The Gate of Angels (5 page)

Mrs Burden, who had favoured Fred outrageously as a small boy, nodded and started up the treadle machine. It oughtn't to be making a noise like that, he thought, the spindle must be catching. He'd have to see if he could put it right later. But if he did that he might seem patronising. He might seem to be saying, here's Freddy back from the university to put all your little bits and pieces together. He stood there, hateful to himself, trying to find his level.

‘We have to finish, you know, Freddy,' said Julia. ‘It's a pity you can't sew. Everything has to be in Birmingham by tomorrow.'

‘How can you get it there?' he asked. ‘The last train from Blow Halt to the junction at Bishop's Leaze left at 3.47 p.m.'

‘Mrs White will take it.'

‘Who's Mrs White?' He felt an exile, knowing nobody.

‘She comes to Evensong sometimes. She'll start for Birmingham as soon as it's night. She is driving herself in her motor.'

‘Does no-one want to know—'

‘It's a Panhard.'

‘Does no-one want to know what I've come here for?' Fred pleaded, against the clatter of the machine. ‘I believe that women ought to have the vote. I ‘m at a disadvantage because if I talk about anything else you'll think I'm not taking the movement seriously. I do take it seriously. But there is a decision I've come to. I want to talk to all of you about it, and Father in particular. I want to tell you about this decision I've come to.'

‘You're repeating yourself,' said Hester.

‘Yes, but we know he can't help it,' said Julia, strongly snipping and pinning. Fred had never seen the four women in such harmony. Perhaps their love for him, in which he had felt secure, had after all been only a by-product of their irritation with each other. Particularly that might have been true of Mrs Burden, the trusted grumbler and confidante, the secret giver of jam tarts made for him alone out of left-over scraps of pastry.

‘Is Father in his study?' he asked.

‘Of course,' said Julia. ‘He wouldn't come in here. He knows what we're all doing, but he's frightened.'

Fred went to his father's study. Without sitting down, or introducing any kind of corrected argument, he began to explain himself in broken phrases. His father held out his hand, and he took it, feeling it chilly in the summer heat and insubstantial against his own. His father said: ‘When you told me that you wanted to study Natural Sciences at university, which led, fortunately I suppose, to your present appointment, I took it for granted that you would sooner or later come to the conclusion that you had no further use for the soul. All I ask is that you shouldn't talk to me about it. The women of the house, as perhaps you have seen, for all practical purposes have deserted us.'

‘I don't think they really have, Father. They're interested in what they're doing, but that's not the same thing.'

‘Freddy, I'm told that there are left-overs in the larder. Have you any idea what to do with left-overs?'

‘You don't have to do anything with them. They're left over from whatever was done to them before.'

His father smiled and sighed.

6

It was because he had no further use for the soul, of course, that Skippey had fastened on him and was making him go out tonight and speak under these absurd conditions. He looked, as he had been doing for some time, at the sheet of paper, on which the motto
Estoy in mis trece
was stamped in pale red. Underneath that, Dear Miss Saunders. It was now too late to write what he had intended to say, and he turned out the lamp, put on his Burberry and went down and out again to liberate his bicycle from the terribly cramped conditions of the shed.

The university societies held their meetings in various colleges, but never in St Angelicus. The Disobligers met in the Hon Secretary's Rooms, wherever they happened to be, and Skippey's rooms were in Jesus, where he tutored in experimental physics. Skippey was loved for his anxiety. His concern for details—not only physical ones, but for the least shade of feeling or lack of feeling—made others, by comparison, feel calm. And there were moments during these evenings when Skippey was an exceptionally happy man, because, for a short time at least, nothing could be seen to be going wrong, and no-one, to all appearances, was dissatisfied. But the moments of equilibrium were few, because Skippey was one of those people who by nature are incapable of running anything. Still he was hospitable. Bottles and glasses shone gently in the gas-light, with plates of Health Biscuits. Fred was late, and reproved himself. He had spent perhaps half an hour over not writing his letter, and quite ten minutes
in not being able to think what to say at the meeting. And Charles Reding, who was proposing the motion, had finished speaking already. It seemed that, cruelly embarrassed at the prospect of treating immortality as a joke, he had spoken in a voice so low that it could scarcely be heard, and then sat down without explanation. He was being offered, when Fred came in, a cup of cocoa, which he accepted, only he would like a little water with it.

