第39章

'Oh,I shall be perfectly all right.You go to your own room and rest,darling.'

But no sooner had she gone,than he rang for Mrs Bolton,and asked her to take a hand at piquet or bezique,or even chess.He had taught her all these games.And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see Mrs Bolton,flushed and tremulous like a little girl,touching her queen or her knight with uncertain fingers,then drawing away again.And Clifford,faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority,saying to her:

'You must say j'adoube!'

She looked up at him with bright,startled eyes,then murmured shyly,obediently:

'J'adoube!'

Yes,he was educating her.And he enjoyed it,it gave him a sense of power.And she was thrilled.She was coming bit by bit into possession of all that the gentry knew,all that made them upper class:apart from the money.That thrilled her.And at the same time,she was making him want to have her there with him.It was a subtle deep flattery to him,her genuine thrill.

To Connie,Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours:a little vulgar,a little common,and uninspired;rather fat.Ivy Bolton's tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent.But Connie did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford.To say she was in love with him would be putting it wrongly.She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class,this titled gentleman,this author who could write books and poems,and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers.She was thrilled to a weird passion.And his 'educating'her roused in her a passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done.In truth,the very fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion,the peculiar passion of knowing ,knowing as he knew.

There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:whatever force we give to the word love.She looked so handsome and so young,and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous.At the same time,there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her,even of triumph,and private satisfaction.Ugh,that private satisfaction.How Connie loathed it!

But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman!She absolutely adored him,in her persistent fashion,and put herself absolutely at his service,for him to use as he liked.No wonder he was flattered!

Connie heard long conversations going on between the two.Or rather,it bas mostly Mrs Bolton talking.She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip about Tevershall village.It was more than gossip.It was Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one,with a great deal more,that these women left out.'Once started,Mrs Bolton was better than any book,about the lives of the people.She knew them all so intimately,and had such a peculiar,flamey zest in all their affairs,it was wonderful,if just a trifle humiliating to listen to her.At first she had not ventured to 'talk Tevershall',as she called it,to Clifford.But once started,it went on.Clifford was listening for 'material',and he found it in plenty.Connie realized that his so-called genius was just this:a perspicuous talent for personal gossip,clever and apparently detached.

Mrs Bolton,of course,was very warm when she 'talked Tevershall'.Carried away,in fact.And it was marvellous,the things that happened and that she knew about.She would have run to dozens of volumes.

Connie was fascinated,listening to her.But afterwards always a little ashamed.She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity.After all,one may hear the most private affairs of other people,but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling,battered thing which any human soul is,and in a spirit of fine,discriminative sympathy.For even satire is a form of sympathy.It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.And here lies the vast importance of the novel,properly handled.It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness,and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead.Therefore,the novel,properly handled,can reveal the most secret places of life:for it is in the passional secret places of life,above all,that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow,cleansing and freshening.

But the novel,like gossip,can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils,mechanical and deadening to the psyche.The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings,so long as they are conventionally 'pure'.

Then the novel,like gossip,becomes at last vicious,and,like gossip,all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels.Mrs Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels.'And he was such a bad fellow,and she was such a nice woman.'

Whereas,as Connie could see even from Mrs Bolton's gossip,the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort,and the man angrily honest.But angry honesty made a 'bad man'of him,and mealy-mouthedness made a 'nice woman'of her,in the vicious,conventional channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.

For this reason,the gossip was humiliating.And for the same reason,most novels,especially popular ones,are humiliating too.The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless,one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs Bolton's talk.A terrible,seething welter of ugly life it seemed:not at all the flat drabness it looked from outside.Clifford of course knew by sight most of the people mentioned,Connie knew only one or two.But it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.