young enough. But he flirted with her as any man of border-line years flirts with women just a little too old to be fallen in love with—by way of inducing in himself the proper spirit of playfulness in which to approach women still young enough to be fallen in love with; thus most men maintain to the end a life of sexual gallantry with their wives, their interest being increasingly one of technique as they increasingly feel the temptation to start all over again with someone else. Diana did not flirt with Tomatoes. But she was a disappointed and nevertheless lively woman and so inclined to be reckless in her remarks, her gestures and her actions. Many people misunderstood her, thinking her a bold woman— Tomatoes among these. She let him flirt with her because she liked the exercise, and there was very little exercise of this primitive sort available at Port Huntlady; and it pleased him, for his part, to feel that he had a stimulating effect on her. Such more or less were Tomatoes's relations with Diana and Miss Bookworth at the period when Dan, Baby and Slick came to their first five-o'clock at Lady Port-Huntlady's.
These six were all tenants of Lady Port-Huntlady's. There were also present several people who were not tenants of Lady Port-Huntlady's: Mabick, a retired publisher, Barney Flagg, a crippled ex-acrobat, and Laura Manilla, a temperamental modiste who was thinking of opening a shop in Port Huntlady where she could practise her profession as she had always dreamed of practising it—as an art. Dan was given a chair at Lady Port-Huntlady's side, as if it had been reserved for him. It was a low chair, and Dan was a tall young man with imperfect muscular control; he stabilized himself on it by twisting his legs whimsically round one of the legs of the sofa on which Lady Port-Huntlady always sat alone (though there was room on it for two). This was how he got to be called 'Dan the Dog'. Dan had been a medical student, but had abandoned his studies because being a doctor involved touching the naked bodies of living people, which he thought menial: there could be a quality of scholarship in touching the naked bodies of dead people, but the naked bodies of living people were the province of only mothers, midwives, nurses, masseurs and valets.
"So you were once going to be a doctor?" said Lady Port- Huntlady in the tone that always made people feel that their past was well behind them. "Here we are never ill," she continued. "Because we don't, you see, try to be healthy. But what special line?" Baby, who was discussing men's clothes with Cards, interrupted boyishly, "Ladies!" Cards laughed, and Lady Port-Huntlady sent a smile towards him without noticing Baby; and thus Baby's rôle among them was fixed—a lightheaded fellow whom everyone must tolerate because he amused Cards. Dan paid no attention to Baby's interruption and answered haughtily, "Gynecology." "Oh," said Lady Port- Huntlady, as if this were quite a different explanation. And her "Oh" established a mutuality of innuendo between them; Dan reacted to it as a stray dog reacts to the first advances of someone who has decided to adopt him—as if it were he who had decided to adopt Lady Port-Huntlady. Of course, she meant him to react in this way. Lady Port-Huntlady was a great believer in mutuality. In the beginning, in a new relation, she generally had to create the feeling of mutuality all by herself. But as the relation progressed, it came to be the other way round.
Slick had been an assistant at a men's draper's in the university town in which Dan and Baby had lived as students. From Dan and Baby he had learned how to behave in an upper-class way, though they themselves did not behave, on the whole, in an upper-class way: being natively upper-class young men, they could afford to forget their inherited securities and resort to them only in emergencies. Slick had grown to be quite fond of them, as a butler grows to be fond of a master whom he has surpassed in aristocratic behaviour by carefully noting points on which he tends to be careless. Among other things, they were careless about their clothes. He liked to see them nicely dressed—if only to justify his own fondness for being nicely dressed. He was always giving them presents of clothes—in excellent taste—from surplus stock that he got cheap from the shop. When Dan and Baby left the university they had taken Slick along with them. Baby had inherited a lot of money from an ancestor who had left his fortune to the first descendant of the fourth generation to come of age. The ancestor had made his money out of houses of prostitution in India; he had hoped that by the time the fourth generation came of age the source of his wealth would have been forgotten. Baby, however, did not forget its source. He spent it as a child, grinning with a sophisticated sense of guilt, spends money that a good- natured drunkard has offered him, and that he has not refused. And as a child in such circumstances might choose the largest, pinkest, most abstractly beautiful sweet in the shop (perhaps not to eat at all, only to keep in his pocket), so Baby chose Port Huntlady to spend his money in. He felt here, that is, that he was spending it on Port Huntlady itself, rather than on Dan or Slick—although it was mostly through them that he spent it. They helped him to choose the large, pink, abstractly beautiful sweet; but it was he who had it in his pocket.