‘Warm water, if you have it,' said poor Reding.

‘He shouldn't have been asked to do this,' Skippey said quietly to Fred. ‘His speech didn't go well. He didn't throw himself into it. I'm glad you've come. I shall introduce you next, and you must throw yourself into it.'

There was a slight disturbance as the door opened, knocking over the only empty chair. George Holcombe came in, a bearded figure in a red tie, for he thought of himself as a democrat. He breathed cold and wet, a discordant newcomer, struggling with the fallen chair as if it had been put there to trip him up.

‘My name is Holcombe. I'm looking for Fred Fairly.'

‘Are you a member of the society?'

‘I paid a term's subscription to it once, several years ago. Before your day I think. I've never been to a meeting. I shall make up now for all the evenings when I forgot to come.'

‘Well, Fairly's here, but he's just about to speak. Not, I'm afraid, the ideal moment—'

But Holcombe had seen Fred and shouldered his way across until he stood close to him, almost rasping him with his beard. He said hoarsely, ‘To continue with what I was saying-'

‘I don't want to see you, Holcombe. How did you know I was here?'

‘I went to your room and read your letters. It didn't take long, as you don't seem to receive many.'

Fred remembered now that he hadn't, this second time, signed himself out.

‘My own note broke off, you remember, at “there seems no point in your getting to know any young women at all”. Well, I should have added “young women of the marriageable class”.'

‘Sit down, Mr Holcombe,' said Skippey, with quite unexpected sharpness.

The other treasurer pointed out that it was a rule of the Disobligers that anyone could interrupt and contradict anyone else at any time.

‘Not on a term's subscription made several years ago,' said Skippey. ‘It can't have been more than one and sixpence at that time.'

‘I shall take this up with Fairly later,' said Holcombe. ‘As long as he bears in mind,
of the marriageable class.'
He took out and lit a briar pipe whose smoke joined other smoke clouds in the room where the air was foundering with burned tobacco.

‘Fellow Disobligers,' Skippey persevered, ‘the next speaker, Fred Fairly, opposes the motion. He was once a Christian, he tells me, but is one no longer. He might say, with Sir Leslie Stephen, that “I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality etcetera, etcetera, and I mean to live and die a gentleman if possible.”'

‘Chairman, I disoblige,' said Fred. ‘I don't want to be associated with Leslie Stephen, I don't know what he meant by etcetera, etcetera, and I don't wish either to live or to die like a gentleman.'

‘Who was Leslie Stephen?' asked Holcombe, raising the stem of his pipe.

Skippey, ignoring both interruptions, went on. ‘Fred Fairly holds, as I do, that we have no supernatural protectors or supernatural enemies. All that we can do has to be done by ourselves, and for ourselves, on this earth where we find ourselves placed. Afterwards, I mean after our present bodily life is over, there is nothing, or rather we have no reason and no right to expect anything.'

‘Could you repeat the actual words of the motion?' asked a mild-sounding voice from the very back of the room. Why the distinguished Provost of St James's should be attending this meeting, Skippey couldn't imagine, although Dr Matthews, tireless and benevolent, made a point of subscribing to all the University's societies and showing an interest, from time to time, in them all. Among the attentive pipe-smokers he was the only one in full evening dress. The Disobligers were Bohemians and dressed informally, while Holcombe was wearing, under his college gown, an old green frock-coat and checked trousers.

Holding up the order paper to give himself confidence, Skippey read out: ‘That the soul does not exist, has never existed, and that it is not desirable that it should exist.'

‘The human soul,' said Dr Matthews.

‘Yes, Provost.'

‘Thank you. Unfortunately, although of course I listened to the proposer, I wasn't very well able to follow him.'

Dr Matthews was known as a man of unclouded faith.

‘I didn't bargain for this,' Fred told Skippey quietly.

‘I didn't bargain for Holcombe.'

