The promise of that wide forehead attracted her, for she was naïve enought to believe in foreheads as an index to intelligence. She did not think it necessary to stumble over preliminary nothings, for Emily, with her delightful directness, had introduced her husband with these words: ‘You can tell Elizabeth the worst, James. I’ve given you away completely already.’ Yet the doctor evaded her with generalizations when she asked him point-blank for some more of his theories about the upbringing of children. His smile was nervous, it even verged on a giggle: he had false teeth, too, and although she tried to be tolerant Elizabeth disliked false teeth.
She felt balked.
Her identification with Emily made her feel humiliated as well as balked. If he tells Emily why shouldn’t he tell me? she thought, and the only possible answer seemed to be that he did not consider her to be sufficiently intelligent. Perhaps he was afraid she would be shocked. For the first time it occurred to Elizabeth that a capacity for being shocked argued a lack of intelligence. This new idea excited her, as new ideas always did, and she turned to the doctor, with an imitation of his wife’s most arch manner, crying: ‘I believe you are afraid of shocking me, but you know it’s only stupid people who are ever shocked! Besides I know all about Teddy speaking at both ends—’
The corners of the doctor’s mouth went up.
‘Emily’s too fond of that story,’ he said.
‘What story?’ called Mrs Scrymgeour across the table.
Elizabeth answered her and Emily laughed heartily. Elizabeth glanced at Hector to share her enjoyment with him. To her surprise he looked almost sulky. He shot one glance at her which she could not interpret and crumbled his bread.
‘Teddy is illuminating a great many phrases and attitudes for me,’ went on the doctor. He began to giggle again.
‘Why do the ministers speak of the “milk of the Word”?’
‘Do tell me.’
‘Watch any baby sucking,’ said the doctor with glee, ‘and you’ll see it.’
‘Oh do tell me!’
‘When Teddy sucks he puts all his energy into it—’
‘Hear, hear!’ from Mrs Scrymgeour.
‘And that makes him clench his fists and bend his arms in and draw up his knees. Now the flexion of the arms brings the fists close together. Turn him up endways in that position and he would be kneeling in prayer. Sucking the milk of the Word. There you have it. Isn’t it illuminating?’
‘What a lovely idea!’ Elizabeth forgot all about Hector. ‘Drawing comfort from Heaven like a child at the breast.’
‘There’s the Milky Way up in the sky too,’ added the doctor. ‘The first god must have been a mother-god. Yes, yes.’
He was fingering his wine-glass.
‘Bottle-feeding,’ he fired out suddenly, with another giggle, ‘will probably mean the end of religion.’
‘James!’ said Mrs Scrymgeour in delight. That’s a new one!’
‘Well, your bottle-fed baby sees the milk going down in the bottle until there’s none left, and he knows that it’s empty. He can’t have the same emotional satisfaction as a child sucking at the breast, which is an apparently inexhaustible source of comfort. Communion with nature, you know, and all that. Your bottle boy isn’t likely to grow up a mystic’
‘I shall put Teddy on a bottle to-morrow,’ declared Emily.
‘I wish I had some proof … statistics of bottle-fed ink ants….’
The doctor shook his head in comical rue.
‘Nobody draws up the kind of statistics I want. But if religion knew its business the Pope would issue a Bull forbidding feeding-bottles. On the other hand, you would have the rationalists financing feeding-bottles.’
He broke off, chuckling, and drank his wine.
Mrs Scrymgeour was radiant. Her husband was going through his paces very well, and Elizabeth looked as if she were enjoying herself. The doctor relinquished his wine- glass and applied himself to a highly decorative sweet which Elizabeth was privately attempting to analyse and deciding to acquire from Emily’s book of recipes. Mrs Scrymgeour turned the full broadside of her charms upon Hector.
But although Elizabeth was stimulated by the doctor’s remarks and preoccupied with the sweet, she was at the same time trying to ignore a certain uneasiness in her spirit. There was something in what had just been said that threatened danger to her inner life.
‘Don’t you believe in religion, then?’ she asked.
The doctor seemed embarrassed again…. Apparently he did not like serious questions.
‘Er–er a childish way of comforting oneself, don’t you think?’
‘But how can one live without it?’
Elizabeth was genuinely shocked at last, and since something she valued was in danger she did not stop to reflect upon stupidity and intelligence.
‘Oh, well, one does, doesn’t one?’
‘I don’t mean conventional religion, going to church, and that kind of thing. I mean precisely that capacity to draw comfort from the universe, that mystical communion you were speaking of. Don’t you believe in that?’
‘Er–no,’ said the doctor.
He looked at Elizabeth, then he looked away.
‘I believe many people feel such a communion,’ he added, ‘but it isn’t what they think it is.’
‘But if I don’t believe what I feel,’ burst out Elizabeth, ‘what am I to believe?’
Dr Scrymgeour carefully spooned up the last of his sweet and said nothing.
‘You take all the poetry out of life,’ murmured Elizabeth.
The doctor brightened and laid down his spoon:
‘I haven’t a grain of poetry in me.’
Elizabeth stared at him, and saw again that his lips were cut like the petals of a flower. Her blank horror was invaded by a secret sense of superiority. He did not understand himself.
‘Perhaps you have more poetry in you than you guess,’ she returned, smiling, and for the rest of the evening she refrained from lapsing into seriousness.
‘Well,’ said Emily, whirling round upon her when she went upstairs for her wraps, ‘well, what do you think of my husband?’
‘I think he’s a darling.’
‘Isn’t he clever?’ said Emily, with satisfied triumph. She then handed Elizabeth a compliment: ‘He’s a shy creature, you know, and he doesn’t usually trot out his pet ideas before company. He must have liked you.’
‘Do you know,’ said Elizabeth, flattered, ‘he has such a lovely mouth that I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.’
‘Better not tell Mr Shand.’
It occurred to Elizabeth that she ought to return the lead and ask for a verdict on Hector, but Emily had already screwed down the gas. Elizabeth obediently went downstairs.
But when Hector was fumbling with the latch-key at their own door she was appalled to hear him say: ‘Thank God, that’s over!’
‘What’s the matter, Hector?’ she called, pursuing him into the drawing-room, where he was striking matches. She thought that he was jealous,