Baby made a friend of Dan because he was, like a too-big dog, proud, resourceless, aggrieved, absurd. When people were absurd Baby felt that there was something 'pure' about them. Dan lived on Baby's money. Slick lived on Baby's money. Baby liked Slick because no matter how much of his money Slick spent on himself, to be a gentleman, he only became increasingly ambitious to be something more than a gentleman: he was always something undefinably below, and undefinably above, a gentleman. It was absurd, of course, to try to be both a gentleman and successful. But nothing could kill Slick's confidence in energy; and this made him 'pure' in Baby's eyes. It will save us some tiresomely picturesque skirting round the facts to know now that a few weeks after this particular five- o'clock, and as a consequence of an unspoken agreement there and then arrived at, Slick and Diana married each other. Diana was fifteen years older than Slick, but she married him for his vulgarity rather than for his youth. Slick had an ungentlemanly talent for making dull days into bright days. If a day was dull, he had to brighten it up. A gentleman does not do this. Slick couldn't make a dull day very bright, but Diana didn't like things very bright. She liked exercise: to feel that things were moving along—not necessarily to a happy end. Slick himself had no ambitions of happiness; happiness is, after all, an extremely delicate notion.
Baby settled a definite income on Slick at his marriage. This was the only way to keep Slick on his books without making Diana feel that he was disputing her rights in him. He knew that the more triumphant she felt about having got Slick away from him, the sooner she would begin to be irritated by her triumph. For example, Diana was the sort of person who never looked right in her clothes, no matter how well they fitted her or how pretty they were—they always looked as if they were slipping off. But if a new dress did, by chance, fit her really well, she would get irritated with it, pull it this way and that each time she put it on, and suddenly stop wearing it altogether. So one day she would throw off Slick, and exactly because he was such a good fit. Baby was perhaps the only gentleman in Port Huntlady: a gentleman believes in his possessions even if he seems to lose them. The person he most resembled in Port Huntlady, indeed, was Lady Port-Huntlady herself. For him, too, his friends were unreal parts of himself. Not only Dan and Slick, but all the other people i
n Port Huntlady, except Lady Port-Huntlady, were unreal parts of himself. He felt that he was somehow spending his money on all of them; and they were all more or less absurd—'pure'. As for Lady Port-Huntlady, he refused to recognize her existence, even as a part of himself; she was what he called 'weather'.
Meanwhile Diana was not unhappy; she looked on her life with Slick as a private honeymoon innocently in advance of the destined universal catastrophe. Slick, too, was pleased. Although Diana was fifteen years older than himself, she seemed young to him. He had always promised himself a wife who should be both young and serious; and Diana seemed just that. She would get excited about any improvement that he suggested for their house; then she would gracefully leave him alone to carry it out himself. And this spurred him on. He was always hurrying from one improvement to the next. Theirs was the most improved house in Port Huntlady. It was one of Lady Port-Huntlady's houses, and so every time Slick thought of a new improvement he had to get Lady Port-Huntlady's permission to carry it out. Of course she never made any objections, but Diana, who did not like being watched, felt that Lady Port-Huntlady was watching them, as if in their enthusiasm to have a really nice home they were being a little excessive even for Port Huntlady. Why, in fact, were they living in Port Huntlady? Why shouldn't they have a really nice home somewhere else? Why (Diana began asking herself) should she be living in Port Huntlady? Why should she want to have a really nice home anywhere?
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