‘Fellow members,' Fred began. ‘I'm here, as our Chairman has repeatedly pointed out, to defend the soul. To do this, I have in the first place to show that everything in life can't be referred back to physical causes. Lord Nelson, like a number of people who have undergone the amputation of a limb, continued to feel pain in his lost arm. There was no arm there, but there was a pain in the arm. This he took to be a clear indication that there are things which are beyond the explanation of the physical, or, as he called it, the corporeal.'

He paused, seeing that Skippey, who had stationed himself by now at the other end of the room, was silently raising the stem of his pipe, indicating that the intellectual tone ought to be raised. Fred, though easy-going, felt annoyed.

‘The Chairman seems to be indicating that you don't want to hear anything more about Nelson's missing arm. I accept the wishes of the meeting. Let me pass to another point. There may
be some here, in fact quite a number, who will tell me that every hope, every feeling, even what we think of as imagination—all of these are conditioned by organic processes. When your memory begins to slip, the cells of the cortical layers will be visibly atrophied. If you go mad, the cortical layer under the frontal bones will be darkened. Depressed, and there will be pathological changes in the upper and hind lobes. Thought is blood, you'll say to me. You are what your body is. It's inconceivable to think that the mind can survive without it. Still, which of you here hasn't been through some confrontation, some danger, or if not danger some intense and extreme personal and emotional crisis, a letter, perhaps, which you have to write, when you have been driven to argue with yourself, to say “go on, there's nothing for a rational human being to fear”? And your body will reply “Yes, there is.”—“Well, even if there is, it's your duty, it's necessary for your self-respect, to go on.”—“No, it isn't.”—The voice, fellow members, of your adrenal gland. The body, then, has a mind of its own. It must follow, then, that the Mind has a body of its own, even if it's like nothing that we can see around us, or have ever seen.'

Fred caught a flash of light from Dr Matthews' black-rimmed spectacles behind which, as he turned his head, his eyes for a moment looked quite blank. He nodded slightly. The effect, meanwhile, of putting forward opinions which he regarded as absolute nonsense was having a curious effect on Fred. It was like hanging upside down or breathing the wrong element, water instead of air and pipe-smoke. There was a gasping, a craving for his own habitat.

‘And if we agree, as we must do, that the mind has time and again shown its independence of the body and all that the body can do to it, isn't it reasonable to believe that it may do so once again, by surviving death under its own steam?' He corrected this. ‘I mean, through its inability to die? But I said “isn't it reasonable?” I used the word “reasonable”—I appealed, as a scientist, and a scientist in the University of
Cambridge, to your reason. This evening, however, that is the very last thing I want to do. “We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born.” But we didn't do so, and now here we are, straining ourselves to make sense of the world we've got through the operations of reason. Fellow-members and Disobligers, I reject reason. I stand here this evening as a believer. I believe in gravitation without weight, life without organic matter, thought without nervous tissue, voices and apparitions without known cause, water turned into wine, stones rolled back without motive power, and souls without bodies. More than that, I believe that the grass is green because green is restful to the human eye, that the sky is blue to give us an idea of the infinite, and that blood is red so that murder will be more easily detected and criminals will be brought to justice. Yes, and I believe that I shall live forever, but I shall live without reason.'

Skippey's pipe was now moving neither up nor down, but in wide arcs from side to side. But at the same time Holcombe, who appeared to have been listening intently, stretched up both arm and pipe to register a strong disobligation.

‘I'm sure that the speaker doesn't intend to confuse us or to confuse himself. But I must ask him—does he consider the soul and the mind as identical, or as different and distinct?'

It was perhaps the clearest remark that Holcombe had ever managed to make. But Skippey advanced from the back of the room, and for some reason putting his arm round Fred, said: ‘As Chairman and Hon. Secretary, I claim the right to answer the question. To imagine anything means to make a new junction between two currents of activity going along two or more nerve-tracks. Electric impulses would, perhaps, be a more exact analogy than railway tracks. The origin of these currents must always be one of the sensory nerves—let us say the eye. Fairly, perhaps, sees a bird flying over the fens, and he looks attentively at a young woman, and he combines the two of them and imagines an angel. That is how the imagination
works. However, no two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is—in other words, not a thing, but a think.'